Mimicking a Grassland, Notes from a Meadow Journal
by Renée Rhodes, July 2021 Artist-In-Partnership
On my first day at Vesper Meadow, I was drawn to a picnic table subsumed by tall foxtail grasses. If I sat quiet and still I'd actually be hidden there at the table, surrounded by a veil of grasses. The birds came: a western tanager perched 6 feet away, a tree swallow flickered in and out of a fence post birdhouse, the meadowlarks were mournful. Hidden there—meadow life buzzed on around me.
I think about mimicry often. I wonder about blending in and becoming part of a place. Here in the tall grasses I think about how mimicry can be a way towards both friendship and survival. To copy someone/someplace you might be merging into a shared intimacy, blurring imaginary lines of separateness, you might be camouflaging to hide from danger, or you might be poised to hunt and kill.
Video Detail: Meadow Sketch (Tufted Hairgrass): a video experiment filmed at Vesper Meadow in July of 2021
For me, I think of mimicry through a lens of wanting to be less separate, to acknowledge the blurriness between species that is biologically real anyhow. I think of Timothy Morton's essay called "Queer Ecology" where he says:
"Queer ecology requires a vocabulary for envisioning this liquid life. I propose that life-forms constitute a mesh. . . of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment."
My intrigue over grassland ecologies and prairie places first started from learning about their ecological function. I am learning that intact grasslands can act as very effective carbon sinks—long root systems of native grasses make them as effective as forests at pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and sinking it back into the soil.
The second intrigue came from a noticing and an affinity for grasslands as places of fluidity, adaptability to change, and a non-linear nature. When I think of mimicking a grassland I feel a personal connection to their example of non-linear mothering, unfixed sexualities, and other fluid ways of being:
Grasses as non-linear mothers are host, home, and nursery for other species (like butterflies) to feed on, to take refuge in, to lay eggs upon. There are many ways to parent.
Grasses as beings with unfixed sexualities cycling through reproductive approach: asexual, bisexual, heterosexual, making new life through cross pollination, sperm, egg, seed, rhizomatic spread, self pollination. There are also some observable examples of pollen transferring from flower to flower without a visible union of sperm and egg. The seeds plump and life carries on beyond binary expectations.
Within the fluidity grasslands, I see bodies moving through changing-states of dormancy and life continuously, and as needed: dying and living and reviving; seeding, germinating, becoming compost or thatch to support new seedlings; I see that being eaten is a transformation to soil carbon; I see being very alive, verdant, and then drying and dying and coming back again—over and over all life long.
Grasslands hold the subtle dynamism of constant change, and for me, model non-linear natures. When I look, I can imagine the cycles time-lapsing before my eyes.
Image detail: a macro photograph of tufted hairgrass and foxtail florets from the depths of Vesper Meadow in July of 2021, picture by Renée Rhodes
I close my eyes and slide off the picnic table bench and crawl into the sea of tall foxtails, grasses of European descent, likely introduced by ranchers for cattle forage. I lie on my back and the foxtail florets bob against a blue sky. A beetle crawls on my arm, a grasshopper rests on my knuckle, a ground squirrel races my way and then diverts—covered by a matted tunnel of last year's dried out grasses.
The five o'clock sun shimmers golden through florets and glumes, stalks and blades. I soften my eyes and slowly zoom in, watching as long stalks, purple, gold, green silvered/grey, cascade in the wind.
This five pm crawl through the meadow becomes an embodied botanical cataloging. Foxtail is everywhere—a wall to wall mat of green waves and bobbing bushy tails. I'm trying out being non-judgmental about its presence and to just sit there with the color, the chlorophyll, and the light-show. I wonder who is living here anyway, since this grass has become a habitat despite the monocultural imposition it became when applied to a grassland so far from its home ecosystem.
Image detail: a macro photograph of non-native grass flowers from Vesper Meadow in July of 2021, picture by Renée Rhodes
Occasionally, I brush against a golden wave of native tufted hairgrass (Deschampsia cespitosa), or back at the house a tended patch of Roemer's fescue (Festuca roemeri). Cylinders of color shift and sway—fading, blending, blurring in the light. The grasses become pure sensation. Traveling up to flower to see slender firework fingers, branches, seed head. How do butterflies see anyway? Is this closeness and blur anything like a butterfly's eye view?
These native patches of Roemer's fescue are one of the only host plants for the Mardon skipper (Polites mardon) who is on the brink of extinction, in part because of climate change and loss of supportive grassland habitats. The slender, slight corridors of native grasses found at Vesper Meadow make me think of ecological restoration—also a mimetic practice which seeks intimacy with plant communities, even with ones that might not be there in the present tense.
Image detail: a macro photograph of spent Roemer's fescue flowers going to seed at Vesper Meadow in July of 2021, picture by Renée Rhodes
I spend a moment with the big tarps laid out in a patchwork pattern beside the barn, ruminating on how they will take 1-2 years to thoroughly solarize the soil seed bank—an asking of the non-native grasses to step back in patches in order to eventually allow for native habitat plants to re-take some space in the meadow. I think of how after years of waiting, then a small prescribed burn might be employed, then seeding of native plant seeds and a continual effort to give them enough room to grow through weeding. This feels to me like meadow-style non-linear mothering, like iterative, non-perfectionistic parenting, enacted to ensure that more than one voice survives.
Image detail: a macro photograph of Roemer's fescue stalks at Vesper Meadow in July of 2021, picture by Renée Rhodes
Back at the picnic table, the sun is setting and I work on designs for a cloak, a quilt, or maybe it's a tarp after all. It will be something that I can wear or hide within to blend further into intimacy with the meadow—further into intimacy with change-states as a way of life.
I look at some sun-prints that I started developing all day in the sun with foxtail, yarrow, cinquefoil, hairgrass. I take some macro photographs of subtle grass flowers with the last of the sunlight. I film some experiments in blending in, placing my body in the grasses, lying down, immersed. I step away from looking. I am trying to mentally erase the imaginary lines drawn between myself and the meadow—lines that can get extra solid feeling when I am looking through a camera lens.
I write and I watch and I think of the seasons and my body in them. Maybe I will sew the quilt by winter time and lay it down come spring. Perhaps I will wrap up in it too and go to sleep on the foxtail—slow like the tarps, blending with dying and birthing all at once. Maybe I will spend a summer camouflaged: watching & wondering who will return, who will emerge? The Mardon skipper maybe, my own non-linearities, or comfort finding home in change?
Image detail: a macro photograph of spent tufted hairgrass flowers at Vesper Meadow in July of 2021, picture by Renée Rhodes
Across the road there is a golden stripe of tufted hairgrass banding through. After being shown this, I began to perceive it topographically—a prominent and impermanent landmark that will shape-shift with every season. I walk there to the golden grass flower island while sandhill cranes sound their echoing alarms at my approach. If I was wearing the grassland cloak/quilt/tarp would they know me as a friend: trying to learn about mimetic meadow-time dynamics? I lay down here and try to blend in as I can.