Not long after moving into their Wilmette home in 1972, nature lovers Charlotte Adelman and Bernard L. Schwartz decided to plant some shrubs to attract birds. “What we put in had berries and thorns,” says Schwartz, “but it wasn’t native to the area. At that point we weren’t really informed. But they did attract more birds than what we’d had.”
These days the pair of retired attorneys–he was a Cook County public defender; she specialized in divorce work–are advocates of native prairie vegetation, and last year they coauthored and self-published the Prairie Directory of North America (available at www.lawndaleenterprises.com). The first of its kind, the 352-page guide lists prairies throughout the U.S. and Canada; 50 pages are devoted to Illinois and include the pristine 5.3-acre James Woodworth Prairie Preserve in Glenview, where Adelman volunteers, the North Park Village Nature Center prairie on Chicago’s northwest side, and an unnamed tract alongside Green Bay Road between McCormick Boulevard and the Evanston-Wilmette border.
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Although they’d always gone for a natural look in the yard, the couple didn’t get serious about going native until the early 90s. “I was walking my dog one day when I saw a goldfinch sitting on a purple coneflower in someone’s front yard,” says Adelman. “The colors were beautiful–a brilliant lemon yellow bird with black wings on a purple coneflower with purple petals and an orange, iridescent mound of seeds in the center. It was a prairie scene in miniature, and I thought, ‘I want to create that in my backyard.’”
That spring Schwartz turned over a ten-by-ten plot of soil and Adelman planted seeds from a prepackaged prairie mix they got at the local nursery. A short time later, plants started to come, followed by goldfinches and other birds, animals, and insects. The following year they decided to turn their entire 50-by-100-foot backyard into a prairie. They hired a botanist who specialized in prairie plants to turn over the lawn in the fall so the grass would die over the winter. (“It’s better to plant it in an empty space as opposed to having a lot of competition from other things that are growing,” says Adelman.) In the spring the expert sowed a variety of native flora such as compass plants, pokeweed, joe-pye weed, buttercups, bottlebrush grass, and blue columbine. After regular watering the seedlings started to sprout, and soon the yard bloomed, attracting even more birds, along with bees, butterflies, and other insects such as milkweed beetles and hummingbird moths.
“The neighbor beyond has asked for pokeweed in his yard. Even the neighbor farther down on the corner wants me to help her plant an area of grass with prairie plants. They say the future of local butterflies depends on local gardens. If everyone planted a small prairie garden in the backyard, the butterflies who depend on them would have a fighting chance.”
In spite of the native plants, bird feeders, and dozen birdbaths in the backyard, most of the birds Adelman sees these days are temporary visitors, like some olive-backed thrushes from the north that stopped recently to gorge on pokeweed berries before continuing on to South America. “They have to gain a lot of weight in order to travel,” explains Adelman. “With so little prairie left, there’s not that much for them to eat.”
The pair also lobby against alien plants that are pushing out the locals–such as the ubiquitous burning bush, a Eurasian native, the “hideous, twisted” Japanese maple, and the deceptively beautiful European purple loosestrife, which is invading the forest preserves and suffocating the indigenous plants–and all other imported vegetation. Adelman is trying to amend the state’s Exotic Weed Act to add the burning bush, garlic mustard, and many other plants to the list of aliens that are outlawed in Illinois. She’s also been pushing the city of Wilmette to have a garlic mustard pulling day at Keay Nature Center, which she says is full of mustard that edges out local vegetation.
