Plowed forests lose their understory medicines even a century after regrowth

Evidence

From a distance the new postagricultural woods look healthy; the trees came back thick and strong. But inside something is missing. The April showers do not bring May flowers. No trillium, no mayapple, no bloodroot. Even after a century of regrowth, the postfarming forests are impoverished, while the untilled forests just across the wall are an explosion of blossoms. The medicines are missing, for reasons ecologists do not yet understand. It might be microhabitat, it might be dispersal, but it is clear that the original habitat for these old medicines was obliterated in a cascade of unintended consequences as the land was turned to corn. The land is no longer hospitable for the medicines and we don’t know why. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 729

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why do understory plants fail to return to post-agricultural woods? Ecologists ‘do not yet understand’ — worth chasing the mechanism literature.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to grafting-and-growth infrastructure article: this is a case of invisible soil-substrate history shaping which species persist.
• XREF: connects to: Severe disturbance plus low resource base can reduce species richness — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 2259; Burning prairies on headlands produced fertilized meadows for elk and rare medicines — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 884

Broader Connections

• Burning prairies on headlands produced fertilized meadows for elk and rare medicines #corroborates (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 884
• Severe disturbance plus low resource base can reduce species richness #expands (0.72) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 2259