Where the Prairie Still Remains

Where Prairie and Memory Intertwine: The Battle for Iowa's Living Landscape. Vast fields of corn and soybeans blanket Iowa, yet tucked behind rusted gates and timeworn headstones lies a different world: the last wild remnants of the state's once-mighty tallgrass prairie. In places like Rochester Cemetery, nature and memory are inseparable. Here, ancient oaks tower over graves, while a sea of native grasses and wildflowers—big bluestem, Indiangrass, shooting stars—blanket the hills, recalling a landscape that greeted settlers nearly two centuries ago. These pioneer cemeteries are more than resting places for the dead; they are rare sanctuaries of a vanishing ecosystem. Less than a tenth of a percent of Iowa's original prairie survives, mostly erased by the relentless advance of agriculture. Where the plow could not go—on stony hills, steep ridges, or out of respect for the departed—the prairie endured, preserving a living memory of the land's past. In these fragments, deep-rooted plants stabilize soil, store carbon, and nurture endangered pollinators like monarchs and bumblebees, offering vital services to a landscape otherwise stripped bare. Yet, this survival is fraught with conflict and compromise. To some locals, wild grasslands look overgrown, disrespectful, even unkempt next to the manicured cemeteries they expect. To others, the untamed beauty is a precious inheritance—one that requires care and, at times, intervention. The prairie is not a wilderness left to its own devices; it is a human creation, kept alive for millennia by Indigenous peoples who used fire to maintain open grassland. Today, controlled burns, careful mowing, and vigilant removal of invasive plants are needed to keep the prairie from slipping away, replaced by encroaching woodland or aggressive weeds. Stewardship falls to people like Jacie Thomsen, the cemetery's burial manager, who walks the hills with a metal rod to find forgotten graves, balancing the needs of mourners with those of the land. Thomsen knows every family plot and wildflower, each a marker of memory. She must navigate the tensions between tradition and restoration, between families who want tidy lawns and conservationists who see these cemeteries as genetic banks for prairie seeds—sources that help restore native grasses along highways and in private projects across the state. But these islands of prairie exist in a climate of uncertainty. Funding for restoration and conservation ebbs and flows with political tides, and as the climate changes, so too does the delicate balance that keeps prairie alive. The future depends on the willingness of communities to embrace compromise, honoring both their history and the living world that persists around—and beneath—their ancestors' stones. In Rochester Cemetery, every bloom and blade of grass is a testament to survival and adaptation, to the possibility of reconciliation between culture and nature. The prairie, like the people who tend it, remembers. In this quiet, contested ground, life—and hope—persist.