The official state grass of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming is western wheatgrass. It’s a prairie native, and I particularly like the statement from the North Dakota official state website NorthDakota.gov:
“tough native prairie grass, once covered nearly all of the state.”
Wow! It’s hard to believe, but that statement is probably fairly true. There are pockets of forest here and there in North Dakota, and, of course, there were certainly other species of grasses, but I’m guessing western wheatgrass was predominant, covering the Dakotas, and eastern Wyoming like a shag carpet for countless millennia.
Shag carpet has negative connotations these days, I presume, but I don’t mean it in a negative way at all. There is nothing more inspiring to me than a long view in the Dakotas, with buttes and hills rising in the unreachable horizon.
It’s bare earth, covered by a carpet, if you will, but there are no walls, no ceiling, and no straight lines to diminish the beauty – The Great Plains at its finest!
2 Responses
I remember reading that the prairie grass rhizomes were so dense that a cast iron plough wasn’t good enough–a fellow named John Deere built one from steel that could hold an edge sharp enough to cut through…and that the sound of the sod being “busted” was like a loud zipper being tugged open. Always a pleasure, Steve–I learn something every time.
True. Thanks Chuck! Plus some of the roots for the natives went many feet deep, which allowed the grasses to survive even in extreme drought.