[To see photos and stories of this prairie in other years, go to the links on the main Hidden Oaks Savanna page.]
This year was a big Queen Anne’s Lace year, so I pulled all the Queen Anne’s Lace from Hidden Oaks Meadow. We also did a big fall project to get rid of the thicket of old apple trees and Prickly Ash and dead sumac that divided the meadow from the path.
8/10/2017 This is Hidden Oaks Meadow before I pulled any of the Queen Anne’s Lace.
8/10/2017 One section of Queen Anne’s Lace is gone.
9/12/2017
9/27/2017
11/6/2017 The path in to Hidden Oaks Point – before we started clearing. Hidden Oaks Meadow is on the right, beyond the thicket.
11/6/2017 Another view of the thicket hiding Hidden Oaks Meadow
11/6/2017 Just after we started work, looking north at the thicket, with the meadow on the left
11/7/2017 Looking down the path into Hidden Oaks Point – the thicket is starting to disappear.
11/7/2017
11/8/2017
11/8/2017
11/9/2017 Not much of the thicket left
11/9/2017 The trees with pink tape on them are Wild Plum. I think this was originally a plum thicket, but it got overgrown with other things. We left the plums, hoping they’ll recover now that they have more room and more light.
11/10/2017
11/11/2017 The thicket is gone – and the snow arrived.
12/15/2017 Our friend Todd is coming to cut more trees for us, so I marked the ones I want cut with green tape.
12/15/2017 More marked trees – green means ‘cut’, pink means ‘don’t cut’. I marked a few special trees with pink tape to be sure they were protected.
12/15/2017
12/18/2017 After Todd had done a lot of cutting
12/20/2017 And after we cleaned up a lot of the slash. It’s much more open now.
12/22/2017 More slash cleanup
12/22/2017
12/27/2017 A friend called this big old Burr Oak a ‘grandmother tree’, with all her babies around her.
