[To see more about restoration of other types of remnants, go to the main Restoration of Remnants page]

Our most recent restoration passion is for restoring overgrown savanna.  Most of our woods, except on our few north-facing slopes, was once savanna.  It’s easy to find traces of that ecosystem.  There are scatterings of huge old oak trees with spreading branches, showing that they grew up when there was more space and light around them.  Under the trees are many plants that normally grow in places with more sun: Monarda, Pussy-toes, Hoary Puccoon, Prairie and Bird’s Foot Violet, and grasses like Big and Little Bluestem and Bottlebrush Grass.

For around 100 years – from the 1880s until the early 1970s – these woods were heavily grazed.  This was a dairy farm, and fences in the woods show that the cows were kept out of the crop fields, but allowed to wander in the woods.  The woods were also logged – heavily in some places, not so much in others.  When we bought the farm in 2000, all the woods were thickly overgrown with a mix of native and non-native small trees and brushy shrubs.

Our first savanna project, and still our largest, is Twisted Oak Savanna.

Birch and aspen forests have invaded many of these formerly savanna areas.  This one had a forest of young aspen trees, and numerous medium and larger birches.  This is looking into the savanna area from the dry prairie point in 2004, after we’d mowed a path through it, but hadn’t done any clearing work.

 

My first project was to girdle the aspens.

 

We weren’t sure what to do next, so we didn’t do anything more for several years.  The aspens died in the first year or two, which let in more light, so the bushes and small trees, which had been very small because they hadn’t gotten much light, began to grow.  Now we had a jungle – fallen and falling dead trees, mixed with thick, healthy, growing brush.

 

We cut and piled the fallen trees, and Mike moved the piles to a larger pile back in the woods.

 

But the brush was still a problem.  It was so thick we couldn’t even see into it.  This was in the summer of 2013.

 

In the fall of 2013 we decided to try to ‘liberate’ one one of the big old Burr Oaks – one of the few we could actually see through the brush.

 

We cut and treated brush and small trees, and made them into piles. Mike used the bucket on his tractor to carry the small piles away to a larger pile in an out of the way spot in the woods.  We prefer leaving the piles to decompose naturally rather than burning them.  They provide shelter and overwintering habitat for many animals, and unless we keep adding to them, they melt away after a few years.

 

We were thrilled with this project.  It was fun work to do, and very rewarding to see the oaks emerge from the jungle.  We were so pleased with our efforts that once that tree was out in the open, we kept going and liberated more trees.

 

This is the way that project looked at the end, just before the snow arrived.  Once the snow came, we stopped work for that year.

 

The next year lots of plants grow back – a mix of native savanna plants, non-native weeds, woody natives and non-natives.  I try to control the undesirable plants as much as I can.  I cut, treat and remove Burdock and Mullein, and do my best to keep up with resprouting or missed honeysuckles and buckthorn.

 

The following spring Mike mowed to set the woody plants back.  Mowing doesn’t kill them, but it keeps them under control until either I can get to them, or until the natives are dominant enough that they’re less of a problem.  He mows all the savannas every spring – as early as possible so it doesn’t disturb ground nesting birds.

 

We’ve continued to enlarge this area.  Every year, as we explore farther back into the woods, we discover more open-grown oaks that are part of the savanna.  This photo was taken in the fall of 2020, farther north from our original clearing.

 

I usually don’t plant any seeds for several years so we can see which plants come back on their own.  Sun-loving plants come up in the more open areas, and shade-loving ones come up under the trees.

 

Once a few years have passed and I can see which plants are coming back, I add seeds of savanna plants that grow in our region or in other places on our land.  This is Elm-leaved Goldenrod from seeds I planted.

 

Here’s the most recent addition to Twisted Oak Savanna – a line of open-grown oaks on the northern-most edge.  Every time we’d clear around one these oaks, we’d see another one beyond it.  There are still more we haven’t gotten to yet.  Here’s a ‘before photo’ from 2005.

 

A photo from the fall of 2017, right after we cleared around a few of them.

 

And a slightly different view of the same area from October 2025.

 

We still approach savanna restoration the same way, except that we’re more careful to cut and treat each woody stem.  If we skip any, they grow back the next year.  And if we cut without treating with herbicide, they often make even more stems in subsequent years.   I usually do the small stems and small trees, Mike cuts and treats the medium sized trees, and we girdle the largest ones and let them die and then fall on their own.

We usually do these projects in the fall – as our ‘fall project’.  The air temperatures are cooler so it’s easier to work outside, there are fewer leaves so it’s easier to see what we’re doing, and the woody plants are pulling in nutrients from their remaining leaves and stems so they’re more likely to pull in the herbicide we put on the stumps.   We stop working once the weather turns very cold, or the snow arrives.

We leave all the larger oaks, some smaller Burr and White Oaks, some small trees and native shrubs like Winterberry, Hawthorn, Viburnum, Wild Plum and Serviceberry, dead trees, and anything I can’t identify.   Our goal is to let in more light so the ground layer can recover.

This is one of our semi-permanent brush piles.  This one is so big because we keep adding to it – in the spring when Mike does his clean-up of trees and branches that have fallen over the winter, and in the fall if we clear another section of savanna.  It’s easy to see the pile in the winter, but growing plants do a good job of hiding it in the summer.

Here’s a list of the native ground layer plants I’ve found growing in these overgrown savannas.