To make a prairie, Emily Dickinson said, it takes a clover and a bee…or a teasel and a butterfly, I say. One teasel, and a butterfly, and revery. And revery alone will do if butterflies are few. (Click on the image above for a larger version.)

Dickinson, of course, never saw a Midwestern prairie, but she understood the basic concept. Prairies are all about flowers, bugs, and revery, the sun turning any day into a lazy day. Although teasels, unlike clovers, aren’t native to American prairies, they (just like white folks) have made themselves at home here since the 18th century. Teasels came to America with white folks, in fact, since their bristly, cone-like flower heads were used in the textile trade to raise or “tease” the nap of woven cloth. So even though teasel doesn’t technically belong on an American prairie, I for one don’t mind their presence since any friend of a butterfly is a friend of mine.

Coming to Ohio in August is a bit like dying and going to heaven if you’re botanically minded. Sure, most folks call field flowers weeds since they aren’t welcome in either yard or farm fields…but to my eye, there isn’t anything prettier than a grassy, butterfly-festooned field strewn with dots of yellow, purple, and white.

And you can believe my little ol’ Midwestern heart thrills to the sight of a field of tall-waving grass…especially if the tallest of that grass happens to be big bluestem, the king of the prairie. To my mind, there’s something magical and (yes) revery-inspiring about a non-woody plant that grows taller than a grown man…or taller even, in some cases, than a grown man on horseback.

When European settlers came to Ohio in the 1800s, most of the state was forested. But the harsher parts–places that flooded in the spring and baked to earth-cracking dryness in the summer–harbored waving seas of big bluestem grass dotted with yellow and purple coneflowers. The first Europeans to encounter endless seas of grass with nary a tree in sight didn’t know what to make of such a landscape. They called it “prairie” after the French word for “meadow”…but these weren’t the pastoral meadows of the Old World. Instead, American prairies were brutally cold in winter and blistering hot in the summer. Fires kept trees at bay and recycled each year’s crop of dead grass, returning nutrients to the rich soil. The first Ohio settlers didn’t know how rich that soil was, assuming that land without trees was barren. But when John Deere invented the steel plow, Midwestern farmers discovered they’d been sitting on dirty gold: soil that would grow corn and wheat as readily as it had grown grass.

Standing amongst even a tiny plot of prairie plants, I can imagine what it must have been like to be a 19th century pioneer trying to make a home on a sea of green. Flat land makes for wide skies, and wide skies make for expansively open hearts. Contemplating a teasel and a butterfly on a sunny day, it’s easy to fall into revery, one’s spirits buoyed on a billow of grass.