1/3/22 “Pioneer Species,” now doesn’t that sound very American? Don’t you picture flowers hitching a ride in a covered wagon going over the Oregon Trail? No? They don’t have thumbs! Sorry for the 6th-grade humor, but that visual was how the term struck me many, many, many years ago when I first heard it in my college ecology class. Now, a zillion years later, I come back across it reading a book, Garden Revolution (highly recommended) by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher in their discussion of cardinal flowers. Larry Weaner’s Garden Revolution and How Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change – Garden Collage Magazine The thing about pioneer species is that they go through their life cycle quickly, a few years, then die. If you don’t know that about a plant, you can’t see why it failed; you think that either you killed it or that it can’t…
