Poplar Bluff Garden Club members stepped back in time when they recently visited Cane Ridge.
The program, “Cane Ridge – A Piece of the Ozarks As It Was,” and outing were organized by Master Gardener Bruce Beck along with the help of U.S. Forestry Staff: Megan Harris, wildlife biologist; Mike Stevens, silviculturist; and Gabe Vandersip, natural resource specialist.
Garden Club President Carla Aldridge explained, the event is in “keeping with the National Garden Clubs’s motto this year: ‘Plant America- Play out Doors’ and the club’s efforts to continue to explore educational opportunities.
“We learned about forest management, saw wildflowers and lots of butterflies,” Aldridge said. “Megan found a temporary puddle of water that housed American toad and salamander eggs.”
Cane Ridge is in Butler County just south of Williamsville. It’s managed by the U.S. Forestry Service and is open to the public for sightseeing and seasonal hunting. Beck explained, “The pine savanna we see at Cane Ridge today is most like the landscape encountered by the first white settlers in the Ozarks. For thousand of years previously Native Americans had been maintaining the pine savanna with periodic fires. Suppression of hardwoods and scrub by fire favored grasses and a very wide diversity of forbs. Elk, woodland bison, black bear, puma, turkey, quail, grouse and numbers of songbirds thrived.
“With the arrival of white settlers from Appalachia the landscape was changed drastically and suddenly,” Beck said. “The large animals and game birds disappeared first. The pines followed.”
The Poplar Bluff Garden Club was organized May 12, 1937 and became a federated club in 1941.
The local club is part of the Southeast District of Federated Garden Clubs of Missouri, Federated Garden Clubs of Missouri, Inc. Central Region Garden Clubs, Inc. and National Garden Clubs, Inc., 4401 Magnolia Ave., St. Louis, Missouri.