Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of a series of scientific papers under the general title “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan.” Written by Dr. Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago, the papers were a major contribution to the young science of ecology, a major shaper of what we now think of as the commonsense view of the structure and functioning of natural communities.
As Cowles studied the flora of the dunes, he came to realize that a walk through the dunes was a walk through time as well as space. By studying the vegetation of the contemporary dunes, he could decipher the history of the place.
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Cowles noted the importance of cottonwoods, marram grass, and a few other pioneering plants as builders of dunes. The sand piles up around them. The plants grow new roots to stay above the deepening sand, and eventually you have dunes nearly 200 feet above the waterline. These dunes grow only along the southeastern and eastern shores of the lake. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry the sand to these shores. On the lake’s eastern shore the dunes are low. The lake deposits sand along the shore, but the winds do not carry it inland.
One of Cowles’s students at the University of Chicago was May Thielgaard Watts. She popularized the work of Cowles and others in the fledgling science of ecology. Through a series of books with the general title of “Reading the Landscape” and through generations of classes at the Morton Arboretum, she taught laypeople that landscapes are ordered in both space and time. She taught that we can understand what is happening in these landscapes if we study their history and learn to interpret their present state as the product of that history.
