Roger Keller of Hickory Hills came up with jokes for volunteers to differentiate between nonnative plants, which had to be removed from local forest preserves, and native plants, which should be left alone to thrive, but his witticisms weren’t always politically correct.
“He would say European women don’t shave their armpits or legs like American women,” said his longtime friend and fellow volunteer Jan Pietrzak.
The joke was to differentiate between the invasive multiflora European rose, which has many fine hairs, and the very smooth and clean American rose.
“It made it memorable,” Pietrzak said of Keller’s jests.
Shortly after his retirement as a lineman in 1990 Keller helped found the Palos Restoration Project, a volunteer program dedicated to restoring Cook County Forest Preserves in the Southland back to their native condition.
After 25 years spent devoted to his cause, Keller died in 2015 at the age of 79.
On June 3, about 30 of his friends, family and fellow volunteers honored his legacy with a ceremony at Hidden Pond Woods in Hickory Hills.
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The celebration included a jazz marching band playing “When the Saints Go Marching in,” because Keller loved jazz.
A bench was installed and dedicated to him along the path in the woods. An inscription on the bench reads, “Children learned, volunteers labored, the prairie lives on. With hope for the future and gratitude to Steward Roger Keller.”
The work Keller started is expected to carry on for generations.
He purchased his home across the street from Hidden Pond Woods because he loved nature, Pietrzak said, and Keller dedicated more than two decades trying to preserve it.
Thanks to volunteers, such as Keller, about 9,500 acres of forest preserve land in that 25 years have been cleared of non-native, invasive plants and are under management.
“When he started there little patches of prairie surrounded by invasive brush,” Pietrzak said.
He said Keller helped spread the word about the importance of restoring the prairie, not just lead work days in the preserves.
And there’s still a lot of work to do in the more than 60,000 acres of forest preserve land that hasn’t been cleared of the brush.
Even in the cleared land Pietrzak said volunteers must continue to work to maintain because “things creep back in.”
He said the Cook County Forest Preserve District has a 100-year plan to restore prairies within the preserves.
And the volunteers know it could take longer than that.
“Nobody expects to finish in their lifetime of people I know,” Pietrzak said.
The invasive plants were brought by the first European settlers and include the European buckthorn and Asian honeysuckle.
“People tended to bring what was familiar to them from home,” Pietrzak said of the European settlers. “They didn’t know what that would do.”
What that did was severely disrupt the ecosystem, affecting just about every living thing in the natural prairie, naturalists said.
“If we lose the natives we lose a lot of plant and animal diversity,” Pietrzak said.
He said the native oak tree can support up to 100 species of insects and birds while the invasive plants support far fewer.
Pietrzak said another example is in the news about declining numbers of monarch butterflies is also due to the decline of native milkweed.