Joyce and George Proper walk into a field of blazing stars opening their purple blooms beneath a steamy, summer sky at Grant Woods in Ingelside.
The Lake Villa couple planted some of those “stars,” and they are thrilled to see them. “This is going to be a good year for liatris,” said Joyce Proper, referring to the Latin name for the native prairie plant.
They also planted seeds of gentian — but a hiker walking by wouldn’t notice them. George, however, knows right were to look. He bends down and points to a six-inch-tall plant with leaves that won’t bloom for a few more weeks.
As stewards for the Lake County Forest Preserves for nearly three decades, Joyce, 81, and her husband, George, 83, were recently named Volunteers of the Year by the National Association of County Park and Recreation Officials. Lake County Forest Preserves is a member organization, along with 121 other park and special recreation districts nationwide.
When the Propers talk about Grant Woods, it’s as if they are referring to an old friend with whom they’ve made many memories. At each turn of the trail, they recall what invasive plant was removed and when, what seeds were scattered, what plant blooms at what time of year, what birds nest in the preserve, and where the 300-year-old bur oak tree is located.
They also note what needs to be fixed. For example, George noticed two invasive plants growing from a distance. “There’s some teasel. We have to tell Brian,” he said, referring to one of the forest preserve employees who removes invasive plants. Teasel is invading many natural areas in the county.
Forest preserves stewardship ecologist Kelly Schultz calls the Propers, “caring, hardworking people who deserve the national recognition.”
“They have been wonderful stewards of Grant Woods, taking on a large, 1,200-acre site and the preserve with the most habitat diversity in the entire district,” she said.
Grant Woods contains rare ecosystems, including a remnant prairie, which has never been plowed a grazed, presettlement oak woods, sedge meadows and a bog, found only in a few other places in Illinois. A third of the preserve is dedicated as an Illinois Nature Preserve in recognition of its high quality natural areas.
10,000 hours
“Joyce first started volunteering 27 years ago, and George soon joined after,” Schultz said. “Over the years, they have helped manage invasive species, collect native seeds, plant trees, monitor and care for rare plants, lead workdays with school groups, corporations, the Sierra Club, and welcomed and inspired countless individual volunteers.”
In the past 15 years, they have donated 10,000 hours of volunteer service, she said.
“Joyce has wonderful stories to share, a lifetime of memories: searching for hepatica, seeking out the largest trees in the county, counting delicate lady slipper orchids, carrying a backpack of herbicide to carefully target invasive weeds in the bog, removing loads of garlic mustard, and baking delicious cookies as a bonus to her volunteer crew,” Schultz said. “George is a wonderful partner, running power tools, herbicide, and whatever else needs doing with a quiet smile.”
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Joyce said she has a “wonderful, faithful crew of 10 volunteers” who work at Grant Woods removing invasive plants, collecting seeds, planting seeds and more. She cracks the whips mostly now, she said, because she can’t work as much or as hard as she used to due to hip replacement surgery.
Hard work
But hard work is exactly how she got started, knowing and caring for Grant Woods. In 1994, after her children were raised, she noticed the forest preserve needed help monitoring rare plants. But she was told she had to earn her ecological stripes first — and that meant helping remove brush on a cold day in winter.
She loved it.
Proper learned that invasive plants, such as the nonnative buckthorn, crowd out native plants and degrade native ecosystems. She’s taken ecology classes and plant identification classes, and walked in woods with land managers and botanists to learn as much as she can about Lake County’s natural areas.
She learned about the special bog on the preserve. “It wasn’t easy to get out there, but we’d find all the plants you wouldn’t see anywhere else — like leatherleaf and huckleberry.”
Proper said she and her crew did what they could to remove invasive species and keep the bog thriving, but she said it really was the forest preserve staff that did the most important work there.
“They went out there in winter when it was frozen with heavy machinery, spraying reed canary grass (an invasive plant), pulling out the buckthorn, collecting seeds around the bog and scattering them widely,” she said. They also collected tamarack seeds, grew the trees in a forest preserve nursery and set the saplings out, which are now 6-feet-tall, she said. Tamaracks grow in bogs and are state-endangered.
Remnant prairie
Another special part of the preserve is several acres of an original prairie that was never plowed. “We removed all the buck thorn and the native seed bank was still all below. All these wonderful plants started appearing — Indian paintbrush, star grass, blue-eyed grass, liatris, toadflax.”
Proper also has monitored rare plants at the preserve. For a particularly rare plant, “we put permanent metal stakes into the ground into a center of a cluster of these plants. We use compass and tape measure, we write down the statistics for each single plant. The next year, we look for every plant we found in the past and if we see a new one, we take the statistics.
Proper says she was born loving nature.
“Living in the boonies near Green Bay when I was 5 years old, there were all kind of places to wander and see nature. I walked a mile and a half to a one-room country school, along the road there were all kinds of wildflowers. Spring beauties, great white trillium, trout lily, hepatica.” Many of these plants she can see, and has helped plant at Grant Woods.
“George and I raised 412 pale purple coneflowers from seeds in our yard, and on a workday I had the crew set them out,” Proper said. The coneflowers have done well, and now there must be thousands of them out there.
Proper also recalled when she and George noticed some prairie plants growing in a roadside near Grant Community High School. They stopped to look closer and saw purplish blue trumpet-shaped blossoms about 8 inches from the soil. It was fringed gentian, a rare prairie plant.
They collected the gentians and planted them at Grant Woods, where they are surviving. The roadside prairie remnant is no more, she said.
Joyce said she hopes when people visit Grant Woods, they will spend less time looking at their cellphones and more time admiring the trees, flowers and birds there. George wonders what will happen to the preserve when he and his wife are gone. The hope is that a new generation will continue their stewardship.
For now, they will continue as long as they can working at and extolling the virtues of Grant Woods.