Miracle under the oaks – the revival of nature in

When Steve Packard first saw the abandoned tract of land along the north branch of the Chicago River, it was choked by weedy brush and strewn with mattresses, car seats, and other debris of human civilization. Vestal Grove, once a thriving habitat with its tallgrass and ancient oaks, had been beaten down to the vanishing point. But Packard, a charismatic, modern-day Thoreau and a man with an extraordinary vision, was determined to overcome the odds and rescue Vestal Grove from the edge of oblivion. To do so, he had to uncover its ecological secrets. Little did he know how wondrous those secrets would be. Beginning in 1977, Packard and a small platoon of volunteers started clearing the land on a series of ecologically shattered prairie remnants in the heart of suburban Chicago. As they worked, Vestal Grove stunningly revealed itself to be a long-lost ecosystem no one realized had existed. Neither prairie nor forest, Vestal Grove was part of a third type of living community - one whose web of life was so finely tuned that only certain plants and animals could live in its unique dapple of sunlight and shade. The challenge now was to restore this ecosystem as closely as possible to its condition before the first white settlers had appeared, and provide a haven where uncommon and threatened species could recover and thrive. Driven by their passion for nature, the restorationists cut through tangles of Bureaucratic red tape, only to discover they faced even greater frustrations as flora and fauna they had planted at first refused to flourish. Crawling on hands and knees in a futile search for blossoming plants, Steve Packard feared the dream was lost. Then the restorationists stumbled upon the answer - a Rosetta stone of the ecosystem that held the secret to success, and to more unexpected victories. Armed with their newfound knowledge, the restorationists painstakingly scoured the countryside for the seeds they needed to rebuild Vestal Grove.