Couple worked to restore native savanna landscape
In 1980, when Tom and Kathie Brock’s children were 3 and 5, they considered buying a vacation home “up north,” where Tom, a University of Wisconsin-Madison microbiology professor, had done research on lakes.
But the idea of 10-hour round-trips with youngsters on weekends was anything but appealing. So the couple, now retired, bought 140 wooded acres near Black Earth — less than 25 miles from their home in Shorewood Hills on the edge of the campus.
The unglaciated property in the Driftless Area came with a one-room shack, an outhouse and steep hills ideal for hiking and tiring out growing children.
The land, still owned by the Brocks, is now open to the public and known as the Pleasant Valley Conservancy State Natural Area. The preserve is one of the best examples in the region of a large-scale effort to restore a bur oak savanna. It will eventually be donated to the Prairie Enthusiasts, a conservation group, and remain open for visitors.
Richard Henderson, a research ecologist with the state’s Department of Natural Resources, praised the Brocks’ efforts to bring back the original prairie, oak savanna, oak woodland and wetlands that were present at the time of European settlement in the mid 1800s.
“The oak savanna that is currently present is not yet a fully intact, ‘pristine’ example of original savanna,” he said. “Those are extremely rare.”
But he called the Brocks’ work on their land over the past two decades “phenomenal, even heroic,” because the site had been highly degraded by grazing and tree/brush invasion due to lack of fire for many years.
“The greatest significance of the PVC and what the Brocks have accomplished is its size,” he said. “It is one of the very few places where people can see and experience the savanna structure, and much of the ground vegetation (if not yet fully recovered), on a large-enough scale to get a sense of what most of southern Wisconsin looked like at one time. It is also big enough to support uncommon savanna birds such as the redheaded woodpecker.”
The Brocks said they bought the land for their kids when they were small.
“We were looking for a somewhat wild place we could go that we wouldn’t have to drive far,” Kathie Brock said. “They loved running around free out there. In fact, our daughter ended up doing her doctorate on the Douglas fir. Our son is a musician.”
For the next decade or so, the family trekked in the hills and explored the wetlands, sometimes staying overnight in the shack, never quite realizing what lay under the heavy brush on the southfacing slopes — an oak savanna.
Tom, 91, retired from the university in 1990. Kathie, 79 and a microbiologist, retired from her post as managing director of Science Tech Publishers and began volunteering with the Nature Conservancy in the early ’90s.
“I started in the office and then went on work parties to do restoration work. Then I went through the burn school and did some burns,” she said.
“I remember clearing cedars off a hillside to expose prairie. I thought, we have cedars, too, and our land looks sort of like this. So I cut down a couple of cedars on our property and soon realized you
don’t do that kind of site work with a handsaw. So we hired someone to come out with a chainsaw and that’s how we got started with our oak savanna restoration work.”
She said they had no idea when they started how nice the savanna would look because “it was initially so overgrown with buckthorn and other plants.
“There were a lot of oaks, but they were hard to see. We had a lot of woody shrubs and trees like buckthorn, honeysuckle, slippery elm, cherry and walnut that are fire sensitive and wouldn’t have been there in the past.”
Henderson said American Indians had been burning the landscape for 5,000 years, but the practice ended not long after European settlers arrived and began farming in the valleys and grazing their animals on the hillsides.
Tom Brock said a few farmers burned the pastures up until the 1950s. Grazing also kept down some of the vegetation, but most of the cows were eventually moved to barns, he said, and the brush and brambles took over.
“The forestry people were also very discouraging about fire,” he said. “And if you don’t burn those hills, they get covered with junipers and brushed in.”
Kathie Brock said it was “something of a miracle” that the man with the chainsaw came back the second day because cutting on the steep hillsides was difficult. He worked for the Brocks for several years.
In 1997, they began burning their property, starting with a small crew on a small remnant prairie of an acre or so that had remained fairly open.
“Burning is very effective,” she said. “It removes all the old grasses that smother the other plants. The next year, a number of prairie plants and flowers grew on that site and we were off.”
Species now thriving in the conservancy include big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, sideoats grama, wood betony, bird‘s-foot violet, purple prairie clover, wood sorrel and the uncommon prairie turnip. The savanna supports numerous grass, sedge, and forb species including the state-endangered purple milkweed, which reappeared after restoration and prescribed burning began. Other plants include silky rye, bottlebrush grass, ear-leaved brome, leadplant, largeflowered yellow false foxglove, Canada milkvetch, Illinois tick-trefoil, alum-root, shooting star, spiderwort, state-threatened giant yellow hyssop and upland boneset.
The Brocks burn sections of their land every year or every other year, working with a group of around a dozen, often in the spring. They are often out on the property at least several days a week, with small crews or working by themselves.
They no longer stay in the shack, however, though they said it is a nice place to sit in the shade and rest. And in the winter, they use it and its small wood stove as a warming hut.
“After working out there and getting covered with sweat, it’s nice to come home, take a shower and sleep in your own bed,” Kathie Brock said.
In 2006, they began the process of turning their land into a dedicated state natural area by deeding the property’s development rights to the state. That move gave them a tax break and meant that the four possible homesites were now off limits.
Hundreds of people visit the property now and it is often used by school and conservation groups as an example of
how land can be returned to its natural state.
The Brocks haven’t kept count on how much money or how many hours they’ve spent working on their property, which they call a “labor of love.”
Their daughter, Kathie Brock, called the conservancy their “obsession.”
“It means that we might not have the resources to go on trips on some huge cruise ship,” she said. “But to tell the truth, we really don’t want to do that kind of thing anyway.”
They’d much rather hike the trails through the wetlands and among the oaks, listen to the songs of the 70-plus bird species that frequent the conservancy, soak up the valley views and enjoy the beauty of the numerous prairie flowers that they’ve helped reestablish on their land.
More information: Field trips in cooperation with the Prairie Enthusiasts and the Madison Audubon Society are offered annually. See pleasantvalley conserancy.org.
Getting there: The conservancy is at 4554 Pleasant Valley Road, Black Earth, about 110 miles west of Milwaukee via I-94 and Highways 12 and 78.