David O'Hara

Every few days, I make new entries in the books I am writing for my grandchildren, both of them born in the last two months. They won’t remember much of this time, so I am doing some remembering for them. Here’s today’s entry for Felix. I hope he enjoys it someday. And I hope the mice in my garden are enjoying the strawberries this morning. I didn’t like the fact that they got the best strawberries first until I wrote about it and sketched this picture for Felix. The writing and the sketching made me glad as I imagined what the mice must feel when they adventure through the tall plants and find sweet, luscious strawberries as big as their heads!

Stairs

It is easy to imagine what we want to reap, and to assume that what we are sowing will lead to that harvest.

It is harder to examine our gardening practices, to take a close look at our seeds, to tend our fields over a long time.

It is harder still to be honest when we see that our garden is not producing what we hoped, and even more challenging when what it is producing is toxic.

But what a delight when we find something good growing there, and we can harvest seeds and share them, and teach others to grow good things, too.

Every few days I add to the journals I am keeping for my newborn grandchildren. My two oldest kids became parents a few weeks apart, and I’ve been writing journals for the grandkids, to let them know what I am seeing in these first days of their lives. No strict agenda other than to offer them glimpses into their own development and things happening in the family. I hope they’ll appreciate them someday. I also try to include sketches. Today I wrote to my grandson about my work in the prairie restoration garden on campus, and included a sketch of a damselfly I saw.

Mother wood duck and some of her ducklings in the campus pond.

POV: you’re a bee small enough to get lost inside a dandelion.

Hylaeus bees (I think this is one of them, but I’m not 100% sure) are amazing.

Here it is, perched on a single petal of a dandelion.

Word on the street.

(Technically, words on the footbridge over Beaver Creek near Brandon, South Dakota.)

What has it got in its pocketses?

Some of my sketching EDC, in two photos.

The bigger your org, the greater the chance that there’s someone in your org who keeps things working well behind the scenes.

Find out who that person is and quietly figure out how to give them what they need to do their job well.

One of the few newsletters I read every week comes from this guy, @jthingelstad www.thingelstad.com/2025/05/1…

Graduation today. I’m gonna miss a lot of these kids.

Postscript to my previous post:

“Have you pen and ink, Master Doctor?” “A scholar is never without them, your Majesty,” answered Doctor Cornelius. – C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, ch. 13

For many years, two of my favorite teaching tools have been oral exams and handwritten journals. When my bookstore stopped selling blue books years ago (back when we had a bookstore) for a little while I bought them from other sources. One big challenge: students often don’t carry writing instruments. Another: most of us have poor handwriting.

Oral exams are time-consuming, but when students take them seriously they turn the exam into something like a private class, and the aim becomes more and deeper learning.

Journals can be a hard sell, because the practice of journaling is so unfamiliar for most of my digital-native students. So I show them examples of journals from history. Pausanias. Henry David Thoreau. My mother’s journal from her trip to Europe after she graduated from college. (Mom died 14 years ago; I still have that journal.)

It’s not easy, but I teach students how to use journals as a practice of being present without distraction. And I ask them to think of a journal as an epistolary practice, writing to their future selves and to others whom they might someday know and love, like their great-grandchildren. (I have letters my grandfather wrote to his mother while he was fighting in the Pacific in WWII. What treasures!)

My sabbatical is coming to a close, and soon I’ll be back in the classroom. I’ve got some work to do to prepare for the fall classes. My students will be even more digitally-oriented than previous generations, and much of higher ed, including my university, continues to adopt digital “solutions” to education in the form of course management software, digital evaluations throughout the semester, quantified assessment of courses. All of those digital artifacts are ephemeral collections of binaries that will likely be forgotten.

Most likely I won’t be offering any blue book exams, but I hope to provide my students with opportunities to be present and still, to converse with those who have written letters from long ago, and to write their own letters to the future in a material, tangible form.

As I type this, I know this reflection is itself one of those bits of digitalia that will also likely vanish. Such writing can be worthwhile, but I don’t want them to completely replace the incarnate and haptic practice of holding a pen, of feeling the nib run across the fibers of paper, of stopping to think bodily about what to write next.

And as I write this I have before me a handwritten note from a student who will graduate today. She wrote to thank me for a course I taught in backcountry Alaska, where the only assignment was a handwritten journal.

She wrote, “I hope that we someday have an Alaskan reunion trip because that may have been the most transformative experience while at Augie!”

Well, I can think of a few things that she experienced while here that were likely much greater, but I am grateful for her handwritten words nonetheless.

And I hope that in the coming semester, my students will also write things that they will look back on with gratitude for the experience.

Since I got a lot of kind and helpful replies to my post about Growing Urban Prairie Gardens, I wanted to share a few more notes, including some of the helpful tips others sent me.

One Sioux Falls Master Gardener (who has an enviable garden at home, and who has done a LOT to beautify our city) pointed out a few other places in and near Sioux Falls for buying native plants. She writes:

• Carla’s Flowers on W. 41st St. (in Sioux Falls) has a good selection of native plants in small pots. Compass plant, rattlesnake master, purple poppy mallow, native liatris. Etc.

• Colin Evers at Norm’s Greenhouse in Aurora, east of Brookings, also has good native selection.

I’ve bought a lot of plants from Carla’s, including a whole flat of native plants this spring. I haven’t been to the greenhouse in Aurora, but I trust it’s worth checking out.

All those plants I bought at Carla’s are now in the ground at my home. When they’re near the street or sidewalk, I like to add small, attractive signs so that passers-by can learn what’s growing there. I like it when my garden becomes a conversation-starter.

I’d like to have a good engraver so I could make metal signs that last, but I have yet to find one I really like and that’s worth the cost. So I usually buy a box of Wanapure metal signs and then mark them with a Staedtler Lumocolor Permanent Garden Marker I might also consider these zinc signs, and I welcome other suggestions.

I keep the signs low and close to the ground, and I bend them so that they can be read without crouching close to the ground. My aim is to keep them appealing but not obtrusive. Metal signs should last longer than plastic ones, and I want the plastic in my garden kept to a minimum anyway. One advantage of signs is that they answer questions for you even when you’re not around to hear the questions.

My art is far from perfect but I’m pretty sure my new grandson, born yesterday, is perfect. Here’s a sketch of my son and his son, a small reflection of how happy I am right now.

I’m also happy that the AI that generated the alt text says that my son has a “warm smile.” Maybe my art is getting better.

One more page from my walking-around-Minneapolis sketchbook yesterday. It was cold and windy so my hands were shaking and the lines are wiggly.

Even when they’re shaky and grossly imperfect, I like sketches better than photos because they show what I saw, not what my camera saw.

Before yesterday, I’ve never taken time to simply walk around Minneapolis. I drive or fly there to get something done, and then go home.

I’m glad I added a day to be a flâneur, to see the Mill Ruins Park, the farmers’ market, people out biking and strolling, a group doing yoga by the Guthrie, and more.

Having walked slowly, with pencil and paper in hand, I feel just a little more at home in the Twin Cities now.

Robin’s nest under the back deck. I love this time of year.

Spent part of my morning walking the streets of Minneapolis. As is my custom, I brought along a pocket sketchbook. One of my favorites is the Hahnemühle accordion-fold sketchbook. It’s about 2 inches on each side which means I don’t get much space to work with. And that’s good because it keeps me from aiming for perfection. It’s just the right size for a quick sketch while standing, or maybe a little watercoloring on a park bench. Here are two scenes I captured as I walked from the Mississippi River to Loring Park in Minneapolis.

Just wrapped up a retreat in Minneapolis with my cohort of 2024 Bush Fellows.

A year into this fellowship and I’m still deeply grateful for having been selected. My cohort is full of brilliant people with big hearts and good ideas. We greeted each other with joyful hugs, treated each other to stories of what we’re learning and how we’re adapting our plans as we grow.

We laughed a lot and cried more than a little. These are people who are hoping to make big changes in our own lives and in our communities, and who are willing to put in the work that those changes will take. The other Bush Fellows make me glad and give me hope.

I think we’re all also aware that there are a lot of other people out there who were just as worthy of this honor and support as we are. Which makes us keen to make the best use of what we have been given, and to make good things available to others as we grow as leaders.

• The Bush Fellowship and the Bush Foundation that funds it are named for Archie and Edyth Bush, who left their wealth to see good ideas fostered and strong leaders encouraged and supported in the Upper Midwest. Since people often ask me: no, there’s no relation between the fellowship and the former U.S. Presidents.

Since a lot of people ask me how to grow native prairie plants or how to replace urban lawns with prairie grasses, here’s a quick summary of what I tell people.

Note: some of this is specific to the area around Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but I think most of it is relevant if you live in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, or the Dakotas.

(Photo: the prairie garden at McCrory Gardens at South Dakota State University)

A few years ago my student (now alum) Mia Werger developed both a prairie restoration garden and a DIY prairie kit for those who wanted to make their own prairies. That kit has since been produced by the Minnehaha Conservation District in Sioux Falls, and it’s worth checking in with them to see if they have any available. The Prairie and Pollinator Garden Program kit comes with seeds and directions for how to grow a small prairie, and a metal sign to help your neighbors know what you’re doing.

One big advantage of growing native plants is they’re already adapted to our weather, so you don’t need to waste water on them like we do with our lawns made of non-native grasses with shallow roots.

(Photo: Biennial Bee Blossom, a native prairie plant)

A helpful guide to replacing a lawn with a prairie that your neighbors will envy can be found at Prairie Up and the Prairie Up book, all put together by Benjamin Vogt in Nebraska.

Prairie Moon Nursery sells local seeds and plants in Minnesota, and their website has a great interactive tool that will help you choose plants according to your growing conditions.

For those of us in western Iowa or eastern South Dakota, I also recommend checking out the online and local sales of Siouxland Prairie Farms. They harvest seeds very locally and grow plants specifically for our region. Plus, they’re really nice people. Here’s their Instagram for up-to-date sales information as well.

If you’re eager to learn more about prairie landscapes, and especially near where I live in South Dakota, check out Carter Johnson and Dennis Knight’s book The Ecology of Dakota Landscapes. It’s very readable, and beautiful, and it will help you understand the place where you’re trying to grow plants.

And if you’re curious about what my students and I have done on our campus, check out this map of our campus sustainability projects..

(Photo: a native bumblebee on a perennial Maximilian sunflower. I took this photo in the garden Mia Werger started on our campus. You can read her published writing about that garden here.)

A couple more notes to consider:

First, prairies don’t grow quickly. Most of the life of a healthy prairie is in the soil, not in the part of the plants that is above the soil. This means they can take a little while to get established. Be patient, and be willing to put in some time for weeding in the first 2-3 years. Eventually the plants will have built up enough root mass, and the soil will have built up enough life to support the plants and they’ll fend for themselves. Prairies are amazing.

Second, be prepared for your neighbors to dislike what you’re doing. It’s going to be a little unfamiliar to them, and it might run up against their notions of beautiful landscapes. Don’t be hard on them, but help them join you in the work of adapting to the place we live. We have adopted a lot of landscaping and architectural ideals from Europe and the eastern United States, and imposed them on the dry prairie. This is normal; we all tend to bring with us a lot of ideas we have inherited, and we don’t always ask whether those ideas need to be adapted to the new place we live. (Consider: we all tend to speak the same language our parents spoke, but we do also change a few words with each generation, and older folks have a hard time understanding the new words young people use to describe the conditions they live in! We can do the same thing with our ideas about landscapes and design, if we are thoughtful. Just be sure to teach the new “vocabulary” of your urban prairie to those who don’t know it yet. Signs can help with that. So can friendly conversations.)

Third, be mindful of covenants and local regulations. This is not always easy to figure out, but those ideas of beauty often get turned into local law or into covenants or agreements attached to property titles. This is often understood as a way of protecting property values by assuring a uniformity of “curb appeal.” Again, we don’t tend to think about where those ideas of beauty came from, or why we all want to live in something that looks like an English manor or a golf course. My city is growing and yet our water supply is not. By reducing the amount of non-native grass on my lawn, I am doing a favor to my city by making more water available for others. If we insist on spraying our purified drinking water on our lawns, we’re losing a precious resource and making our city less liveable. Native plants can be beautiful (see Vogt, above) and they can improve soil health, increase the number of butterflies and birds we see, and reduce our water use, saving us all money–and water.

I hope that helps!

(Photo: this is one of the species of Liatris native to the prairie. I think I photographed this one in Brandon, South Dakota, at the state park there. All the photos on this post are mine, and all were taken within an hour’s drive of my home in Sioux Falls.)