Native, but aggressive

Butterweed, Packera glabela
Source

Something has changed. I don’t know what, but the river bottoms south of town are covered in a blanket of yellow. 

It’s quite pretty, actually. Acres and acres of yellow flowers, about waist high under the near-closed canopy of the maple and cottonwood trees. Bright yellow as deep into the woods as you can see. It’s especially stunning in the “golden hours” early in the morning or late in the day. 

I’ve been tramping around those river bottoms for more than 30 years and I’ve never seen this. In fact, until about three years ago, I had never seen the plant responsible for those bright yellow blooms. It’s called butterweed, also known as cressleaf groudsel and, fittingly, yellowtop. 

And it’s everywhere this year. Why? What has changed such that this plant is now the dominant ground cover over large swaths of the bottomland forests I know so well?

Honestly, I have no idea. 

In ecosystems, “native” species are usually ones that don’t take over, don’t disrupt the balance, and contribute more or less to a static state, if such a thing can exist in nature (it doesn’t, change is a constant, but you get the idea). 

But some species, like how butterweed is described online, are “native, but aggressive.” 

Today, I invite all my fellow Burlington natives to take inspiration from this plant.

Though native, butterweed has the capacity to substantively change ecosystems, to become the dominant species in a certain area, given the right conditions. After years of quietly building its capacity, it must have found those right conditions in the river bottoms this year.

Well done, butterweed. You’re hard to miss, now.

Fellow Burlingtonians, do you see where I’m going with this? 

For years, there have been people in our community quietly doing their thing in the background. Writing a grant here, fundraising there, planting the seed of an idea occasionally, serving on committees, volunteering for organizations, growing businesses, and enduring more than a few setbacks along the way (I wonder how many butterweed seeds were lost to floods over the years). 

Those quiet members of our community - or shall we call it our ecosystem - recruited others. Maybe you’re one of them. Together, they laid the groundwork for big changes, knowing that eventually the conditions would be just right for a wholesale change to the landscape. 

I believe that’s what we’re seeing in Burlington right now. Like butterweed in the river bottoms, it’s hard to miss. You see it in a renovated riverfront, an ever-growing and more vibrant downtown, in a new four-lane highway, and an updated high school the likes of which you’d expect in places with an extra zero on their population count.

You see it in the committees that have formed to offer things like Burlington River Days, a summer jazz fest, a downtown cultural district, and committees intent on turning downtown buildings into things like a children’s STEM center (at the Craftsman Press building) and a Mississippi River/Aldo Leopold-themed restaurant and interpretive center (at the Big Muddy’s building). 

You see it in new businesses, new housing, and investments in existing structures like the old Apollo School and countless buildings downtown. 

Yet, along the way, so many of these projects were met with, “you can’t do that,” or “that’s awful ambitious,” or “that place has been empty for years/decades/generations…” And they would have stayed that way were it not for the people - many of them native, some of them transplants but now deeply rooted here - quietly building capacity behind the scenes, waiting for the right time to be aggressive. 

Burlington, that time has come.

The ecosystem that has been our community for the last three decades is not the same ecosystem we will cultivate in the next three. For those of us that call this place home, it’s our turn now to be aggressive. To make this community into what we want it to be. To put our time, talent, and treasure into creating the ecosystem we want for ourselves, our families, and for future generations. 

The groundwork has been laid by many who have come before us. It’s our time now to rise up and be hard to miss. It’s our time to serve on the committees that plan big events, to volunteer with the local organizations that do so much here, to donate to the capital campaigns that build STEM and interpretive centers, and to read online about new things happening in the community and reply with, “Hell yes!”

Because there will continue to be many, natives and otherwise, who say, “Can’t!” who want to maintain the status quo because that’s what’s familiar and change is scary and there’s always the fear of failure. 

To which we will reply, “Watch us!”

Native, but aggressive. And definitely hard to miss.