"A few miles outside Pullman, Washington, a remnant of the Palouse Prairie lies on a small hill, surrounded by undulating wheat fields and studded with cracked and weathered headstones from the late 1800s."
"More than 100 plant species bloom here at Whelan Cemetery, including pink prairie smoke, purple lupine and yellow arrowleaf balsamroot, highlighting the biodiversity once prevalent in the prairie."
"Two centuries ago, these plants were part of what Melodi Wynne, a citizen of the Spokane Tribe, describes as a 'million-acre grocery store,' valuable for food and medicine to Indigenous peoples."
"By most accounts, less than 1% of the original prairie remains, most of it on land too rocky or steep to farm - or, as at Whelan Cemetery, protected by being home to the graves of the people who plowed it under."
Collection
[
|
...
]