Creating a Front Yard Prairie: In the Land of Riding Lawn Mowers

Deb McRae, Retired Director Wehr Nature Center

This is a story of the McRae’s family’s journey, with its many successes and failures, to create a front yard prairie in a subdivision of acre lots that love their manicured landscaping.  Besides the actual processes used in creating the prairie, Deb will also share the continuing changes to their yard based on aging of the surrounding landscape, new knowledge, increasing plant diversity, and even climate change. Working with native plants and the wildlife they attract is a joy, a challenge, and great exercise. Deb hopes you will enjoy their journey and learn something new in the process.

Deb McRae is the former Director of Wehr Nature Center, serving from 1998 to 2021, following the retirement of Mariette Nowak. Before that, she was the Education Director at the Wehr Nature Center and Director of the Nature in the Parks program. She helped launch the environmental education programs at what is now the Urban Ecology Center, and the Pringle Nature Center, and worked to create and promote sharing of environmental education programming and teacher education with the metro Milwaukee environmental centers. Today she continues to naturalize the same yard she and her husband purchased in 1982. She is busy with the never-ending battle with invasive plants and animals, adapting to climate change and watching the change from yard to meadow to prairie and now probably an oak savanna as the land around her continually changes.

WHEN:  Saturday, February 21 at 10 a.m.

WHERE:  South Kettle Moraine State Forest Headquarters, Eagle

      S91W39091 Highway 59, One mile west of Eagle.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.  No admission fee.