Long ago, when I was an undergraduate (the 1960s) I met a man who had been one of the very first to settle on the open western plains. Before his family plowed that patch of prairie under, it had been grassland with tops as tall as a man and more. There were still abundant wildlife, antelope and deer, (buffalo were long gone) but you only saw them when they jumped higher than the grass. He said that from the seat of a horse-drawn wagon the grasses were like waves of the ocean, rippling green and shining into the sunlit distance. Those ancient prairies and grasslands are mostly gone now, but remnants survive in parts of the Whiterock Conservancy. Oak savanna is a prairie-like landscape dotted with copses of oak trees. At the Conservancy you can imagine the immensity, the ocean-like vastness, that once was.
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| "Oak Savanna, Whiterock," oil on panel, 12x16 |
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