If you contact DOT commissioners about this issue, please
consider also expressing support for the efforts being made by the DOT to
use Iowa-ecotype seed. By using Iowa-ecotype seed, the DOT is helping
to protect the genetic integrity of native prairie remnants near their
plantings, and are creating plantings that are more appropriate for
Iowa and look and function more like real prairies here.
Cindy
"Coming home across the rolling open fields we gathered quite a bouquet
of violets, looking carefully for them in the gathering dusk and picking them
with chilling fingers. These were of the kind the boys call "birds-foot," with
parted leaves...A long hot summer followed by heavy rains, without heavy frost,
may account for this October bloom." (Selden Lincoln Whitcomb writing of a walk
near Grinnell on October 22, 1886)