Sometimes You Just Need Community
The monarchs are here.
Earlier this year, while doing my normal check of what was growing in my pastures, I made a mental note that we had a healthy amount of milkweed mixed in with everything else.
I didn't plant it.
Mostly, I just noticed it and didn't kill it.
Then, a few days ago, my sister and I saw two monarch butterflies while we were doing chores.
One was flying around normally. The other was a little faded and had ended up down among some of the taller vegetation. It could fly, but every attempt to get itself back up into open air seemed to end with it crashing into another plant.
So, I offered it a hand.
Literally.
It climbed onto my finger, I lifted it above the vegetation, and off it went.
Sometimes you just need community
For monarchs, milkweed is mandatory. Adult monarchs drink nectar from many different flowers, but monarch caterpillars can eat only milkweed, and females lay their eggs on milkweed for exactly that reason (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, n.d.). Eastern monarchs beginning their fall migration can eventually travel thousands of miles to their overwintering grounds in central Mexico (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2021).
So, seeing monarchs after spending the summer noticing milkweed scattered through my pastures felt like a tiny bit of confirmation that sometimes stewardship consists of not doing something.
I didn't have to cultivate milkweed.
I just had to let it exist.
Unfortunately, not everything growing here is milkweed
Which brings me to the Japanese mimosa.
Or, more accurately, mimosas, because they have apparently spent the last year or two having a baby boom.
I have complicated feelings about them.
They're beautiful.
They provide shade.
Their fluffy pink flowers draw insects and hummingbirds into the yard, and I genuinely enjoy having them here.
They are also Albizia julibrissin, a nonnative invasive tree.
The Missouri Invasive Plant Council notes that mimosa escapes cultivation, reseeds readily, and can become weedy as far north as central Missouri. Missouri Botanical Garden similarly describes it as fast-growing and capable of producing numerous seedlings through self-seeding (Missouri Botanical Garden, n.d.; Missouri Invasive Plant Council, 2023).
Looking around my yard, I can personally confirm the numerous-seedlings portion of the program.
That leaves me with a question more complicated than:
Native good. Invasive bad. Chainsaw.
I want more native plants on this property. Missouri's native plants evolved alongside the state's wildlife, and they can provide food, cover, and habitat for butterflies, birds, and other wildlife (Missouri Department of Conservation, n.d.-g).
I also don't particularly want my yard serving as a mimosa distribution center for the surrounding countryside.
But removing a mature tree immediately removes everything that particular tree is doing right now.
Shade disappears immediately.
Flowers disappear immediately.
The birds and insects using it don't receive a memo explaining that I've removed their resources for ecologically principled reasons.
And whatever I plant in its place will not instantly become a mature tree because I have made a better botanical choice.
So, I'm increasingly interested in replacement rather than simply removal. What replaces a mimosa?
That's the question I'm working on now.
I immediately think about redbuds, dogwoods, and sassafras because I love all three.
I grew up near the Lake of the Ozarks, and we had tons of redbud, dogwood, and sassafras. Here, we have managed to identify exactly one sassafras tree so far, and my sister and I became perhaps disproportionately excited about discovering it.
There are plenty of Missouri-native possibilities for adding small trees and wildlife value. Eastern redbud, flowering dogwood, serviceberry, wild plum, and other native flowering trees all fill different niches depending on the site (Missouri Department of Conservation, n.d.-c).
Sassafras is another option particularly close to my heart. It occurs across most of Missouri and can grow along pastures, fence rows, old fields, woodland edges, and other places that sound suspiciously like my property (Missouri Department of Conservation, n.d.-h).
That doesn't mean one of these trees is a perfect mimosa substitute.
There probably isn't one.
That's part of the lesson.
Maybe I don't need to march outside tomorrow and cut down every mature mimosa.
Maybe I need to control the offspring, stop allowing the invasion to expand, start establishing native replacements, and eventually remove mature invasive trees as other plants become capable of taking over some of their functions. Transitioning an ecosystem makes more sense to me than creating a hole and calling the hole restoration.
And I've also had to accept that I am probably never going to have a perfectly native yard.
I'm increasingly okay with that.
I care about native plants.
I care about reducing invasive species.
But ecological function matters more to me than botanical purity.
And then there are the horses
This gets more complicated because I also have two horses living on this land.
They're both over 21 now, retired, and mostly employed as very large yard ornaments.
At first glance, domestic horses seem like another human-introduced piece of the landscape.
But history is considerably more interesting than that.
Equids evolved in North America and lived here for millions of years before disappearing from the continent near the end of the Pleistocene. Missouri's own fossil record includes horses during the Pleistocene (Missouri Department of Natural Resources, 2016).
Why horses and so many other large North American mammals disappeared around the end of the Pleistocene is still debated. Rapid climate and habitat changes, human hunting, and interactions among multiple pressures remain among the major explanations rather than there being one universally accepted cause (National Park Service, 2023).
So, horses aren't completely alien to the ecological history of this continent—or even this state.
But my two domestic horses are also obviously not Pleistocene wildlife.
Modern domestic horses have been selectively bred and managed by humans, and I have fenced mine onto six acres rather than allowing them to migrate across a landscape according to forage and water availability.
That distinction matters.
The landscape they live in has changed too.
Missouri once supported a larger community of big herbivores and predators than we see across most of the landscape today. Elk are native to Missouri and were gone from the state by the late 1800s before restoration efforts brought them back beginning in 2011. Bison also occurred here, although the Missouri Department of Conservation notes that they were apparently sporadic rather than extremely abundant immediately before European settlement. Gray wolves were part of Missouri's fauna as well before they were extirpated (Missouri Department of Conservation, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-d).
Humans dramatically altered that community.
Bison and elk disappeared from the state.
Wolves were deliberately eliminated.
Prairies were converted.
Forests were cleared and regrown.
Agriculture changed plant communities.
Roads, fences, towns, livestock, invasive plants, and fragmented habitat followed.
Some species have recovered or been reintroduced. Other's haven't, and the only large native grazer I see on my property now is the white-tailed deer happily helping itself to the same pasture my horses are eating.
So, when I think about my horses' ecological hoofprint, I'm not putting them into an untouched ecosystem from which large grazing animals were always absent.
I'm putting domestic grazers into an ecosystem whose relationships among plants, herbivores, predators, fire, and humans have already been heavily rearranged.
That doesn't give me permission to let my horses destroy the place.
Quite the opposite.
Because I put these horses here, their impact is my responsibility.
Native also doesn't mean safe
This is another place where the simple categories fall apart.
I have a lot of black walnuts.
I love black walnut trees. The nuts are great for snacking or cooking. They are hearty, they provide great shade, and the local squirrel population certainly seems to consider them a major food source.
And then the horse-owner section of my brain starts screaming.
Black walnuts are native to this region, but black-walnut heartwood shavings are dangerous to horses. Exposure can cause limb swelling and severe laminitis, and veterinary references warn that contaminated bedding can be dangerous even when black walnut makes up only part of the material (Merck Veterinary Manual, 2024).
This one isn't merely an abstract warning to me.
Back when I was knee-deep in the mid-Missouri horse world, I knew of Missouri stables that had received loads of shavings contaminated with black walnut and lost horses to the resulting toxicity.
I can't give you barn names, case reports, or records all these years later, so I am deliberately leaving that as what it is: a personal memory from the horse community, not a documented case I'm asking anyone to take as scientific evidence.
The scientifically documented danger of black-walnut bedding to horses, however, is very real (Merck Veterinary Manual, 2024).
That does not mean the black walnut trees growing around my property are evil horse-killing trees that all need to come down.
It means I need to know what bedding, sawdust, or wood products my horses might encounter.
We also appear to have some black cherry, Prunus serotina.
Black cherry trees are native too.
They are also one of the Missouri plants livestock owners need to know.
Damaged or wilted black-cherry leaves are particularly dangerous because they can release hydrogen cyanide, also called prussic acid. All parts of the plant are potentially toxic, but damaged and wilted leaves present the greatest risk (University of Missouri Extension, 2026).
Again:
Native does not mean harmless.
The cherry tree belongs here.
The walnut belongs here.
My horses are the part of this arrangement whose presence and movement I control.
The trees aren't doing anything wrong by having chemical defenses.
The horses aren't doing anything wrong by being horses.
I'm the one responsible for managing the interaction.
And now I must decide what not to mow.
Which brings us to fall.
I have pastures to manage.
I have brush that genuinely needs knocked back.
I have invasive plants I do not want to spread.
I also have wildlife preparing for winter.
And once you start looking at a patch of prairie instead of seeing it simply as "overgrown," it becomes harder to indiscriminately flatten everything.
Standing vegetation provides seeds, fruit, stems, cover, and shelter through fall and winter. Missouri Department of Conservation specifically cautions that mowing and clearing large areas of old-field habitat destroys seed- and fruit-producing plants that wildlife use for food and cover (Missouri Department of Conservation, n.d.-e).
There is also a balance to strike where my pasture vegetation includes native warm-season grasses. Missouri Department of Conservation guidance advises against mowing native warm-season grass after August 1 and recommends leaving protective cover through winter (Missouri Department of Conservation, n.d.-f).
Research from University of Missouri Extension likewise describes wildlife benefits from taller residual vegetation and from delaying harvest or leaving portions of warm-season plantings unharvested (University of Missouri Extension, 2025b).
Even mowing itself isn't necessarily the ecologically neutral option it sometimes appears to be. MU Extension notes that repeated mowing reduces the habitat value of early-successional vegetation; where mowing is needed as a management tool, timing and frequency affect how much food and cover remain available to wildlife (University of Missouri Extension, 2025a).
So, my fall management question isn't:
Do I mow or do I save nature?
It's:
Which areas actually need mowing, and which areas am I mowing mostly because
humans have decided land looks more respectable when the vegetation is short?
My horse areas still have to function as horse areas.
I need to be able to inspect fences.
I need to manage woody growth before it becomes impossible to deal with.
I need to suppress invasive plants.
I need to know whether toxic plants are somewhere the horses can reach.
There are practical reasons for brush hogging.
But I don't necessarily need to make all six acres look like a lawn.
Instead, I'm leaning toward something more like patchwork.
Some areas maintained for the horses.
Pathways and fence lines are kept accessible.
Problem brush and invasive species targeted deliberately.
Other patches left taller through fall and winter. This allows seeds, stems, and cover to remain available to everything else living here.
Then, where appropriate, I can rotate which places get cut rather than repeatedly disturbing the entire property at once.
It isn't a complete abandonment of land stewardship.
It's management with more than one species in mind.
Living on land instead of owning scenery.
I think that's what all these questions keep coming back to.
Legally, I own this land.
Ecologically, that's a spectacularly incomplete description of our relationship.
I share it.
With monarchs.
With milkweed.
With deer.
With hummingbirds.
With black walnuts.
With black cherries.
With the one beloved sassafras that hopefully has family in the area.
With native plants I haven't learned to identify yet.
With invasive plants that arrived because of generations of human choices.
With wildlife whose populations have been shaped by centuries of hunting,
agriculture, habitat conversion, conservation, extirpation, and reintroduction.
And with two elderly horses whose presence on these six acres is entirely my decision.
Stewardship doesn't mean refusing to interfere with any of it.
Humans are already part of the system.
Sometimes stewardship means pulling something.
Sometimes it means mowing.
Sometimes it means not mowing.
Sometimes it means removing an invasive tree.
Sometimes it means planting its eventual replacement first.
Sometimes it means looking at a native plant and realizing that because you've brought livestock into its space, you have created a new management problem.
Sometimes it means letting the milkweed grow.
And sometimes a monarch needs uppies
Sometimes you just need community
I keep coming back to that butterfly.
It didn't need me to redesign six acres around one niche.
It needed a landscape containing the plants monarchs depend upon.
And, for approximately ten seconds one afternoon, it needed a slightly taller place to stand.
Then it flew away.
There is something reassuring to me about conservation at that scale.
Not because larger conservation efforts aren't necessary.
They absolutely are.
But because stewardship doesn't always require controlling everything.
Sometimes the contribution is planting.
Sometimes it's removing.
Sometimes it's replacing.
Sometimes it's making space.
Sometimes it's recognizing that the animals I've chosen to bring here change
what responsible management looks like.
Sometimes it's asking whether a patch really needs to be brush hogged before
I erase someone's winter shelter.
And sometimes it's noticing something useful already growing and choosing to leave it the hell alone.
I don't think my goal is to turn six acres into some imagined pristine ecosystem frozen at one arbitrary moment in history.
That ecosystem doesn't exist.
The land has always changed.
Humans have changed it enormously.
My responsibility is to understand as much of that system as I can, reduce the damage caused by my own choices, and make room for as many of my nonhuman neighbors as I reasonably can.
The monarchs can have their milkweed.
The horses can have their safe pasture.
The deer will apparently continue helping themselves regardless of whether I have consulted them.
The hummingbirds will need something else to visit if the mimosas eventually go.
The sassafras is strongly encouraged to reproduce.
And the mimosa seedlings?
We're still going to have to have a conversation.
References
Merck Veterinary Manual. (2024). Range plants of temperate North America. https://www.merckvetmanual.com/toxicology/poisonous-plants/range-plants-of-temperate-north-america
Missouri Botanical Garden. (n.d.). Albizia julibrissin. Plant Finder. https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?lang=en&taxonid=280416
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-a). American bison. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/american-bison
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-b). Elk. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/elk
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-c). Flowering spring trees. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/activities/driving-tours/flowering-spring-trees
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-d). Gray wolf. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/gray-wolf
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-e). Managing unique habitats. https://mdc.mo.gov/your-property/improve-your-property/habitat-management/managing-unique-habitats
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-f). Managing warm-season grass pastures. https://mdc.mo.gov/grazing-wildlife-management/managing-warm-season-grass-pastures
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-g). Native plants for your landscape. https://mdc.mo.gov/trees-plants/native-plants-your-landscape
Missouri Department of Conservation. (n.d.-h). Sassafras. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/sassafras
Missouri Department of Natural Resources. (2016). Geologic time scale. Missouri Geological Survey. https://dnr.mo.gov/document-search/geologic-time-scale-pub0663/pub0663
Missouri Invasive Plant Council. (2023). Mimosa tree. https://moinvasives.org/project/mimosa-tree-2/
National Park Service. (2023). Quaternary Period—2.58 MYA to today. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/quaternary-period.htm
University of Missouri Extension. (2025a). Enhancing white-tailed deer habitats on your property: Early successional vegetation. https://extension.missouri.edu/publications/g9494
University of Missouri Extension. (2025b). Using native warm-season grass, forb and legume mixtures for biomass, livestock forage and wildlife benefits: A case study. https://extension.missouri.edu/publications/g9424
University of Missouri Extension. (2026). Plants poisonous to livestock. https://extension.missouri.edu/publications/g4970
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (2021). The phenomenal monarch migration. https://www.fws.gov/story/phenomenal-monarch-migration
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (n.d.). Monarch (Danaus plexippus). https://www.fws.gov/species/monarch-danaus-plexippus