Author and naturalist Gary Lantz combines forces with photographer Don House to bring alive the natural and human history of the Southern Plains. They focus their energies on one immense ranch in Western Oklahoma that has been worked by the same family for four generations. Sue Selman weaves her memories of growing up on a working cattle ranch into the fabric of Lantz’s seasonal diary of the natural forces that come together to make the Great Plains one of the most powerful and intensely beautiful, yet often misunderstood and under appreciated, regions of the United States.
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Introduction
It was the cottonwoods that drew me out here. I was sitting four hundred miles away in a small cabin surrounded by trees when I received a call from Gary Lantz. He was researching an article for AMERICAN FORESTS magazine that delt with the trouble prairie cottonwoods were having trying to survive in a region whose aquifer was dropping and where invasive alien species were competing with natives for what little was left. He needed a photograph. I remember saying this:
"But, Gary, it's the middle of winter, there are no leaves."
So on a freezing cold December morning, I drove out of the Ozark valley I call home, through red oak, white oak, chinquapin oak, hackberry, sycamore, cedar, maple, ash, seviceberry, elm, sweetgum, redbud, sassafras, beech, paw-paw, hickory, haw, and walnut, and headed west toward the Oklahoma prairie that a neighbor of mine, who had once lived there, described this way:
"If there's a tree and it ain't growing on a river, it ain't there."
I stopped in Norman, just south of Oklahoma City, to pick up Gary, the