Joyce Proper: ‘If we don’t take care of this land, we’ll lose it’

Still in a crib, Joyce Proper pointed to the “pretty bug” on the wall. That pretty bug turned out to be the venomous black widow spider, which her mother promptly destroyed.

“From infancy on up, I just loved nature,” Proper said. “It does my soul good.”

Today, the 73-year-old Lake Villa resident serves as a volunteer steward for Grant Woods Forest Preserve, working hundreds of hours annually to make sure the rare prairie remnant and other important ecosystems there remain pristine.

“She’s incredible,” said Tom Smith, volunteer steward coordinator for the Lake County Forest Preserves. “She puts in at least 500 volunteer hours a year, doing plant monitoring, seed collecting, leading workdays, applying herbicides, whatever needs to be done to keep the preserve from being filled with invasive plants.”

Growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, Proper said she was smitten with praying mantises, lizards and flowers, including the dogwoods that bloomed pure white in springtime.

“We lived out in the boonies. I had wonderful woods and fields to roam around,”  especially at a place called The Flats. A bluff led to the river where she discovered hepatica, a rare wildflower which, to this day, remains her favorite. Indeed, her living room is filled with photos and drawings of this flower that appears in March or April in  some of the county’s forest preserves.

Proper and her husband, George, who has been known to lend a hand in the wilds of Lake County, have lived in Lake Villa since 1966.  She got busy raising a family, but when her children were grown, she returned to that which nurtured her soul. In 1995, she heard the forest preserve district was looking for volunteer stewards at different preserves, where they would monitor plants and ecosystems and organize work days to remove invasive plants such as buckthorn and garlic mustard.

She went to a workday, was handed a pair of loppers and told to cut down some buckthorn. “I just loved it,” she said. “It was good exercise, good camaraderie, and the buckthorn had to be removed.”

Proper  learned that invasive plants such as the non-native buckthorn crowd out the native plants and lowered biodiversity, which makes the ecosystems disintegrate.

She’s taken ecology classes and plant identification classes and walked in woods with land managers and botanists to learn as much as she can about Lake County’s natural areas.

She’s proud of the natural prairie remnant, called Gavin Prairie at Grant Woods. Buckthorn began to creep into this nature prairie remnant, choking out the native plants.

“We went and cut it and the native seed bank was still all below, and after we removed  the buckthorn, all these wonderful plants started appearing, Indian paintbrush, star grass, blue-eyed grass, liastris, toadflax.”

Fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the native prairie remnants remain in Illinois, and Proper knows how special this part of Grant Woods is. “It’s a top priority,” she said. “It’s a dedicated nature preserve,” meaning it will be protected forever – that is, if people like Proper continue to keep buckthorn and other invasive plants at bay.

“She’s our eyes and ears,” along with more than 2,000 other volunteers, said Smith. “If they see something awry, they tell us so we can deal with it.” And if they discover something wonderful, they can help protect it, he added.

Recently, Proper was driving with her husband near Grant Community High School. “We noticed along a roadside, some compass plant growing.” The tall native prairie plant can indicate that other interesting plants are nearby. So, they stopped to look closer and saw purplish blue trumpet-shaped blossoms about 8 inches from the soil. It was fringed gentian, a rare prairie plant.

“We gathered seed and scattered at Grant Woods and now we have thousands of blooming, fringed gentians,” she said. The flower blooms in September, rendering a lovely deep glow to the forest preserve.

Another year, Proper was poking around and discovered 100 marsh marigold plants in an area that was getting choked by glossy buckthorn. “We did lots of clearing and now we have a half acre of marsh marigolds,” she said. These plants bloom in wet areas in early spring.

“I love being outdoors. I love plants. I love nature. It’s my cup of tea,” Proper said.

“If we don’t take care of this land, we’ll lose it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t recreate a native prairie.”

Nature for her is her “psychiatrist,” she said. “I feel so good when I’m out in nature. It’s sad so many kids and grownups don’t take the opportunity to get  out in nature. The forest preserves are out there” for them to enjoy.

She’ll keep spending  hours outdoors working to protect the forest preserves, she said, until “I can’t lift a lopper anymore.”