This is the best summary I could come up with:

Until last fall, when PBS screened “The American Buffalo,” a documentary by Ken Burns, I had no idea bison were native to Middle Tennessee, where I have lived for 37 years.

Before the European settlers arrived in North America, the region we know today as the American South was home to seven to 10 million acres of prairie, according to Dwayne Estes, a botanist, professor of biology at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., and executive director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, which works to research, preserve and restore native grasslands across the South.

Until the early 18th century, the South had up to 120 million acres of grasslands — prairies, savannas, wet meadows, barrens, glades, fens, marshes, coastal dunes, balds and riverscour that collectively supported a truly breathtaking array of plants and animals.

We know the European settlers chopped down much of the Eastern hardwood forests to harvest timber, but the ecological devastation wrought by a belief in Manifest Destiny didn’t stop with deforestation.

“Yet the remaining scraps include more grassland plants and animals than the Great Plains and Midwest combined,” notes Janet Marinelli in the publication Yale Environment 360.

At Radnor, the restoration site was blooming with brown-eyed Susans, daisy fleabane, spiderwort and native morning glories, and the frostweed and goldenrod and ironweed were setting buds.

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