On a crisp winter afternoon, UNC Greensboro’s prairie went up in flames. But that was all part of the plan for Dr. Kevin Wilcox. He organized the controlled burn with the Forest Service on January 9, 2025.

“The two things it takes to restore prairies are time and fire,” he explains.

It’s a point of pride for UNCG that students can get a break from city life without stepping off campus. That’s thanks to Peabody Park, a gift to the community cultivated by faculty, staff, and past students. Located a short walk north of the heart of the campus, it’s a source of inspiration, an outdoor lab, and a place of calm. 

“You feel like you’re in a different world,” says Kevin Siler, interim assistant director for grounds. “It’s not only the students. You can tell the faculty and staff just really enjoy it.”

Siler and Wilcox are both on the Peabody Park Preservation Committee. Wilcox, who recently came to UNCG as an associate professor of biology, is its new chair. With proper care, he says the prairie will become self-sustaining, regulating its flora and fauna with little intervention by humans – except for the burns.

“They need time for more perennial species to take hold and compete with existing species,” says Wilcox. “We burn it about every two years to make sure that happens.” 

Over the River and Through the Woods

Dr. Elizabeth Lacey, now professor emerita of biology, spearheaded Peabody Park’s preservation in the early 2000s. She started with its woods to the east. As UNCG’s development expanded into the park, Facilities’ director asked her if the woods were worth saving. She took that question to students in her Conservation Biology class. 

“They went into the woods and classified and aged the trees,” says Lacey. “They wrote a report for Facilities, and the recommendation was to definitely preserve the woods.”

At their urging, UNCG Chancellor Patricia A. Sullivan implemented the Peabody Park Preservation Committee with Lacey as chair. This committee recruited student volunteers for ivy pulls and began weeding out invasive plant species. When the construction of the chiller plant in McIver Parking Deck demolished the pine trees nearby, they planted new ones.

Groundskeeping staff help students with providing equipment and regular maintenance. That is how Siler joined the committee. 

“I would help with these ivy pulls,” he says. “We were told, ‘You don’t need to get out of the truck; just let the students load it.’ But I like to help, so I started helping, interacting. I met Dr. Lacey and everybody else on the committee. It wasn’t long before it was more than just a job. It was something fun to do.” 

Greener on the Other Side 

In 2011, another Conservation Biology class asked Lacey about building a prairie at UNCG. They scouted out the best location and proposed it to the committee. 

It became a recurrent project for her students. “One semester, we would work on a necessary project for the woods, and in the other semester, we’d have volunteer students work on the prairie and do something to help establish it,” she says.

A common misconception is that prairies are restricted to the Great Plains, but according to Wilcox, they were once abundant in the Southeast. He says Peabody Park Prairie is a peek back in time, which is vital to students, especially those who lived in urban areas all their lives. “It’s a little time machine for the community,” he says. “People can stand next to this area and see what it might have been like before European colonists came over.”

Because UNCG’s prairie is still new, the committee guides the development of a healthy and balanced ecosystem with more wildlife. “A lot of times, in heavily disturbed areas, you’ll have one species, usually a plant species, dominate everything, and it shades all the other species out,” says Wilcox. 

If they see one plant overwhelming the others, they remove those. The other way to manage that is a regular controlled burn.

Did you know?

Peabody Park has one of the only native horsetail populations in Guilford County. Horsetails provide cover for many species and are one of the host plants for weevils.

Read about all the plants found in Peabody Park here.

Playing With Fire 

Lacey says popular opinion is that fire is always bad. “Historically, these prairies were maintained by fire. Then Smokey Bear came in. That campaign, with urbanization and agricultural development, effectively repressed fires. Some species were disappearing as a consequence.” 

Prairies need fire – caused by lightning strikes in the past – to remove excessive vegetation and release nutrients back into the soil. Furthermore, Wilcox says if a land is not naturally cleared of dead and dry brush, it becomes kindling for much more destructive wildfires. 

There’s a science to managing a controlled burn. Siler and groundskeeping first mow the grass down. “I’ll go in there and cut everything off, maybe 12 inches high, and that forms a mat on the ground that we’re able to burn,” he says.

This spring, they will watch which plants grow in that space. As new plants grow, Wilcox says the burn will evolve. “The goal for the future is to increase the abundance of grasses like Little Bluestem,” he says. “Those add fuel in that medium layer so that the fire can get up into the canopy and burn the vegetation completely.”

Their goal, ultimately, is that the prairie will reach a point where it can sustain itself. “If you have a healthy community of plants and insects and birds, right, these should be regulating each other,” says Wilcox, “You can have community that sustains itself without relying on much of our intervention.” 

Sowing Seeds for the Future 

The committee is signing people up for the next ivy pull in the woods on April 11 at 12:30 p.m. It is open to the public, so anyone interested can contact Wilcox at k_wilcox@uncg.edu. 

Siler encourages everyone to consider joining in, even if they’ve never done it before. “I’ve seen the students who haven’t done that kind of outdoor physical work. You hand them the shovel, and they don’t know which end to hold. But at the end of the two hours, they feel like they’ve really accomplished something.”

Lacey is grateful to entrust the future of Peabody Park with Wilcox and with students who care as much as that first Conservation Biology class. “I’m delighted,” she says. “It’s really important to help students understand the importance of nature and natural areas, not only for species preservation, but also for human health.” 

Wilcox agrees. “The students here at UNCG are some of the brightest, most dedicated, engaged students anywhere. Seeing them thinking about these conservation ideas, grappling with difficult questions, taking challenges head-on, makes me excited to think about what they’re going to do in the future.” 

Story by Janet Imrick, University Communications
Photography by Sean Norona, University Communications
Additional photography courtesy of Dr. Elizabeth Lacey and Adobe Stock
Video by Grant Evan Gilliard and David Lee Row, University Communications
Video edited by Michael Ream, University Communications