“The Indians called this the Burnt River District,” says Aunita Erskine as she tromps across the Shanghai Prairie. According to local legend–which, Erskine cheerfully stresses, is just a legend–it’s called “Shanghai” because Chinese workers camped here long ago while working on the railroad track that borders the thirty-five-acre lowland just north of St. Joseph Mercy Hospital.

Native Americans burned prairies to keep the land open and provide forage for the animals they hunted, and they did it for so long that entire ecosystems evolved to depend on fire. Even after the federal government bought the land and the Potawatomi moved west, cinders from passing trains set fires that kept the area open and preserved the prairie plants that lived here. But when diesel engines replaced steam, invasive shrubs and trees began to move in, smothering the native plants. For a prairie, Erskine says, “that’s like the kiss of death.”

Erskine, fifty-two, is a hospital administrator by profession–at the U-M, not St. Joe’s–but the U-M English grad got hooked on native plants a dozen years ago while working on a master gardener project. When she was introduced to the Shanghai Prairie a few years later, she fell in love. “It is one of the most botanically diverse areas I have ever seen,” she gushes. “It has everything any student of the prairie could hope for.”

Though U-M professor and prairie advocate Bob Grese had earlier done some work to remove invasive plants, by the late 1990s buckthorn and honeysuckle were again crowding out the native grasses and wildflowers. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re losing the prairie,'” Erskine recalls. “If I didn’t do something here, in ten years half of this will be gone.”

With the blessing of St. Joe’s, Erskine became the prairie’s self-appointed, unpaid guardian. She doesn’t have permission or the budget for burning, so several times a year, she sprays herself with repellant to ward off the insects, then leads a dozen or so volunteers down the steep, poison ivy-lined footpath to the prairie. Doing their best imitation of a prairie fire, the volunteers cut down shrubs with hand tools, then dab the stumps with weed killer.

“I’m glad to get rid of some of that,” says Erskine, pointing out a clump of small buckthorn stumps almost lost amid the growing grasses. Over by the train tracks, a small pine tree stands dead. “The only good pine tree in a prairie is a dead pine tree,” Erskine declares. “Bob [Grese] girdled it, and we finished it off.”

Then she spots a small buckthorn growing nearby. “Here’s one we missed,” she scowls. “Your days are numbered, buddy!”

Shanghai Prairie is not virgin land–it was used for grazing, and long ago gravel miners dug trenches across it. But it was never farmed, so many prairie plants survived here that disappeared elsewhere, including two endangered species–white bottle gentian and what Erskine calls “a little teeny panic grass.” But, she stresses, “it’s not really the species, it’s the collection” that makes the Shanghai special. A survey found 268 species of plants growing here, more than 80 percent of them native.

Fiercely protective of the natives, Erskine sometimes makes a mock gun with her thumb and forefinger and “shoots” invasives–“ka-pow!”” In contrast, she gently brushes a hand over some of the prairie natives at her feet: “here’s heath aster, early goldenrod, an anemone of some sort–I dunno, some fuzzy thing!–a strawberry. Everything’s here that should be here.” A high water table moistens the trenches left by the gravel miners, so species typical of wet and dry prairies thrive within a few feet of one another. She has a visitor feel the fuzzy, oval leaf of a plant called prairie dock–even under a hot sun, evaporation makes it cool to the touch.

People who love prairies are a special breed. In her day job, Erskine says, “I help identify children who have chronic or serious illnesses that are eligible for a [state] program called Children’s Special Health Care Services–it used to be the Crippled Children’s Fund.” Recently, a parent with whom she was discussing the program asked about the photo of a prairie plant on her wall. He turned out to be a native plant specialist himself, so they talked prairies for a while–a welcome relief, he told her, from thinking about his child’s medical problems.

Erskine met her husband, Dean, through family members who worked at the U-M Hospital (“Everyone at the hospital is married to a relative of someone who works in the hospital,” she says.) Married for fifteen years, they have no children of their own, but Dean, radio host Lucy Ann Lance’s producer and business partner, has a grown son, Kyle, from a prior marriage.

Dean’s not part of the Shanghai clan–“a workday for Aunita is a pizza night for Dean,” he says–but he hasn’t entirely escaped the prairie’s pull. “My husband worked on the first workday,” Erskine chortles. “I told him we were going out for ice cream.”

Erskine’s restoration efforts are supported by a grant from the Michigan Botanical Club–“I got under $1,000, but it jump-started me buying supplies.” She’s collaborating with people restoring other “prairie remnants” along the railroad tracks, which are owned by Norfolk & Southern. They hope to persuade the railroad to stop using herbicides on a twenty-mile stretch of its line through the county.

As for Shanghai Prairie, she’s determined to restore the open landscape of the Burnt River District. Her ultimate dream is to see it protected by a private conservancy that can maintain and burn it, assuming a way can be found that won’t trouble the nearby hospital. But for now, she’ll keep pushing back the woody invaders one shrub at a time.

“Those are prairie grasses back in there,” she says, pointing into a patch of invasive locust trees that she has in her sights. “I’m coming!”