This large area of the Preserve hosts a variety of activities for teaching, learning, and landscape operations. Once part of the Picnic Point farm, it continues to embrace the spirit of a working landscape—complete with organic vegetable gardens (Eagle Heights Community Gardens and F.H. King Student Farm), agricultural research plots, restored prairie, old orchards, open-fired ceramics kilns, and a storage area that supports landscaping for the entire campus. It even has at its northwestern corner a city pump station that supplies drinking water to Madison residents.
This part of the Preserve is a reminder of how much we all still depend on things that, in the end, still come to us from working lands.
In coming years, these Prairies, Fields, and Gardens will continue to evolve as we witness efforts to restore some portions to prairie, savanna, and forest plant communities that were present long before European American settlement.
