Fire might not be the first thing that you think of when it comes to managing a natural area, like a meadow, for birds and other wildlife. But that’s exactly how the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden decided to treat its Dogwood Meadow for an invasive species this October. It’s called a prescribed fire or a controlled burn.
Writer and author Andrew Moore wrote about the Botanic Garden’s plan and attended the event that took months to plan. He spoke with The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple about the prescribed fire, a first in Allegheny County.
LISTEN to the conversation
[This interview has been edited for clarity.]
Kara Holsopple: Why did the Botanic Garden want to burn its Dogwood Meadow?
Andrew Moore: To answer that question, let me start by saying that the Dogwood Meadow is an old hay field that’s managed as a meadow. When the Botanic Garden took over the site in 1998, they decided they liked having this open field of wildflowers. It’s full of goldenrods and asters. They liked having this field because it attracted butterflies and bees and bluebirds. It’s also a nice backdrop for wedding photos.
So for the past 20 years, they’ve kept the meadow open by mowing it every three years. But a few years ago, they discovered an invasive plant, Lespedeza cuneata, in the garden. And in 2023, it was found in the Dogwood Meadow. It’s a real problem because it muscles out less assertive native plants, and if it’s not controlled, it can quickly form a monoculture. Purdue University has called it the “plague on the prairie.” The garden’s management of mowing every few years would continue to keep the trees at bay, but it would do nothing to stop the spread of Lespedeza cuneata.
Pittsburgh Botanic Garden to use prescribed fire in its meadow, a first for Allegheny County
Kara Holsopple: So, how did they come up with the idea of fire?
Andrew Moore: Last year, an intern, Alexis Balog, looked into the problem, and she learned that prescribed fire was an option for Lespedeza. She had studied plant biology at Northwestern University in Chicago, and in Illinois, prescribed fire is commonly used to manage the state’s tall grass prairies. So she suggested the garden consider a burn.
Kara Holsopple: What is a controlled burn?
Andrew Moore: A controlled burn, more commonly known these days as a prescribed fire, is the deliberate use of fire to manage habitat. It’s a common tool elsewhere in the country, but it’s been rare in Pennsylvania for more than 100 years. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that historically, many parts of Pennsylvania were actually burning quite frequently. There were natural wildfires all throughout the state, and fire was actually put on the land deliberately by Indigenous people.
The resurrection of this disturbance regime, fire, is actually something that has excited Allegheny County’s natural resource community. Many of these professionals were on hand to witness the prescribed fire at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. One I spoke with is Burlton Griffith, a board-certified master arborist and a master naturalist. He also has a strong interest in the history of our local ecosystems.
Burlton Griffith: First Peoples used fire a lot to manage pests on food crops and also to manage the land for game and potentially hunting of the elk that were super abundant here. Elk eat grass, right? Grass and fire get along really well and a good way to keep things open for grassland is to use fire to suppress certain species of trees.
Andrew Moore: Griffith and others hope this is just the first of many projects to come that utilize prescribed fire.
Kara Holsopple: It sounds like putting fire back on the ground here was a really big deal.
Andrew Moore: Absolutely. And, again, prescribed fire hasn’t been used much anywhere in Pennsylvania until relatively recently. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Prescribed Burning Practices Act, which legally protected those who implement prescribed fire when they follow, of course, professional standards.
Over the past 15 years, prescribed fire has dramatically increased in Pennsylvania, and it’s actually the Pennsylvania Game Commission that conducts the overwhelming majority of prescribed fires in the state. The Game Commission is routinely burning more than 11,000 acres a year now. But the Game Commission told me that they’d never conducted a prescribed fire in Allegheny County. And no one I talked to could cite the most recent controlled burn in the county. So the fact that the garden was doing this was absolutely groundbreaking.
The resurrection of this disturbance regime, fire, is actually something that has excited Allegheny County’s natural resource community.
Ahead of the burn, I spoke to Caitlin McCalla, who is vice president of stewardship at Allegheny Land Trust. McCalla is responsible for managing invasive species on about 1,500 acres of land trust properties. She told me that there have been restoration projects where she would have preferred to use prescribed fire, but without that option, she had to utilize herbicides. Because of the perceived barriers to implementing a prescribed fire in Allegheny County, she just completely ruled it out as an option for management.
Kara Holsopple: The burn itself was put off many times because conditions had to be just right. Tell me a little bit about that.
Andrew Moore: First of all, let’s not lose sight of the fact that fire is, in fact, inherently dangerous and can be risky. The professionals who do this work are focused on safety all the time and minimizing risk, but it’s important to note that this is no easy task and that it takes a lot of training and experience to conduct one of these burns. And garden staff are not trained to do a prescribed fire. So they had to look for a professional land management group, and they hired NatureWorks LLC, which is a company headquartered in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But more than anything, to do a prescribed fire, the weather has to be just right, or else the fire won’t carry and you won’t get the effects you want.
Kara Holsopple: You were there at the Botanic Garden on October 15 when the burn finally happened. Set the scene for us.
Andrew Moore: So the garden had organized something they called a Learn and Burn. A dozen or so community members, natural resources personnel, plus garden staff gathered at the welcome center, and there was a celebratory feeling in the air.
One of the first people I saw that morning was Alexis Balog, whose idea it was to bring fire to the garden in the first place.
Alexis Balog: I’m so excited and mostly relieved that it’s finally happening.
Andrew Moore: We all hiked down to the Exhibit Garden, which is actually a reclaimed surface mine. The Dogwood Meadow was going to be burned later in the day. And as the Nature Works crew conducted their pre-burn safety talk, it actually drizzled a little bit. But it cleared up in less than a minute. After the safety meeting, Nature Works set a test fire and then set about doing the big fire.
They were equipped with a pair of utility vehicles, with water pumps, and the fire was actually ignited by drip torches, which are fuel canisters with a flame on one end that literally drips fire down into the grasses. They started on the east edge of the meadow, burning a black line towards the north slope.
Kara Holsopple: So why do they burn the lines, so the fire is contained within those lines?
Andrew Moore: Yes, they burn a back line so that the fire doesn’t jump that line. Part of the prescribed fire protocol is setting the parameters and boundaries of the fire. Ideally, the fire would have begun to spread throughout the Exhibit Garden meadow, but the temperature had dropped more than they expected overnight, and there was a lot of dew in the field. James Remuzzi is the founder and CEO of NatureWorks, and he was the burn boss for this fire.
James Remuzzi: It’s not doing exactly what we want. The dew point is really kind of hurting us right now in terms of the fuel moisture. It’s doing okay, but we’d like to see better fire effects. So we may just have to wait.
Andrew Moore: They didn’t have to wait for long. As the fire rounded the slope, the sun had burned off a fair amount of dew, and the fire reached some areas of dry fuels, and they finally got a medium-intensity fire to carry.
James Remuzzi: The sun’s staying out consistently, and that north wind is starting to push as the afternoon builds. So this is a little bit more of what we expected and predicted. So it’s just an exercise in patience.
Andrew Moore: In addition to the Lespedeza, the fire is likely to set back some of the berry thickets, sycamores, and other woody plants that would otherwise transform the site into a woodland. I checked in with Remuzzi as the Exhibit Garden fire came to a close and he said this mosaic of burned and unburned sections is just what natural fire looks like. In fact, these mosaics allow for areas of refuge for small mammals or for insects or other things that otherwise aren’t able to get out of the fire.
Kara Holsopple: Right, the little living things in the meadow.
Andrew Moore: That’s right. So, prescribed fire in a lot of cases is just this low intensity, creeping fire. After the exhibit fire was closed, the crew had about two minutes to eat some lunch, and then they were off to the Dogwood Meadow. There wasn’t a lot of time to spare because they needed to finish all of their work while the sun was still up.
Kara Holsopple: So the fire just burns itself out. What did the fields look like afterwards?
Andrew Moore: From a distance, it didn’t look all that different. Because it was a relatively early fall burn, there was still a lot of green in the fields and green stuff like goldenrod doesn’t really want to burn. But if you got down on your knees, you’d see that the thatch layer, the dead stuff on top of the soil, was all ash. The fire in the Dogwood Meadow was a cooler fire than they had expected, but in the areas where the Lespedeza had been treated, those dead stalks actually burned really hot, and in those areas, the surface vegetation appeared to have been burned off completely. There were completely bare patches in the dogwood meadow.
Kara Holsopple: What is the Botanic Garden expecting to happen in the coming months?
Andrew Moore: In the coming months, the ash will break down into the soil. In the spring, there will be a lot more sunlight returning to the soil, which opens opportunities for more and diverse species to germinate. Sue Myers, who is the horticulture and conservation director at the garden, says they’ll be monitoring both sites where the Lespedeza occurs for the foreseeable future. And they’re going to have to stay vigilant.
The more significant breakthrough, from my perspective, is the return of fire and its use as a management tool in Allegheny County. As for the Lespedeza, you’d like to have a management prescription that occurs once and works, but it just doesn’t always work that way.
Sue Myers: There’s no winning this game. It’s just adapting and adapting and adapting as you go forward and changing your goals if you need to. We are, in one way, trying to subdue nature, but in a way we’re also trying to work with nature. We recognize that there are natural processes going on here and that we can intervene, if you will, rather than just trying to take over and dominate. That’s the way we are approaching it.
Andrew Moore: One of the things that this story emphasized to me was that land management and conservation in general is work that never ends.
Andrew Moore is the author of “Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit,” a James Beard Foundation Award nominee in Writing & Literature. His next book, “The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness,” will be published by Mariner Books next summer.
10/27/25: A correction was made on the spelling of James Remuzzi’s name.
