Welcome to Jubilee Native. We are all about native tallgrass prairie plants and the native people who subsisted on the native plant ecosystem. One of our primary interests is to offer guided tours out onto the prairie to teach people about the native grasses and wild flowers, the ecology of the tallgrass prairie and the story of the native people, especially the Kansa, who lived here.

We can do this by motor vehicle or on foot - it's up to you. Tours can be anywhere from two hours to a full day or even an overnight campout if you are interested. We are not far from the National Tallgrass Praire Preserve, a part of the national park system.

We also offer a service of planting prairie gardens in residential areas as a beautiful and low maintenance landscape feature. We are especially proud of what we call our "pocket prairies", miniature prairie gardens set in native limestone rocks. All of our plants are grown from locally collected seed, so our genetic base is local. So contact us about your interest in tallgrass prairie and we will do our best to meet your requests.

The ecosystem known as the Tallgrass Prairie covered a huge area of land in the middle of the continental United States. It stretched from Texas in the south to Canada in the north and from Kansas and Nebraska in the west across Iowa, Missouri and Minnesota to Illinois in the east.

The plants consisted of a mix of tall grasses and abundant wildflowers. The main grasses were big bluestem, indian grass, switch grass, little bluestem cordgrass, gama grass and side oats grama. The wildflowers are comprised of many species such as the sunflowers, goldenrod, pale purple coneflower, yellow coneflower, purple prairie clover, gayfeather, blazing star, butterfly milkweed, asters, leadplant, primroses, boneset, sage, and many others.

The prairie was populated with animals and people. The most famous animal was the bison. It is estimated that in 1850 there were in the range of 60 million bison on the prairie. But also there were elk, deer, and antelope. There were also many groups of indigenous people living there such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Wichita, Pawnee, Missouri, Iowa, Omaha, Illinois, and many others. In eastern Kansas, the indigenous people were called the Kansa and the Osage.

When european immigrants arrived in the late 1800s they found a pristine prairie paradise. However, they were farmers and brought with them the sod buster plow. With this device they plowed the prairie and planted crops such as wheat and corn. Over the next half-century 98 per cent of the virgin tallgrass prairie was destroyed and along with it most of the animals and the indigenous peoples. Today only remnants of this once vast prairie ecosystem with its unique animals, plants and peoples remain.

The largest remaining remnant of tallgrass prairie ecosystem is found in eastern Kansas in a region known as the Flint Hills. The Flint Hills are a region of rolling grass-covered hills that had so much flint and limestone rock on or near the soil surface that the farmers could not plow it. It extends in a 50 to 60 mile wide swath from northern Oklahoma on a north-south axis across Kansas nearly to the Nebraska border.

Jubilee Native invites you to join us for a tour of the Kansas Flint Hills to experience the enriching solitude, peace and amazing beauty of the tallgrass prairie. We can take you motoring, walking, hiking or camping out into the prairie. We can teach you names of the grasses and wildflowers. We will guide you into an experience of a now rare ecosystem and help you experience some of its former glory and majesty.