Those who have seen it are universally effusive about it, wearing out every superlative in Webster’s dictionary, attempting a description.

“Gem.”

“Jewel.”

“The finest ... the showiest ... the most beautiful.”

Frank Oberle, who has traveled the United States photographing and studying grasslands, says there is little like Coyne Prairie. So when the chance came to grab the Dade County remnant, Oberle, who lives near Kirksville, leaned on his contacts at the Missouri Prairie Foundation with a message: Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.

“He told our president he didn’t care what we had to pay for it,” said Justin Johnson, development director for the Missouri Prairie Foundation.

Now the foundation, which has been working to preserve prairies in the region for 40 years, hopes to raise $96,000 to buy Coyne.

“Coyne, when it is in full bloom, is probably the showiest prairie in the state,” Johnson said. “We believe it is the most beautiful 80 acres in the state. It is such a powerfully visual thing.”

“Coyne Prairie is pretty much a pure, pristine prairie,” added Oberle.

He ranks it and other remnants of prairie in Southwest Missouri highest on his list of favorite places.

“The prairies of Southwest Missouri are the rarest of all prairies in North America,” he said. The region’s deep soils, which support so much diversity, which feed such luxuriant displays of color and form, also make them vulnerable to the plow, and are the reason so little of it now exists.

“I somehow think of them as the Garden of Eden. ... I can’t imagine something being better than those prairies.”

Like individual puzzle pieces that remain long after adjoining parts have been lost, Southwest Missouri is dotted with bits and pieces of preserved prairie, tens of thousands of acres in bits ranging from 40- and 80-acre tracts up to a few thousand acres, in places such as Prairie State Park near Liberal.

Reminders of Ireland