The Great Steppe

“The great Eurasian steppe belt, also known as the Ponto-Caspian steppe, is a vast area that once fell within the limits of so-called European Russia but today is divided between Moldova, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and Kazakhstan...the region is marked by a transition zone of forest-steppe; stands of woods interspersed with prairie... Around the time of the first millenium, A.D., the environment that fell between these edges and transitions zones — the steppe proper or the open steppe— was all grassland: a continuous, mostly treeless, dry (though not arid) plain, less elevated and flatter along the seas and more rolling and elevated in the northeast toward the Urals and in the south toward the Caucasus Mountains, but characterized throughout by one-to-five-foot tall drought and frost-resistant grasses and forbs, such as fescues, oat and rye grasses, sedges, sagebrush, feather grass, and wild onion, as well as numerous varieties of seasonal wildflowers — perfumed hyacinths, scarlet tulips, valerians, irses.”