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by Pam Owen, Spring 2006 When Bruce Jones starting naturalizing his property at the base of Long Mountain in the 1980s, he was interested in seeing native plants and animals return to what should be their natural home. Years of cattle grazing and logging had changed the land, and little of it was in its natural state. Jones began reintroducing native plants, focusing on wildflowers—his passion—including many species that are now scarce in Virginia. The one thing most of these plants have in common is their beautiful and varied blooms—from the subtle grace of the yellow lady's slipper orchid to the audacious scarlet blooms of the red buckeye, a small tree that is a favorite of hummingbirds and butterflies. Returning farmland to native habitat is a difficult, time-consuming, and costly project, but Jones now can enjoy the blooming of native wildflowers from March through November in his woods, along his ponds, and in his meadows. He says he learned a lot about native wildflowers in the process, but knowing that the Appalachian region has some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, he wondered just how biodiverse his property is and wanted to catalog what is there.
So how do you get professional botanists to take the time to catalog your property? One way, he figured, was to offer them a bounty for every plant species found, with the proceeds to go to the Flora of Virginia Project. A member of the Virginia Native Plant Society, Jones is familiar with the project, which was initiated, according to its website (www.state.va.us/dcr/dnh/vaflora.htm#project), "to prepare and publish a comprehensive manual of Virginia's 3700+ native and naturalized plant taxa, from oaks to cattails, ferns to pines, kudzu to coneflowers." Many other states have similar projects, but most are publicly funded, which is not the case in Virginia. Begun in 1999, volunteers and private funding have fueled the project, although it has wide support from organizations and state agencies in Virginia.
Why bother cataloging all the plants in Virginia? According to the project's website, access to this information "provides a deeper understanding of Virginia's plants and ecosystems, and increases our ability and desire to conserve the Commonwealth's plants and environments they inhabit." The information from the project will be used by professionals, researchers, conservationists, students, and amateur botanists, and anyone else needing a detailed reference on our plants. Such a reference is particularly important as a baseline in making conservation decisions—how do we know what to protect if we don’t know what's here now?
No complete reference on Virginia’s flora currently exists. A 1743 reference, Flora Virginica, by John Clayton, covers only a small portion of the state's flora and is written in a form that's not very useful to modern research. The manual produced through the Flora of Virginia project will have illustrations of every plant catalogued, its distinguishing characteristics, modern nomenclature and cross-referenced plant names, as well as Virginia-specific habitat and distribution. It will also have field-tested "keys," pictures of plant characteristics (such as the shape of the leaves) that help in identification. The associated website will have color photographs and additional natural-history information about the plants.
Twenty botanists and knowledgeable amateurs, working in teams, are now combing Jones' property bit by bit identifying all the plants they see. What Jones didn't realize, he says, was how many different plants he had and how slow the identification process would be. One query of "What’s that down there?," and a whole team will go to their knees scouring a few square feet, finding one plant after another and discussing their identities and taxonomies. With many acres to cover, this thoroughness is good, but Jones says he'll need to adjust how much acreage he hoped to cover on each day of the survey. Jones is learning a lot, he says. During a recent survey, one of the botanists exclaimed "Look at that wonderful sedge!" "I stepped on those," Jones comments. "I didn’t know what they were." Sedges (Cyperaceae), which include thousands of species, are grass like plants with solid stems and little spikes of inconspicuous flowers. Like many low-growing plants that have subtle or no blooms, these are easily overlooked by all but botanists.
Jones has also learned more about the native flowering plants on his property, like the fact that he has three different types of pussy-toes. Some portions of his property were not being farmed when he purchased the land. Here his survey teams are finding several varieties of naturally occurring native plant species. As part of the Biodiversity Task Force's Spring Nature Series, Jones offered to lead wildflower walks around his property on April 30 and May 9. However, when the Task Force publicized the event, the response was so great that Jones added three more walks to try to accommodate everyone who was interested in coming. Those who attended saw trillium, whorled pogonia, lady's slippers, native columbine, red buckeye, Virginia fringe tree, marsh marigold, spring larkspur, shooting star, trailing arbutus, bird’s foot violet, golden club (an aquatic plant), twisted stalk, golden saxifrage, paw-paw, and a host of other Virginia native plants.
A wide variety of native nonflowering plants and native animals, especially birds, were also on view. As well as planting native plants for food and shelter, Jones has provided bird houses and tree snags for many bird species, including wood ducks and bluebirds.
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