Saving the Wild South by Georgann Eubanks;

Author:Georgann Eubanks;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tracy Cook, curator of horticulture at the Huntsville Botanical Garden, picks up a strand of Morefield’s leather flower vine (Clematis morefieldii) growing after the plant’s blooming season along the garden’s Matthews Nature Trail. Photo by Georgann Eubanks.

Tracy and I made our way over to a second group of the Morefield’s leather flowers, in a sunnier location beside a running creek. These plants were clearly happier than the ones in shade. I hated that I’d missed the blooming time.

We got back on the cart to ride to the nonpublic section of the garden. Tracy took me into a greenhouse where seedlings of the leather flower were growing. Huntsville Botanical Garden is partnering with ABG on native plant cultivation and conservation, and Morefield’s leather flower is a focal point here.

I asked Tracy about the lack of support and appreciation these days for horticulture as a field of study, noting how a number of once-dynamic horticulture programs at colleges and universities in the South and elsewhere had been folded into other academic departments or eliminated owing to underenrollment, decreasing state resources, and faculty retirements.

She shook her head. “Horticulture is still seen as stoop labor,” she said. “It’s not always perceived as science, but it is science. It’s applied science. It’s boots on the ground. Researchers who spend their days in a lab with tissue fragments of a plant often have to depend on us to know enough to recognize when something is going wrong with the whole plant.”

For her part, Tracy has continued following the literature about the ongoing threats to Clematis morefieldii in the wild. Besides being hurt by industrial and residential development, she told me, the plant is plagued by destructive deer, mealybugs, and mice.

“Rodents find the seeds very tasty,” Tracy said, “and the plant will abort flowers if the shade gets too deep where they are growing.” She noted that there are actually four known kinds of leather flowers in Alabama, but they don’t tend to cross-pollinate, because their bloom periods don’t overlap. What delineates one from another, she said, is how pollinators interact with them: four different types of bees are involved. “But I’m not a bug gal,” Tracy said, grinning. “Pollinators definitely affect leather-flower livelihood, and pollinators get thrown off by climate change, including the extremes of drought and rain that we’ve experienced lately,” she said.

So many challenges from so many factors. We were still talking about preserving biodiversity in the South when Tracy got me back to my car in the parking lot. “We have to conserve habitats, not just the species,” she said finally. “We don’t know where the next cure for cancer is coming from. The world’s wealth is really in our plants.”

I thanked her for her time, and she promised to send me her master’s thesis and some pictures of the Morefield’s leather flower from when they were blooming in the garden.

My next stop was a little more than an hour northeast of Huntsville. I’d arranged for a visit to the Sewanee Herbarium, at the University of the South in southeastern Tennessee.

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