A Snowy Wild-Goose Chase
What the suburbs swallowed whole.
Deep in south Florida’s swamps lurk the remnants of the past, tell-tale signs of the natural history of the state before the loggers, the plume hunters, and the orchid thieves plundered the natural resources of the region. If you trek far enough into areas like Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park or Big Cypress National Preserve, and even Everglades National Park, you’ll come face to face with rare plants endemic to these strand swamps. If you are lucky you’ll find long-lost species thought to have been extirpated decades ago. Sometimes you find them by accident.
In 2009 my husband Chris stumbled across Cyclopogon elatus, a rare orchid growing on a log in Fakahatchee, when he was out looking for orchids and other rare plants with fellow naturalists and botanists. It had been thought to have been extirpated, at least from several of the previous counties it had been seen in, and those sightings had happened sporadically in 1980, 1961, and further back to 1881. When rare plants become even rarer due to development, hydrology changes, or even climate change, it becomes a significant event to even try to track them down, to determine if they even still exist in some previously known location or in a habitat similar to where it has been found before. Finding this orchid was part luck, part knowledge. You go out into Fakahatchee searching for plants you’ve seen before, to track their health and population changes but also to search out plants seen 70 years ago but not seen since. They could still exist for decades, high up on a twig of a pop ash or pond apple and then a hurricane or summer thunderstorm comes through and trashes the canopy and now your target plant is submerged in the swamp. The last vestige of that population gone forever. Or it happens to thrive in some pine rockland in Miami-Dade county and now they want to build a Walmart on it.
When we lived in Florida, and to some extent when we moved back to Texas before we had our son, we loved looking for rare plants, primarily orchids and bromeliads, in the swamps of south Florida. Many of the locations were places few people venture into, and even fewer leave the old logging tram roads or buggy trails to hike off trail and explore. Yes, there are snakes and alligators. But in the summer, the swamp is cooling and surprisingly the mosquitoes are generally few. In recent years, the hunt for rare plants has taken a back seat to raising a kid and staying on trail, though we do have our moments and now that our son is older it’s easier to do some bushwhacking when we’re out exploring. And surprisingly, you can still find oddities near trails because so many people aren’t looking for these uncommon species, particularly grasses and sedges.
Though, exploring is harder in many aspects because Texas is such a huge state and our public:private land is abysmal. In Florida it was easy to find somewhere to explore within 15-30 minutes of your house; in most regions of Texas that becomes a lot harder. So, you drive. Which means a long day of driving to and from said location or deciding to get a hotel room, or if camping is available and seasonally appropriate, doing that. It’s much harder to know a place deeply in Texas unless you live very nearby.
In 2010, Deer Park Prairie was “discovered” by Texas naturalists looking to find remnant coastal prairie habitat in the Houston region. After getting permission to access the property from the landowner, they found a trove of biodiversity residing within the 50-acre tract. A tiny snapshot of what used to exist where homes and refineries now sit. Eventually conservation groups got involved, trying to make an offer to purchase the property. At the same time, developers were circling with offers of their own. It took a lot of desperate, last minute fundraising but in 2013 the required $4 million the landowner was requesting was raised and the Bayou Land Conservancy was able to purchase the property and later donate it to the Native Prairies Association of Texas, with a conservation easement placed on the property. It’s now the Lawther-Deer Park Prairie and open to the public only during tours or special work days.
I’ve never had the chance to get to the prairie to see it for myself but it is one of the few places in Texas where you can still see snowy orchids, Platanthera nivea. I’ve seen the orchids at the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve in east Texas, one of the well-known sites, and at a site in western Louisiana. But it wasn’t until recently that I started thinking to myself that there had to have historically been more sites with the orchids in the Houston region other than the Lawther-Deer Park Prairie. I took to looking through herbarium records and sure enough, there were historic collections from several locations in the Houston area. And one was in an area I go to on a semi-regular basis: not far from a Mexican restaurant we like to eat at. What’s also in this area? A Lowe’s, Wal-Mart, Chick-fil-A, Kroger, Sonic, churches, and lots of homes. A mile north is the Grand Parkway. Hello suburbs!
But I held out hope. I pinpointed two areas that I thought could possibly still hold a remnant prairie and also looked like the type of wetland habitat the species could reside in. I’d even recently driven that way and looked in ditches as we drove, and tried to peer into the scraps of land still undeveloped, holding out hope maybe one or two lingered somewhere. Chris and I made an investigation into these two locations last Saturday evening, pairing it with dinner out.
The first site was a complete dud. A couple weeks ago I had actually looked at an area between this property and the Wal-Mart and found a wetland in a pipeline easement with Rudbeckia maxima and some other interesting herbaceous plants and thought the habitat would have been right if it hadn’t been so overgrown. At that time I wasn’t dressed for descending down a Wal-Mart parking lot slope into an area that usually collects trash from grocery shoppers to go scouting plants, so I viewed from above as best as I could. The actual site on the other side of the easement I’d pinpointed had been converted to upland long ago and the wetland features I was seeing on aerial imagery were not wetland features in-situ. No luck on that site.
Chris drove us around to the other site, which was more definitively a wetland on the aerial, one of the few pastures still in existence in this area. I could see it as we approached from a road to the north and as we made our way to the south part I saw that while it was a wetland and definitely habitat that might work, there were not snowy orchids, nor any of the other wet prairie type species that would be growing in conjunction with them. Ok, 0/2.
In 1944 these orchids would have thrived in the prairies of northern Harris county if they could evade being eaten down by cattle running through pastures up there. Who knows how many grew in the wet prairies in the region, as documentation is scant for this particular area.
By the mid-80s, the first collections in this area were made of the orchids and you can already see by the 90s development was sprawling out to this area.
By 2012, I’m sure the orchids were already plowed under and converted to concrete, though you can see pockets were possibly they may have remained if hydrology hadn’t been altered.
And by this year, things are so packed in you can’t imagine what it even looked like there 80 years ago when you drive down the roads.
Does the snowy orchid exist in this particular site any longer? Probably not. I see a few other spots I’d love to check out some day but once you start diverting water into ditches and stormwater ponds, and building up roads and pouring concrete, it makes it almost impossible for a species such as this to even think about thriving, let alone simply existing here.
Driving around and looking at all of the non-native landscaping and generic shrubs, it’s depressing to think about what habitat was lost in the span of 80 years. Even the last 30 years. I think it’s important to note that these orchids are not a protected species and even if they were, if they exist on private property they are offered no protection under the law anyway. And so while they are rare and beautiful, a developer can come in and scrape the land away, dump in fill, and pour concrete and build a Lowe’s. Goodbye snowy orchids, hello rows of exotic, greenhouse grown plants.
Ad nauseum.
I have another area to check out, also nearby, that will just require me to drive around a lot of backroads that are quickly filling up with more sprawl developments.
Houston bloats.
Some day we’ll require a fourth loop highway and wonder how we made do with three. I jest, but not really.
It is a wonder that naturalists even pinpointed the Lawther-Deer Park Prairie to begin with. If they’d not be on the case to find these increasingly rare and endangered prairies, there would probably be homes and a few strip malls on it by now. You have to at least try to look. Because you don’t know what you might find.
Many people are out hiking and enjoying nature but few are walking shallow creeks or checking out oddball formations on aerial imagery and trekking out to see what might even be there. But that’s how species range expansions, and county and state records happen for plants. You can’t know what’s out there unless you try to see for yourself. And of course, Texas’ immense private property makes this difficult. We often drive by tracts of land and just wonder what the owner does and doesn’t even know exists on their own property. Most of the time they don’t even care that much so long as they can run cattle and get an ag exemption.
So, I’m still on my quest to find snowy orchids in Harris county in a “new” location. I only have a few more weeks to try this year before any that may exist will go to seed. And then I’ll have to look again next June.
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Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
Misti, I am so glad you’re out there, rambling about in the underbrush, trying to keep our precious natural heritage alive.
“They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” — Joni Mitchell.
Love this essay. Last year, I found a small patch of orchids (not rare) growing around our brush pile. Nodding Ladies Tresses. I hope they come back.