(p. A10) The whimsical image fit when the state of Vermont announced last month that a plant thought to be locally extinct — false mermaid-weed — had been found through a chain of events that seemed stolen from a fairy tale.
It began with a sharp-eyed turtle biologist for the state, Molly Parren. She had been out surveying the habitat of wood turtles in rural Addison County on May 7 [2024] when she spotted some wild meadow garlic, which is extremely rare, beside a stream. Ms. Parren snapped a photo and sent it to her colleague, Grace Glynn, Vermont’s state botanist.
But when Ms. Glynn opened the photo, another plant, visible in the foreground, seized her attention. She knew at once what it was: Floerkea proserpinacoides, or false mermaid-weed, an herb that had not been documented in Vermont for more than a century, and one that Ms. Glynn had sought in vain for years.
. . .
The day after the false mermaid-weed was spotted, Ms. Glynn rushed to the rural site to confirm its presence in person. She found a dense carpet — “so many plants, it was hard to imagine how they had been overlooked,” she said.
And yet her disbelief was familiar. “It happens a lot, people saying, ‘We couldn’t have missed that,’” she said. “But we do, and we’re humbled over and over — I love that.”
Far from an anomaly, rediscoveries of plants thought to be extinct are a relatively regular feature of field botany.
. . .
Tricky as it is to find elusive species, it is harder to pinpoint why they thrive or dwindle, and how such shifts might be related to a changing climate. Flooding is cited as one possible factor in the disappearance of false mermaid-weed from Vermont. And yet flooding in the state last summer may have helped it flourish by the stream where it was found, Ms. Glynn said, by depositing sediment and creating a more hospitable habitat.
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 11, 2024, and has the title “By a Stream in Vermont, a Glimpse of a Plant Last Seen a Century Ago.”)