In the 2024 season we had the opportunity to visit several new project sites in the Catskills. One site stood out, however, when it came to the extent of preserved habitat and botanical diversity.
While we always love creating new native plant communities where invasive species used to be, getting a chance to preserve extant biodiversity can be even more satisfying. This site in the northern Catskills of New York State boasted a wide range of rarely encountered species for us and was one of the highlights of the year.
Like most old farms in rural areas, it boasted fields dominated by non-native cool-season grasses, but also held secret refugia, one on a steep wooded slope below craggy outcrops and the other in and around a perched mountain top wetland.
We had an opportunity to visit this site twice, once on an April day when the overnight lows went below 20 degrees and the other in early July.
On the first visit we encountered a sea of woodland ephemerals likely protected from deer over browse by virtue of being on a steep rocky slope. The slope faced east, giving the plants full access to the sun and soils were kept moist by a seemingly ever flowing seep out of the base of the high outcrops above. Among the Sugar Maple leaf litter, we found masses of Squirrel Corn (Dicentra canadesis) and Dutchman’s Breeches (D. cucullaria), Red Trillium (Trillium erectum), Carolina Spring Beauty (Claytonia caroliniana), Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), Early Blue Cohosh (Caulophyllum giganteum), Ramps (Allium tricoccum), and many more.
It may have been the best ephemeral display this author has seen on private lands. Given that we’re often faced with forest understories denuded of ephemeral growth by human driven deer-overpopulation, invasive species competition, historic and modern disturbance, etc., it was a treat to see a patch of diverse, healthy understory still remnant.
On a second visit in July we explored a perched wetland and its surrounding woods at the top of the property and again found a host of exciting species. Carpeting the understory were Dewdrops (Rubus dalibarda) and Dwarf Raspberry (Rubus pubescens), herbaceous, thornless members of the Blackberry and Raspberry genus and dwellers of cool moist forests and bogs.
Alongside these were Pale Green and Ragged Fringed Orchids (Platanthera flava and P. ciliata), Pale St. Johns-wort (Hypericum ellipticum), Small Sundrops (Oenothera perennis), Golden Ragwort (Packera aurea), Slender Wedgescale (Sphenopholis intermedia), and thickets of Wild Raisin (Viburnum nudum var. cassinoides), to name a few.
As lovers of native plants, we were overjoyed to spend time with this great diversity of species, but even more so we were struck by a simple fact. Many of the species we encountered so prevalently in the wild on this site are relatively rare across the region and entirely absent from the nursery trade. If they were to be eradicated, they could neither easily recolonize the site nor be replanted.
Sites like this drive home the great and often overlooked importance of protecting in situ diversity as the best way to ensure ecosystem balance and the preservation of our extant native diversity, lest it be lost for good.