by Jackie O’Keefe
We in the plant community have had unusual good fortune the past couple of months. The owner of a sizeable property gave permission for numerous groups to access his land for plant rescues before he began building. He had responded to urging by neighbors – NPSOT members among them – to grant this access. To say that this property had a lot to offer would be an understatement. And the months-long access has allowed us to collect seeds and plants of the Balcones Canyonlands habitat to pass along to BCP preserve areas and replant in native plant gardens across our area. Again, it’s hard to overemphasize the opportunity it has presented to re-home plants from this habitat. In general, we are not talking about rare species, but shrinking habitat focuses our concern.
There are philosophical arguments here about the utility of plant rescues. Just what are we saving and are we trying to put the ocean in a depression in the sand…? Our rescue efforts are grassroots (Native Grasses!!) attempts to maintain the flora of our protected Balcones Canyonlands Preserve and Native Prairies acreages and to broaden the availability of the native species of our region – Blacklands Prairies and Edwards Plateau. This latter aim is accomplished by a couple of mechanisms. One is the quite small inroad of having volunteers introduce the rescued species in their own landscapes and the public landscapes they help support via the conservation organizations where they volunteer. The other is by encouraging the cultivation and sale of the rescue species in our local plant nurseries – another incremental process. Any more on that discussion, I’ll happily leave for another day. Habitat is slipping away in the meantime.
The recent rescue efforts were spearheaded by a CAMN (Capital Area Master Naturalist) member and Austin Balcones Canyonlands people, and enthusiastically joined by Austin NPSOT, Balcones Canyonlands Master Naturalists, Williamson’s Good Water Master Naturalists, and Williamson NPSOT, among others.
