Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 27, 1993 TAG: 9312270039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NARROWS LENGTH: Long
Once near extinction, this plant, found only in Giles County, is making a remarkable comeback after years of research by concerned scientists.
When the plants were discovered in 1927, there were only 50 left.
In 1989, the plant was placed on the federal endangered species list, a space shared with only seven other plants. Despite efforts to save the remaining mallows - constant monitoring and protecting them from deer by enclosing them in chicken-wire cages - by 1991 only four plants remained on the mountain.
They were the last four in the world.
The plant is striking - it grows from 3 to 5 feet tall, has maple-like leaves, and produces up to 20 delicate pink blossoms. It is a herbaceous perennial, meaning it keeps resprouting from the ground with new shoots each year.
Saving the plant has been a group effort for many agencies - the state Department of Conservation and Recreation; scientists from the Nature Conservancy, which owns the land where the mallow grows; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and the U.S. Forest Service, to name a few.
Virginia Tech biologists and graduate students also are concerned for the plant's recovery and have worked with these departments to help save it.
"You lose one thing, then another, then another, and at one point you reach a crisis," said Tom Wieboldt, curator of the Virginia Tech Massey Herbarium. "Where do you draw the line? Those of us who value natural things don't want to lose any of it."
The road to recovery for the Peters Mountain mallow has been a long one. First, scientists had to figure out how to get more of the plants to grow; with four plants remaining, the gene pool had dwindled to practically nothing.
It wasn't the plants they needed to save, they learned, but the dormant seeds. Scattered among the remaining mallows, the seeds are essential to the plants' survival.
Seeds have different types of dormancy, said Jerry Baskin, a biological sciences professor from the University of Kentucky who was involved in the recovery program. "[The Peters Mountain mallow] has a hard seed coat - like the bean family - which means the seed can't germinate because the seed coat is hard, not permeable to water."
Baskin concluded that the Peters Mountain mallow seeds must be "scarified" - sliced open and chemically treated or burned in order to become wet and germinate. Like other Western plant species in the mallow family, the Peters Mountain mallow depends on natural fires for its seeds to germinate. Dousing forest fires - which saves many plants - could have helped wipe out this one.
When Baskin and his wife, Carol, first visited the Giles County site where the Peters Mountain mallow lives, they immediately saw the problem: Nothing was going to grow under all those leaves. The Baskins, who have spent more than 20 years studying seed coats in various plant species, were determined to help save the mallow.
"We sifted through the leaf litter and found a handful of the seeds," said Wieboldt, who was with the couple during a 1987 visit to the site. "That was just the beginning."
That handful of seeds was taken back to Virginia Tech, where a graduate student carefully nicked each seed and placed it in a moist environment.
Within 12 to 24 hours, little green shoots were coming out of the seeds. This was the beginning of the Virginia Tech experimental garden.
"The plants grew and flowered in the same season, and we got a huge seed set from them," Wieboldt said. Nearly 35,000 seeds came from that set and were added to a gene pool that will give the plant the diversity it needs to survive.
Some of the seedlings were placed on Peters Mountain in various experimental situations to see how they would fare. They were harvested when they were only a foot tall.
"We didn't want to leave them, because it would bias the gene pool of seeds," Wieboldt said. "All along, this has been an attempt to work with what's there, with what occurs in nature."
The culminating event for the Peters Mountain mallow took place in May, when scientists heeded the Baskins' advice and burned the area around the remaining plants, hoping to awaken the dormant seeds.
Shortly after the "prescribed burn," more than 100 seedlings sprouted in the area, giving everyone involved new hope for the rare plant.
The Peters Mountain mallow has received much publicity since then. The Washington Post wrote about the results of the spring burns, and a local filmmaker has worked on a documentary he plans to submit to the Public Broadcasting Service. Biology graduate students have used the Peters Mountain mallow as their graduate projects for years.
"There is so much more we want to know," said Duncan Porter, botany professor at Virginia Tech. "There is so much more everyone wants to know."
Even though only three or four mature plants remain in the world, there are thousands of seeds in the seed bank, Wieboldt said. "That's what makes this so exciting, because the potential is still there [for the mallow to fully recover.]"
However, the future of the Peters Mountain mallow remains uncertain.
"At this point, we don't know too much about what the plants need to have good survivorship," Wieboldt said. "It's always rough the first few years when a plant is still small, and we don't know what sort of micro-habitat will give it the best chances of survival.
"I think there's a good chance for the plant to recover, at least back to its 1927 status, but it will have to be closely managed for a while," Baskin said. "Man has gotten our environment into this shape. Now we must fix it."
by CNB