Following Flynn, Finding Floerkea (Why Little Things Matter)
An Interview with Grace Glynn
Editor’s Note: I’ve known Grace Glynn since her graduate school days, when she took a field botany and ecology course that I taught. I knew right from the get-go that she would be a force in the world of botany, ecology, and conservation. Following graduate school, she did exactly what Larry Master recommends—she found the top botanists in the region and accompanied them in the field to learn everything she could about the plants of the region and, more importantly, how to look for them. Field botany can be an underappreciated calling, but that all changed when Grace rediscovered a very rare and inconspicuous plant, and The New York Times decided it was worthy of a story. We’re delighted to have Grace recall here what happened, and to reflect on why such a tiny and unassuming plant matters in the big scheme of things. – Liz Thompson
Liz Thompson (LT): Thank you, Grace, for speaking with us. If you don’t mind, please retell the story of your finding the false mermaid weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) in 2024. Was it something that was on your mental list of things to look for?
Grace Glynn (GG): As you know, we have a lot of historical species—things that haven’t been seen in recent times—and there are some that aren't really on my radar as much, but certain species capture our imaginations. We’re called to certain species, I think, or at least I am, and so was my friend and colleague Matt Charpentier, a consulting botanist from Massachusetts, who was later featured in the New York Times piece on this. He was interested in Floerkea for some reason, probably because it’s historical in Massachusetts as well. And he had brought it to my attention several years ago.
Part of the allure of Floerkea is the seasonality. It’s such an ephemeral species. It has a unique life history, because we don’t have very many winter annuals that germinate so early in the spring.
When you look into the literature, there’s not actually a lot of work on this species, but people say that the seeds germinate beneath the snow, and then are ready to go in the spring.
As an aside, I’ve watched the seeds as the snow melted, and even dug beneath the snow the year after we found it, and it seemed like the seeds germinated right away once the snow melted. They germinated on March 16 last year, which was really early. It’s pretty amazing.
So with this unique life history, there is a limited window for surveys, and that made the species all the more mysterious to me, and maybe, in my mind, increased the likelihood that it had been overlooked, because a lot of botanists just aren’t out that early.
LT: This discovery made the big-time news, so I know the story, but can you remind me how you found the plant?
GG: So I had gone to the LaPlatte River Ledges for years in the spring, hoping to find Floerkea, because that’s where Nellie Flynn collected it in 1916, and I had looked at all the old herbarium labels. Some of them are in Latin, for example the one from Castleton said something like “ad margines rivulorum inundatos” This was just so romantic and alluring. How could you not go and search “ad margines rivulorum inundatos?”
Nellie Flynn, botanist. Photo © Liz Thompson
Nellie Flynn’s Flora of Burlington and Vicinity was published in 1935. Photo © Liz Thompson
Nellie Flynn’s 1916 specimen of Floerkea from Shelburne. Photo courtesy of Pringle Herbarium University of Vermont
J.F., who signed this book as a gift to a friend, was John J. Flynn, for whom Burlington, Vermont’s Flynn Theater is named. A prominent businessman and philanthropist, he entirely funded and published Nellie Flynn’s book, Flora of Burlington and Vicinity (1935), which was printed posthumously to support her scientific legacy. Photo © Liz Thompson
Flynn’s entry on Floerkea at Shelburne. Photo © Liz Thompson
So, I’d walk the LaPlatte River Ledges, and really kind of scoured it for a few years in the spring, and thought, maybe this plant is not here, because I had heard that Floerkea tends to form pretty large carpets, which is the case with a lot of annuals. You’re not just going to find one—it’s not very likely. You’ll find a lot, so I just thought it wasn’t there. Matt Charpentier came up with me one spring. We searched, and we failed.
A lot of reed canary grass had come into the LaPlatte River Ledges. It’s kind of disturbed. It’s pretty close to Shelburne, a populated area, and we thought maybe it had been too altered, or there’s too much thatch from the introduced species for Floerkea to exist, so perhaps it was gone.
What I didn’t really do was to search in new places, where it hadn’t been historically collected. I was just searching the historical stations.
2024 came around, and Molly Parren, who studies wood turtles, was walking on a parcel close to her house. She saw Allium canadense (wild onion), and she thought, “Oh, I think this is that species of Allium that’s rare.” So she took a photograph, and she emailed it to me with a note: “I don’t know if you have this in your database. Let me know if you want more info.”
So I went home and I reopened her photos a second time, and I… it was only then that I noticed this little plant in the corner of the photo that was flowering, so there’s no mistaking it. And I was like, “Oh my god, that’s totally Floerkea!” I zoomed in on it. I was like, “It’s totally Floerkea!”
I was at home, and I screamed when I saw it. As was relayed in the New York Times piece, I called Matt [Charpentier], and I said, “Are you sitting down?” And he said, “You found Floerkea!” He knew immediately. Which is so… you know. It was so cool to be able to share that very niche moment with somebody who understood the weight of it. To me, Matt is such a treasured colleague and friend in that way, because he was able to share in the joy of that. And, what a special thing. Because for most people, they’d be like, “What? What are you talking about? There’s a little weed in the corner of the photo.”
“Are you sitting down?” The New York Times. Photo courtesy of Google
So then I got off the phone with Matt, I called Molly, and I said, “Molly, where did you take this photo? I really need to get out there. Can you take me out there? Will the landowner let us go out?” She replied, “Let me see if I can get permission.”
She got permission from the landowner, so the next day, I drove down to the site, and went out (Molly wasn’t able to be there). I found thousands of plants. It was just, like… Floerkea carpeting this floodplain terrace, this kind of rich, open floodplain terrace. There were big stands of ostrich fern, and if you crouched beneath the ostrich fern, the understory of the ostrich fern was just hundreds and hundreds of false mermaid weed plants, Floerkea.
“There were big stands of ostrich fern…” Photo © Grace Glynn
Grace Glynn surveying false mermaid weed among tall ostrich ferns. Photo courtesy of Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department
“I found thousands of plants.” Photo © Grace Glynn
So I was really struck by the abundance at this site, where it was the dominant species in some areas. And to think this was a species that we thought was totally gone, and meanwhile, it had been thriving in this place, presumably just persisting there.
Some people asked me if it was new to this site. And I think it was probably just there for a long time. Annuals can just be at one site and do perfectly fine for many, many decades.
So, the striking thing about that is that we’d never seen it, and people had been surveying this site for a number of species, but either not at the right time of year, or they just didn’t notice the plants because they’re so small, and in early June, they start to go yellow, and they just kind of flop over and just dissolve into the soil in this kind of spaghetti-like mess.
And then they’re gone. You wouldn’t know. If you went back in July, you wouldn’t know that they had ever been there, except if you got down on your hands and knees and saw these big, chunky fruits sitting on the floodplain that float up, and get eddied around and deposited in these backwaters of the floodplain.
The habitat that they seem to really like is these old oxbows and little dips where they get eddied around and stay in the system.
So then we started to walk up and down that stream and look and try to get a sense of the extent of the population. It was really massive.
LT: Tell me about how this story of finding this tiny plant made it into the news.
GG: I talked to our outreach people, and I said, “you might be interested in this story. Maybe VTDigger will pick it up, or Seven Days?” [Ed: these are Vermont-based news outlets.] And our outreach people said, “Oh, I think this is going to go farther than that.” They pitched it to The New York Times, and I thought, “Really? I don’t know. I don’t think this really makes the cut.” Part of my thinking was that it’s not actually so unusual to refind historical species. People are doing it every year in most states.
But what I didn’t realize, and what the reaction to the New York Times piece showed me, is that a lot of people out there do not know that there are field botanists devoting their life to documenting plant diversity on the ground—walking around the landscape and paying deep attention to what’s going on, and the plants that are here.
And people were really moved by that. I got a note from the writer of the New York Times piece, who said, “I didn’t quite expect this reaction—people were writing to me and saying that they were moved to tears just to know that people are doing this work.”
And that was really moving to me, to know that people do care. And to see rare plants get some airtime, and to see that people are delighted that we’re doing this work. That was really a surprise and a delight for me.
Grace Glynn in her element. Photo courtesy of Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department
I think there’s this idea out there that we’ve found everything.
There was an initial, like, time of discovery when naturalists scoured the landscape, and they collected everything, and they documented it by putting it into herbaria and other public collections. What a great time to be a naturalist and to be a part of that.
But the work is not all done. We are finding so many new things. We are adding to the knowledge of biodiversity all the time, and that was a takeaway for a lot of people, I think. They didn’t realize that you could go out and find a species that hadn’t been seen in a place for over 100 years, or was thought to be locally extinct.
People hear so much bad news all the time, and think that when they hear news about biodiversity, it’s gonna be about loss of species. And so, to see a story about the rediscovery of a species that was thought to be locally extinct, that was really surprising for people. And people want to hear happy stories right now, when there’s so much dismal news.
LT: So, why is it important? This diminutive, small, beautiful species—why does it matter in the big scheme of things?
Floerkea flower. Photo © Grace Glynn
GG: I was asked this a lot by reporters during the media wave for this find. I was struck by the number of people who asked me, “Oh, so what animals use this?” Or “Is it edible for people?”
And I thought to myself, “Yes, it is actually edible, but please don’t eat it here!” I came into these conversations thinking, “Wow, this is our one known population of this species, how cool to just know that it’s there and it has inherent value as part of our biodiversity.” And then when people would ask me about its value to animals or to humans, I thought to myself, “Who cares?” Of course I didn’t say that, but I wondered, “Does it really matter? Does the species only have value if it is known to provide forage for a particular mammal, or if it has utility to humans?”
Botanists, of course, would say no. But that is the lens that society often looks at plants through: “What is the utility of this species?”
LT: Can you say more, then, about what you mean by inherent value? Can you elaborate on that a little bit? (And I completely agree with you!) If somebody asks you, “What do you mean, inherent value?”
GG: I guess to step back to thinking about heritage work. Essentially, our job is to document our biodiversity, and decide what we can do to help them and keep them from disappearing from the landscape.
If that floodplain had just been developed, or dredged, or something, and the habitat had been lost, we would have potentially lost the species from the flora. If we don’t do the inventory work, then we’re not going to know what is there to save.
And then you could say, “Well, why does it matter? What’s the big deal? If we lost this species, would anyone even notice? If somebody goes and walks down this stream next month, are they even gonna notice that Floerkea is there?” Maybe they won’t, and so if it disappeared completely, would that change their experience, or anything about their life?
It might not. But I think when you start losing pieces of the landscape that have been there long before we’ve been around, there is something tangible that’s lost.
It’s hard to talk about.
“A lot of people out there do not know that there are field botanists devoting their life to documenting plant diversity on the ground—walking around the landscape and paying deep attention to what’s going on, and the plants that are here.”
But I think we have an obligation to do everything we can to help our native biodiversity persist, even if there’s no obvious utility to us.
If I think about… going out to that floodplain and Floerkea not being there, to me that is a real loss. There’s a loss of complexity there that is meaningful, that does matter.
Even just being out there for a couple years, we started to notice all these clumps of Floerkea in the upland above where the water ever reaches, almost as if animals were caching the seeds up there. And all these questions started to emerge. This is what happens when you look carefully. It doesn’t take long: As you spend any amount of time looking closely at one piece of the system, things that we don’t know will start to reveal themselves, and I think that points to how much complexity that we don’t fully grasp, and the importance of working to conserve all of those pieces, even if we don’t know exactly what they’re doing.
Floerkea seeds. Photo © Grace Glynn
More clumps of Floerkea. Photo © Grace Glynn
I sometimes wonder, “If you think you have a right to persist here, then why do other species not have that same right?”
LT: That’s really a beautiful way of putting it. And to have seen, that, for example, maybe there is some animal that has moved, and cached the seeds, or, just to see some evidence, as you watch this population, that there are lots of interactions with other species and with the ecosystem. Just knowing those interactions, I think, helps to create or support that idea of humility. We just don’t know.
GG: Yeah, I hadn’t really put that together, but I think that’s true. And it helped to pull animals into it. I think it helped people grasp it a little more. After all, animals are, to many people, just more charismatic.
LT: That is beautiful, and it’s really nice to have you tell the story in retrospect, after all of the media attention. It’s so interesting to understand why people got so excited about it, or were so moved by it. It is really wonderful.
Thank you so much.
GG: You’re welcome. Thanks for asking.
Grace Glynn is the State Botanist with the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife, where she is responsible for mapping, monitoring, and conserving over 500 rare and uncommon plant species across the state. Grace was born and raised in southern Maine and studied the integrity of Maine’s salt marshes as part of her master's work through the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist Program. She lives in Barre, Vermont, where she enjoys growing native sedges and grasses in her miniature sandplain.