No plant should have to end this way.
North America’s various beach plums bear purple-blue, cherry-sized fruits that make for a beloved New England jelly. The small trees’ tolerance for salty, wind-blasted shores impresses biologists. But even a beach plum has limits.
One of the plum’s distinctive forms, named in 1897 for physician Charles B. Graves who called attention to the plant, may have gone extinct in the wild in large part because people like a little privacy when they need a bathroom break on the beach.
All of the known Graves’ beach plums grew in a cluster on a ridge overlooking the Connecticut shore in Groton. It “was the only shade on the beach,” says botanist Wesley Knapp, who studies extinctions with the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program in Raleigh. Beachgoers seeking discreet foliage gravitated to Prunus maritima var. gravesii, relentlessly delivering excess nitrogen. “I can’t think of a worse way … to go extinct,” Knapp says.
He has now determined that Graves’ beach plum and four other kinds of U.S. plants that have been wiped out in the wild still grow in at least one garden somewhere. Ongoing quests might reveal two more. Dozens of others, however, are gone.
Focusing on U.S. and Canadian green heritage, Knapp and colleagues declared August 28 in Conservation Biology that 58 plants are extinct in the wild, with no miracle rescues in gardens. That totals 65 known losses from the wild, about 1.4 per decade, since Europeans started settling in the mid-1500s.
“We are positive it is a gross underestimate,” Knapp cautions. The team’s methods were conservative: going plant name by name and declaring a loss of a full species or a distinctive lineage within a species only if detailed information existed.
Knapp, however, doesn’t come across as a gloomy guy. He calls his motivational spiel about conserving native plants “Tales from the Crypt,” and he chats colorfully about plants and the people who love them. Many of his colleagues do too. The possibility of snatching a flower or fern from the jaws of extinction has fired up a community of enthusiasts trying to document and protect what’s left of the rarest of native vegetation. The challenge is immense, but sometimes there are wins. It’s good practice in the art of hope.
