Virginia Gazette News |

A plant in York County is on the brink of extinction. Scientists are trying to save it.

YORK — If all goes according to plan, Zach Bradford will soon be fostering a growing family in York County.

Bradford is a regional supervisor with the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation‘s Natural Heritage Program, and the progeny he and his team hope to rear, with the help of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, is an extremely rare native shrub called pondspice — a species that faces a genuine threat of extinction.

The shrub can grow more than 10 feet high and produces clusters of small, yellow flowers and red berries that resemble those of the more common spicebush. Pondspice is dioecious, meaning that individual plants have either male or female flowers, and both are needed for successful pollination, which eventually results in berries and seeds. The plant’s ideal environment is wetlands that are seasonally flooded — habitats that have been frequently destroyed by development through the centuries.

Botanists occasionally documented pondspice in Virginia in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the plant disappeared from the scientific record for more than a century and a half. In 1995, three individual pondspice plants were discovered in York County’s Grafton Ponds Natural Area Preserve — a rare example of a wetland known as a coastal plain pond complex — owned by Newport News Waterworks and stewarded by the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Of the three plants discovered in York County, two were female and one male. The male plant died after that discovery, leaving its partners no opportunity to have their flowers pollinated.

Bradford said that recently, he and his colleagues felt compelled to act, because doing nothing amounted to a decision to let the species disappear. The two female plants are vulnerable to all manner of natural hazards.

“A beaver could come through and chew them. A tree could fall and crush them,” Bradford said.

The small pondspice population in the Grafton Ponds preserve is one of only three known communities in Virginia. The others exist at Antioch Pines Natural Area Preserve, also managed by DCR, and on private land, both in Isle of Wight County.

The solution for saving the Grafton Ponds pondspice population is relatively simple and inexpensive, according to Bradford. He identified male plants in the Antioch Pines population, collected pollen in a test tube from multiple individuals and drove to York County — a feat that had to be accomplished during a narrow window when the male plants had ripe pollen and the females had receptive flowers. At Grafton Ponds, he dabbed hundreds of female flowers with the male pollen.

So far, the plan has worked.

“We have small, green berries, which will turn into small red berries about a centimeter long,” Bradford said.

Although the results are encouraging, Bradford said, the effort is not yet out of the woods. To guard against potential destruction, DCR has erected fencing around the pondspice to keep the area’s large deer population from browsing its foliage and placed mesh bags around the berries to keep birds from dining on them.

“The minute a berry becomes red, a bird will try to eat it,” he said.

When the protected berries come to fruition, Bradford and his team will send the seeds they contain to the North Carolina Botanical Garden, which has been involved in rare plant conservation since the mid-1980s, according to Michael Kunz, the director of conservation programs there.

The botanical garden’s work involves not only seed banking to safeguard wild species but also restoration projects, and the organization has been successful in reestablishing diminished species such as the smooth coneflower and Georgia leadplant.

Pondspice will not be an especially difficult plant to grow, Kunz said, but there will be some special considerations as they nurture a new generation.

For starters, the pondspice seeds don’t store well using conventional methods such as freezing or drying, so getting the seeds into an appropriate growing medium within a narrow window of opportunity will be an important task. So, too, will be creating an ideal habitat, as the plants prefer an environment that’s neither too wet nor too dry.

Because the parent populations are small, propagating a wide range of samples is important, too, according to Kunz. “We want to make sure we are restoring as much genetic diversity as we can,” he said.

Once the North Carolina Botanical Garden has established the next generation, the pondspice seedlings will be replanted at the Grafton Ponds preserve, with ample male individuals making natural pollination possible once again.

Bradford sees this work not only as a way to protect a threatened species, but also as a way to connect to the diligent naturalists who recorded the rare plant beginning in Colonial Virginia as well as to European botanical publishers who documented its shadowy presence.

“This is a plant whose history is tied to the history of Virginia,” Bradford said.

Ben Swenson, ben.swenson05@gmail.com