A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Now, the story of an effort to save an endangered plant. It lives in a patch of woods in the middle of a city. Here's Grant Blankenship of Georgia Public Broadcasting.
GRANT BLANKENSHIP, BYLINE: About 15 volunteers spread out in the early light of a mature hardwood forest in the middle of a city - Macon, Ga. - to weed. They work by hand pulling up invasive English ivy - no rakes or shovels. That's because Heather Bowman Cutway wants them to preserve the plant she hopes is below, but she teaches them to ID on sight.
HEATHER BOWMAN CUTWAY: This is our plant of interest here, so it's the little rosettes.
BLANKENSHIP: Bowman Cutway is a biologist at Mercer University in Macon. And she's showing this group of amateur plant enthusiasts and scientists a federally endangered plant, called the fringed campion.
CUTWAY: It is a clonal specie, and so it will send out runners.
BLANKENSHIP: The groundhugging plant has a flower that looks like a frilly pink carnation. Bowman Cutway never intended this to be her main topic of research.
CUTWAY: I put out a call to a fellow botanist being like, I need student projects, and he was like, how about a federally endangered plant?
BLANKENSHIP: That was more than she hoped for. So she's been hunting in little isolated tracts of forests, squeezed between roads and neighborhoods like this ever since.
CUTWAY: These urban places tend to be a really nice reservoir of this plant.
BLANKENSHIP: Urban, because these breathtaking woods are stuck in the middle of 2 4-lane roads and tons of houses. Reservoir because fringe campeon is so far impossible to grow from seed. So conservation means keeping plants alive where you find them and growing clones from cuttings and greenhouses. Just where this spot and others like it are is kept top secret to protect against poachers. Luckily, the private land owners are excited to work with Bowman Cutway and with Michelle Elmore, recovery biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
MICHELLE ELMORE: You know, it's - only occurs in Georgia and Florida.
BLANKENSHIP: So you'll find fringed campion here in the middle of Georgia, and on the Appalachicola River on the Florida panhandle, and that's it. Elmore says big storms imperil those Florida plants.
ELMORE: Hurricane Michael really impacted a few populations down there, and we're just not sure about them.
BLANKENSHIP: Heather Bowman Cutway says here in Georgia, the threats are more manageable.
CUTWAY: The biggest threat to their survival, really, is the invasive plants.
BLANKENSHIP: Hence, the weeding party, organized by Jennifer Ceska of the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance to take out this English ivy.
JENNIFER CESKA: English Ivy is right. It's a misplaced plant.
BLANKENSHIP: It escaped from the homes at the edge of these woods, but she says, once the English ivy is pulled...
CESKA: We're going to see plants pop out that have been waiting.
BLANKENSHIP: Just as Ceska predicts, over on the newly weeded bank of a wet weather creek, a fringed campion has popped out.
CESKA: Yeah, underneath the English Ivy. That one was on top of the stump. What do you call that - hill? And then the whole stump-hill sloughed off.
BLANKENSHIP: It's a tiny patch of green hugging the newly exposed clay. So Heather Bowman Cutway cuts just a piece of this new plant. It will join others in her grow house at Mercer University for safekeeping. For NPR news, I'm Grant Blankenship in Macon, Ga.
(SOUNDBITE OF LADY MOON'S "BLUE MOUNTAIN PASS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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