Title: Yadkin River Goldenrod And Heller’S Blazing Star
Abstract: We meet two college students in their early twenties who forged a lifetime friendship while plant hunting in the wilds of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1891. To examine their fieldwork in North Carolina before the turn of the twentieth century is to understand something about how botany has been practiced over the past two centuries. Among the plants that John Kunkel Small and Amos Arthur Heller found while hiking that long-ago summer was a never-before-seen goldenrod that was soon to be all but forgotten in botanical literature. When the goldenrod was rediscovered a century later, it was immediately named to the list of federally endangered species in the United States. The other showy bloomer, a <italic>liatris</italic> which Arthur Heller named for himself, is now confined to only eight locations on rocky summits in northwestern North Carolina. It was listed as threatened in 1987 and remains of special concern to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Specimens reside in the New York Botanical Garden, which we visit at the end of the chapter.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-10-19
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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