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Plant Society Cultivates Wild Initiative to Reseed Rhode Island

Frank Carini, ecoRI news, recently interviewed Sue Theriault, chair of ReSeeding Rhode Island Initiative and Shannon Kingsley, RIWP’s botanist about this initiative.  Read this article, published March 3, 2023.

 

In Memory – Margaret “Maggie” Downes

With sadness we note the passing of Maggie Downes on November 11, 2022.  Maggie’s membership in RIWPS spanned decades, beginning in 1988, the year after RIWPS was founded. She was a very active volunteer. Maggie participated in more plant sales than people can remember. Always ready to help in any way whatsoever, Maggie served as chair of the Program Committee, planning and organizing events ranging from lectures and workshops to displays about the value of native plants for public libraries.  She promoted and led outside plant adventures across Rhode Island and sometimes to other places such as Martha’s Vineyard which involved the whole day.  She loved the outdoors, hiking and kayaking.

For years, Maggie eagerly volunteered to help with the annual native plant exhibit at the Rhode Island Spring Garden and Flower Show.  She also helped establish a native plant garden at the Aldrich House, the home of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Her love of gardening included the great pride she had for her own garden, a small but meticulously kept area full of native plants and shrubs. A woman of many talents, she contributed illustrations to RIPWS coloring book, A Walk Through the Seasons. She is remembered for engaging others in conversations and for enthusiastically sharing her experiences, knowledge and perspectives.

Our condolences to her family and friends.

obituary

In Memory – Debbie (Deborah) van Dam

We extend our heartfelt sympathy to the family of Debbie van Dam, a 30-year RIWPS member and volunteer who died in October. Debbie was known at RIWPS for undertaking a large variety of roles. Her service on the board included a number of different terms beginning shortly after she joined in 1994 and extending through 2009. Very notable, was her term as a Vice President in 2006 when RIWPS was struggling financially. Her leadership and determination led to a major fundraising event which allowed us to remain solvent. She dedicated her time to our publications, serving as the Chair of Publications and later as a member of the WildfloraRI Editorial Advisory Board. She occasionally wrote brief articles and cultivation notes.

Debbie is remembered for generously sharing her interest and knowledge in gardening and native plants. An active member of Seed Starters East, she also assisted at the annual June plant sale, including the effort to make informational plant signs for each species. Besides her own garden which she tended with care, Debbie was a part of a project to create of a native plant garden at Aldrich House, the home of the RI Historical Society, an organization to which she also belonged.  Additionally, for over ten years, Debbie was involved in the award-winning native plant exhibit at the RI Spring and Garden Flower Show.

We are indebted to Debbie for her friendship, her quiet leadership and her wide-ranging contributions. She touched the lives of so many.

Member Helen Lusi honored!

Helen Lusi, David Gregg and fungi at Mercy Woods Preserve BioBlitz in Cumberland in 2021,

Congratulations to Helen Lusi!  Helen has made innumerable contributions to the stewardship of plants and their habitats during her long years as a member of RIWPS and in 2014 received a Lifetime Service Award. This year she is being honored by the Rhode Island Natural History with the 2022 Founders Award for Exception Service for her dedication to their mission and in particular for her work on Bioblitz and her passionate support of youth engaged in nature.

In Memory: Russell J. Chateauneuf

Russell J. Chateauneuf, of Cranston, a member since 2014, died earlier this year.

Reseeding Rhode Island

This article by Anne Raver first appeared in our publication, WildfloraRI, Spring 2022

photo (D.Vissoe)

As native plant enthusiasts, we have long been aware of how important native plants are to creating ecologically sound habitats, ones that will support the local bugs, bees, and butterflies, the beasts and birds that depend on them, and even the microbes and fungi dwelling in the soil below them. Now, we are coming to realize that we need truly local plant species—that is, ecotypes that have coevolved with the local fauna and are genetically suited to meet the unique needs of all the occupants of a particular habitat.

Recognizing this need, the RIWPS board unanimously approved the ‘Reseeding Rhode Island’ initiative in early February [2022]—an ambitious five-year plan for increasing the availability of seeds and plants grown from locally sourced native seeds collected from Rhode Island and other parts of Ecoregion 59.

(Ecoregion 59 includes all of Rhode Island; most of Connecticut and Massachusetts; and sections of Long Island, NY, New Hampshire, and coastal Maine. It is one of 105 ecoregions mapped on the continental United States by the Environmental Protection Agency to designate areas that share largely similar environmental conditions and plant genetics.)

“Over time, we hope the project will create an abundance of seeds so we don’t have to rely on seeds from other ecoregions,” said Peter Lacouture, RIWPS President. Trustees Dave Vissoe and Sue Theriault hammered out the proposal with trustees Brian Maynard, a URI professor of plant sciences, Peggy Buttenbaum, Dick Fisher, Sally Johnson, and Mary O’Connor

“Seed Starters has long felt the need to propagate more from locally sourced seeds, but our seed sources were limited,” said Buttenbaum. “We’ve purchased some seeds from New England  sources and even some from midwestern suppliers in order to provide a diverse selection of native plants at our sales.”

The Forerunner: Rhody Native

‘Reseeding Rhode Island’ builds on the work of Hope Leeson, the botanist who coordinated ‘Rhody Native.’ Rhody Native was launched in 2009 by the Rhode Island Natural History Survey in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service. It was part of a $673,000 grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act designed to help revive the economy. The real estate crash of 2008 had left many landscapers out of work; meanwhile, the Forest Service needed to get rid of the invasive species taking over its forestlands.

“The idea …was to train landscapers to recognize and remove invasive plants and give them an extra line of business to make them more secure in the future,” said David Gregg, the executive director of RINHS. The Forest Service found, however, that once the invasives were removed, “there weren’t any native nurseries and garden centers.”

Over the years, Hope Leeson taught volunteers how to identify and collect seeds of wild species and the nuances of their propagation. Rhody Native supplied plants to restoration projects and public gardens, including the native plant garden at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Kettle Pond Visitor Center in Charlestown. Before the Rhody Native project came to an end in 2020, Leeson and her volunteers had collected seeds of about 120 species of native perennials, grasses and sedges, shrubs, trees, and vines from which they grew thousands of plugs and plants at RINHS facilities at URI’s East Farm in South Kingstown. Leeson said, “We were trying to focus on species common to different habitats, so that people doing coastal or wetland restoration, or working with drought conditions, or creating some kind of pollinator garden would have the right plants.”

 

The ‘Reseeding Rhode Island’ Initiative

To set up the ‘Reseeding Rhode Island’ initiative, the RIWPS board signed a $25,000 contract with Shannon Kingsley, a young ethnobotanist, who will organize the seed collection process this spring. “She will determine how and where seeds will be collected, obtain permits from landowners, help us narrow down the number of species we will work with, then harvest the seeds in a timely fashion,” said Vissoe. The process will adhere to the Bureau of Land Management’s ‘Seeds of Success’ protocols, set up to protect wild plant populations while enhancing genetic diversity.  Along with the original $25,000 funding, the board approved an additional $2,000 for expenses, including the cost of a GPS tracker and supplies for cleaning and growing the seed into plugs.

Buttenbaum emphasized the importance of education in this new project. “When the botanist goes into the field, she will be accompanied by volunteers who will be learning as they work.” Leeson, who now teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has begun to share her experience and data, including locations for collection sites, with Kingsley and the Reseeding RI team. RIWPS member Beth Dickson, who has a doctorate in botany and collects seeds of rare plants as a volunteer for the Native Plant Trust and plants for the Brown University Herbarium, has also offered to meet with Kingsley and help with the project.

Reseeding Rhode Island is modeled after The Ecotype Project for Pollinator Health, set up in 2019 by The Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut (CTNOFA). It was created in response to insect populations plummeting from loss of habitat as well as to meet the need for local ecotypic native plants. Funded with two consecutive $75,000 USDA Specialty Crop Block Grants over four years, this project’s ‘specialty’ crops are native species that provide food and habitat for pollinators. Planted on organic farms, these plants, grown from wild-collected seed, have vastly improved food crop production.

The Ecotype Project relies on trained field botanists to sustainably collect the seed from wild plant populations. SOS collection protocols require finding a population of at least 50 plants to ensure a diverse gene pool in the seeds. “When we collect, we want a wide representation of all the genes in that population,” said Goerdie Elkins, lead seed collector for The Ecotype Project team speaking for a You Tube video.“We don’t collect from a few plants but across the whole spectrum of plants, all the while not over-collecting, sometimes taking seed from 5 percent and never more than 20 percent of the plants.”

Volunteers then clean and grow the seeds into plugs, and organic farmers plant the plugs on ‘founder plots.’ Each plot is planted with about 200 plugs of a single species, and each farmer plants at least three plots – one with a spring-blooming species, another with a summer-bloomer, and a third with a fall bloomer – to feed pollinators throughout the growing season.

These founder plots produce thousands of F1 generation seeds—the first generation harvested from plants grown from wild seed. The farmers can sell the seeds directly or to a farmer-led seed collective, Eco59. The seed can then be sold to gardeners, conservationists, and nurseries that are looking to grow locally sourced native plants.

“I think we’re on the F4 generation now at Kettle Pond,” said Vissoe, who co- leads that project [now under the auspices of U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Master Gardener Program] with Master Gardener Erin Beuka. “But some of those original plants don’t necessarily make it through the years. So, we’re constantly reinvigorating the garden with new plants of the same species … adding plugs from the wild.” These gardens and restoration areas produce thousands of ecotype seed, which can then be propagated. “The Kettle Pond native plant garden produces about 6,000 new plants a year,” said Vissoe. He envisions possible variations on The Ecotype Project model for Reseeding Rhode Island. He has talked about growing founder plots with some organic farmers and farmers who use sustainable methods on their land. Other possible sites could include URI’s East Farm, the Crandall Narragansett Tribal Farm in Westerly, land trusts, and private lands.

The key is finding a location with enough distance from related species or cultivars to avoid potential cross- pollinating and thus contaminating the straight species. The plots also need to be free of pesticides, including any pesticides that might blow in from adjacent fields or orchards.

Steven Alm, an entomologist at URI, would like to find a site for a founder’s plot at East Farm. “But we have apple trees here, which are sprayed, so we have to find areas we’re not spraying,” said Dr. Alm, who would love to see more habitat for native bees. “Of the 11 species of bumble bees that we know were here from historical records, we have found only six of them. That’s a huge pollination loss.”

Pollination loss was a key motivator for CTNOFA’s Executive Director, Dina Brewster, who planted the first seven founder plots for The Ecotype Project at The Hickories, her organic farm in Ridgefield, CT. “We have lost 74 percent of our insect abundance since 1976,” she said. Now, she says, those plots of native plants are “vibrating with pollinators and bees.” And so are her crops. “Those bugs are making juicier tomatoes, working alongside me.”

The Ecotype Project is currently growing 17 different plant species on 11 properties (nine farms, one land trust and one nursery); the number of species will increase to 25 this year, said Sefra Alexandra, the project coordinator. And thus far, she estimates, “there are upwards of nine million seeds coming out of the native seed supply chain we have established.”

Alexandra, who spoke at RIWPS’s annual meeting in March, is a Fellow for the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which oversees the worldwide seed banking network. She holds a master’s degree in agroecological education from Cornell University, and her “BOATanical Expeditions” paddle New England’s rivers, planting local ecotypes along riparian corridors and raising funds for The Ecotype Project.

Alexandra emphasized the importance of genetic material that is ecoregional: “When we take the genetics from another place, typically seeds and plants from large nurseries in the Midwest, it shifts the bloom time and all these adaptations that have been going on since time immemorial. “You see the nuances of speciation even within five feet of collecting seeds. So from New England to Minnesota, even within the same species, there are massive inherent differences.”

Finding grants is crucial to the development of the ‘Reseeding Rhode Island’ initiative. Vissoe recently met with Ghyllian Conley and Max Weinstein, soil conservationists at the state office of the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), in Warwick. “They suggested funding that would go directly to the farmers growing the founder plots,” said Vissoe. “They’re excited about this being a great pollinator source for the farmers.”

The ‘Reseeding Rhode Island’ initiative intends to collect seed of 21 local species in 2022. Volunteers would process the seeds and grow plugs for 21 founder plots. Vissoe is exploring the possibility of working with URI to grow plugs from wild-collected seed, as well as retooling the old greenhouse once used by Rhody Native at East Farm.

An exact species list has yet to be made. Trustee Sally Johnson, an early proponent of developing sources for locally grown seed, has suggested that RIWPS grow species different from those being grown by The Ecotype Project, “If we collected a different set of 20 or so species and each group recorded the same kind of data, we could create a collective database,” Johnson said.

As Reseeding Rhode Island moves forward, it will be building on the knowledge gleaned by its predecessor. Rhody Native was an ambitious project, and an expensive one. “Hope harvested 120 different species, because we wanted to see what was there and what there was a market for, what was easy to propagate versus hard to propagate,” said Gregg.

The Ecotype Project, in contrast, started out focusing on a handful of familiar species within Ecoregion59. “We started with species we knew were readily available to nursery trade,” said Elkins, the operations director of Highstead, a conservation foundation with 200 acres in Reading, CT. “Plants that are available to homeowners and ones that they’re familiar with that also benefit pollinators. We didn’t want to get obscure plants nobody had heard of.”

Initially, Leeson set out to collect seed of a particular species in three distinct ecoregions in Rhode Island—Northwest, the East Bay and the South Coast—so that the propagated plugs and plants could then be planted back in the same area (even more local than Ecoregion59). “But it was so time-consuming to go to each area, to keep the collections separate and organized,” said Leeson. It was also a challenge training volunteers.

“Hope knew exactly what she was looking for, the right seed when it was ripe, but volunteers would get the wrong seed sometimes, or it wouldn’t be ripe,” said Gregg. Some wild species themselves are a challenge. “You can go out to collect little bluestem and get a pile of it in no time, but turtlehead ripens only one seed at a time,” slowing collection down.

Gregg estimates the annual cost of Rhody Native was about $100,000, which paid for Leeson’s salary and benefits, a part-time propagator, and expenses for labor and supplies. The return, Leeson estimates, was about $30,000. After its first federal grant ran out in 2012, RINHS kept Rhody Native going with additional grants and paid local nurseries to grow plants for large projects. “But once the money ran out for contract growing, no commercial grower was interested in taking it on,” said Gregg.

“Hope was ahead of her time,” said Vissoe. But it’s a different time now, informed by lessons learned from Rhody Native and a growing body of data and experience from The Ecotype Project. In a recent email to Vissoe, Leeson wrote, “I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel, knowing that the seeds have been sown and others are there to propagate them and carry on the work.”

 

Update 

Since the article was written the ReSeeding Rhode Island initative has been moving forward.  Find out more about this journey.

Also, We anticipate ample and varied opportunities for volunteers at each stage of the project as it gets fully underway.  Contact office@riwps.org to express your interest in helping us with this exciting adventure.

In Memory – Janet White and Margaret (Johnny) Stone

We remember two of our long serving members.

Rites of Spring Adventure

Yes, the Trailing Arbutus was in bloom!

Beechwood Garden renamed in honor of Jules Cohen

by Dianne L. Izzo, RIWPS member and URI Master Gardener, who volunteers at the Beechwood Garden.

The North Kingstown Town Council granted the petition of the North Kingstown Senior Association (NKSA) to rename the Beechwood Gardens The Jules A. Cohen Gardens at the regular Council meeting on April 4, 2022. Mr. Cohen is Past President of the Master Gardeners and the Wild Plant Society, as well as Past President of the NKSA.

The Garden concept was originally proposed by Mr. Cohen in 2010, and as soon as the NKSA approved the proposal, he led the effort to make the gardens a reality by taking the following actions:

• Organized the approval, design, implementation, installation, maintenance and funding of the gardens

• Solicited licensed landscape architects, volunteers from the community, the URI Master Gardener program and the RI Wild Plant Society, and,

• Through a formal Memorandum of Agreement with the Master Gardeners and Wild Plant Society, obtained a commitment to maintain the gardens with regularly scheduled work sessions.

In addition, Mr. Cohen has —

• Established guidelines for the planting of native trees and shrubs with advice from experts

Volunteers working on April 21, 2022 (left to right) are Dona Giglio, Jules A. Cohen, Mary Lou Upham, Linda Solitto (in front), Allen Mongeau, Suzanne McDonald, and Marcia Herron. [Photo: Dianne L. Izzo]

• Obtained donations and acquired appropriate plants

• Together with the volunteers, planted all the materials within the Town guidelines and with the approval and assistance of the North Kingstown Department of Public Works

• Installed an automated watering system and takes care of annual maintenance of the irrigation hoses

• Provided for ongoing care of the garden environment by engaging professional arborists and contractors to preserve the integrity of the walkways and the size and health of the trees

• Provided a funding mechanism via appeals for donations to make garden purchases and pay for maintenance, including the sale of Memorials (trees, garden objects) and to ensure the longevity of maintenance funds, he formalized an endowment that has been placed in restricted accounts as shown in the NKSA financial statements

• Established a Garden Program at Beechwood for speaking presentations made to the larger community. Speakers are experts in subjects ranging from Favorite Native Plants to Worm Composting to Drawing from Nature and include URI faculty and environmental professionals. Generally five or six lectures are scheduled per year and these programs are widely advertised and attended. Cohen and volunteer Landscape Architect Kevin Alverson arrange all the programming and introduce each speaker. As part of the Education Mission of the Beechwood Garden Project, native plants are labeled, and a self-guided tour brochure is available to all visitors.

• The Gardens are now a source of beauty, inspiration, peace and pride for citizens of North Kingstown and the wider community, and we owe their existence to the work of many but most certainly to the inspiration and perseverance of Jules A. Cohen.

Congratulations to Jules for this well deserved honor!

Further resources for Ecotypes, Ecoregions & Ecological Restoration from Sefra Alexandra

RIWPS March 5 Annual Meeting featured Sefra Alexandra’s talk on Ecotypes, Ecoregions & Ecological Restoration. She underscored the pressing need to preserve the genetic diversity of native seed populations whether through seeds banks, which can supply seeds to recreate or amplify these populations in case of need, or other efforts to increase the availability of locally sourced seeds such as the  Ecotype Project of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut (CT NOFAR) which she leads.

Under this project, organic farmers establish founders plots large enough to maintain the genetic diversity of plants grown directly from seeds of wild plants native to their ecoregion (Northeast Coastal Zone).  Seeds from these founder plot plants are harvested and become the basis for future generations of plants.

As you know from the meeting, we are very excited about our new multi-year initiative, Reseeding Rhode Island. Our goal is to increase the availability of seeds and plants from our local wild plant populations. This initiative builds on the incredible work of the Rhody Native Initiative started by the Rhode Island Native Plant Survey in 2010. We have already started to work with a botanist to collect seeds. Our next phases will be to grow these seeds to plugs for founders plots and then to work with our founder plot partners to make the seeds and plants grown from these seeds available in the course of the next few years.

While we were not able to record the talk itself, we encourage you to explore the list of resources connected to the talk that Sefra Alexandra has sent us.


• In response to the question about  genetic diversity in founder plots, see current research: “Seeding the Future: Evolutionary Perspective on Seed-Based Restoration” Data on genetic diversity of founder plots compared with wild populations. Unpublished: Please do not distribute widely. https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=29c885fb-88ce-4e9b-
abfa-ae2401656897

• Links related to topics in the talk

For questions/staying involved with the formation of this network

Sefra@ctnofa.org / www.ctnofa.org/ecotypeproject