St. Louis center conserves native U.S. plants

ST. LOUIS -- Kimberlie McCue is not a parent in the traditional sense. But the conservation biologist at Missouri Botanical Garden has nearly two dozen precious charges that require plenty of patience and attention.

McCue is trying to conserve 22 species of native Midwestern plants and lift them from the brink of extinction for future generations' benefit and enjoyment.

After all, these leafy, green species flower and sweeten the air, halt floods, cleanse the environment, balance the local ecology and offer the promise of medicine, she said.

Skeptics need only look to the rosy periwinkle and its tiny pink flowers, which deforestation nearly wiped out in its native Madagascar. Man came close to losing the species whose chemicals fight childhood leukemia and Hodgkin's disease, she said.

Native American plants by the hundreds are close to extinction because of a decades-long process of suburban sprawl, loss or alteration of habitat, and a wave of invasive species, which quite literally smother the natives into oblivion.

"People ask me 'Don't you get depressed?' with the doom and gloom of loss of species," McCue said from her sunny St. Louis office filled with flowering plants, clay pots, seeds, bags of potting soil and dozens of botany books. "I tell them 'No, I get feisty.'"

Limping into extinction

McCue, together with colleagues from 31 other botanic institutions in the United States, are trying to restore more than 600 rare native American plants that likely would limp into extinction if not for help from humans.

Those 32 institutions, in places ranging from Hawaii to New England, make up a network known as the Center for Plant Conservation, which has identified the 600-plus plants as its National Collection of imperiled species.

The Center for Plant Conservation, founded in 1984, originally had offices at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum. It relocated in 1991 to St. Louis at the invitation of Missouri Botanical Garden director Peter Raven, one of the world's leading botanists and advocates of conservation and biodiversity.

Responsibility for plants on the National Collection is spread among the 32 participating institutions. McCue's 22 species fall into her seven-state Midwest region.

Many of the plants are on the federal endangered species list, but not all of them. Kennedy said the center wants to restore imperiled plant species even before they wind up on the list, which, according to Missouri Department of Conservation biologist Rhonda Rimer, doesn't do enough to protect species.

Two major restoration projects McCue has been tackling for years appear headed for success, but McCue remains cautious, saying restoration is a long-term proposition.

In one case, the rare Pyne's ground-plum, endemic to Tennessee, is being re-established in that state's Stones River National Battlefield as well as on land acquired by the Tennessee Nature Conservancy. Loss of habitat shrank the plant to just three spots in the wild.