Zach Irick, SGIs Southern Appalachian grasslands coordinator, recently co-led a “Grasslands and Woodlands of the Smokies” hike for the annual Great Smoky Mountains Wildflower Pilgrimage in Cades Cove, with Dwayne Estes and SGI-APSU graduate research assistants, Gabby LeFevre and Jared Gorrell.

Earlier this year, SGI became an official partner of the Center for Plant Conservation (CPC), an organization that advances the science and practice of rare plant conservation by making sure its partners are equipped with the resources to best save plants. In particular, these partners – or as CPC calls them, Participating Institutions – are organizations that maintain ex situ rare plant collections. This could mean live plants in a botanic garden or seeds in a seed bank. With the establishment of our Conservation Seed Bank which focuses on rare and declining grassland plants, we were a perfect match to partner up with CPC.

Over a century ago the botanist and Presbyterian minister Thomas Conrad Porter collected a rather elusive plant in Jasper County, Georgia (southeast of Atlanta). Upon collecting it, T.C. Porter identified it as one species. Half a century later in 1902, his nephew, the famous botanist John Kunkel Small, author of the original Flora of the Southeastern United States, took another look at his uncle’s collected specimens. He recognized the specimen as a species new to science and named it after his esteemed uncle – Solidago porteri, or Porter’s Goldenrod. After that, T.C. Porter’s pressed plant specimens sat nestled away in the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium and were promptly lost to the annals of history. That is, until another century and change later when SGI’s Executive Director Dwayne Estes discovered a new population in south-central Tennessee nearly 250 miles from where T.C. Porter originally collected it in Georgia in 1846.

April has been an extremely busy and exciting month for us. Education and outreach, volunteer activities, restoration work, networking, and much more are some of the many activities that SGI has been involved with this month. Read this newsletter to hear about all our exciting news and announcements, find out about our upcoming events in May, be reminded of our recent blog articles, and find out the hot topics being discussed in our Facebook group.