Kenny Slocum is the naturalist and natural resource manager for the Clayton County Conservation Board.

The first time I had an opportunity to write for Bleeding Heartland, I wrote about one of my favorite places. Bloody Run County Park, outside of Marquette, sparked my interest in plants years ago when I began to find a litany of unique native plants, stuff that I’d mostly consider “meat-and-potatoes” kind of species now.

Yet every year, it seems, I get the pleasure of adding a new species to my digital herbarium. Some of them, the butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and round-headed bush clover (Lespedeza capitata) and rough blazing star (Liatris aspera), in and of themselves, might not make the typical prairie-stomper excited, but it’s a thrill for me to see them in context.

Rough blazing star in Bloody Run

Even these relatively common species have importance on a remnant landscape. Yes, they all spring forth readily from seed mixes, but to have them appear on their own suggests a recovery of the important local ecotypes, which improve the available resources for future restoration efforts.

A bush clover from Marquette will have different genetics than a bush clover from Marshalltown, and vice versa. Recovering these populations helps build a more robust native seed market, and in turn seed mixes more resilient to a variety of environmental conditions.

But I still get the most excited when I find something new, truly new. Last fall, I stumbled upon just such a fellow.

After enough time investigating plants, one gets a sort of sixth sense for when something merits a little extra attention. I have no formal training and consider myself a “hack” botanist, but the delicate little flowers triggered my own developing sixth sense, and I decided to really dig into it.

Mystery plant

Step one (of course): the almighty apps. This spindly, delicate flower shied from the camera, which kept focusing on everything but the target. I got as far as “dicots” on the Seek app, which narrows it down to around 1,500 species in Iowa. It’s a start, I guess.

Next step: the old trusty field guide. Iowa could desperately use a more state-specific reference guide, but until we get one, I prefer to use Wildflowers of Wisconsin by Merel R. Black and Emmet J. Judziewicz.

It packs a ton of information into a manageable size, and arranges flowers by the number of petals, which works more intuitively for me than arrangements by phenology, or color, or—the worst for a hack like me—taxonomic relationships.

With at least some petals to count, I could narrow it down to Agalinis, commonly called “false foxgloves.” What these poor plants did to get a common name that calls them pretenders to the foxglove throne, I’ll never know. It illustrates why many true plant nerds prefer Latin binomials.

Seeking a little more information than the field guide can realistically contain, I turned to Minnesota Wildflowers, a favorite online reference of mine, to find some more discriminating characteristics among the group.

Once there, I narrowed it down to a couple of likely candidates—Agalinis aspera, the rough false foxglove. For the sandy, rocky, dry hill prairie habitat, this seemed the most likely, based on the relative commonality of this species compared to two other contenders.

Pale false foxglove, Agalinis skinneriana, also grows in such habitats but is quite rare. Throughout most of its range, the conservation status varies from vulnerable to endangered to possibly extirpated.

The last contender: Agalinis gattingeri, round-stemmed false foxglove. While (seemingly) slightly less threatened than A. skinneriana, this plant still has a spot on the Iowa threatened species list, and endangered status in neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin.

I am prone to wishful botanizing, and the idea of finding a rare/threatened/endangered species almost always turns out too good to be true. Just the same, I posted some photos on the Iowa Native Plant listserv so the statewide experts could weigh in.

Mark Leoschke, botanist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, offered some helpful tips. More pictures with a ruler for scale might eliminate the most common of the three, rough false foxglove, as that species will typically have larger flowers than the two rarer fellows.

I also showed some pictures in person to John Pearson, Mark’s fellow botanist at the DNR, when he came up to the area for a visit to Soule’s prairie in Fayette County. Alas, John had never seen A. gattingeri in person, so he couldn’t say for sure, but we did get to see some rough false foxglove on site.

We were down to two species, both rare, and hard to differentiate. Mark suggested I collect a specimen and send it to Deb Lewis, curator for the Iowa State Herbarium, and an expert at working with microscopes to key out difficult species.

But I wouldn’t get my answer for another year. The specimen I’d sent had come a little late in the season for clear examination of the floral parts. I tugged at my collar a bit; both of the candidate species were annual, which leads to significant fluctuations in population year over year. I hoped I could find it again.

Lo and behold, the brief lurch out of drought conditions in northeast Iowa yielded a fantastic year. I saw the plants first before they bloomed, and knew I’d have an easy enough time finding them in full splendor.

I waited patiently for the blooms to emerge: one at a time, at the branch tips, for just a few days before dropping off. With a better, cleaner specimen off to the herbarium, Deb excitedly wrote back confirming the identification as A. gattingeri, and the first recorded specimen from Clayton County. I was elated.

But more importantly, I was educated. This delicate little flower showed me how much work real botanists put it on a day-to-day basis to catalogue and document Iowa’s native plant life. Apps and field guides can get you to the tip of the iceberg, but there is no replacing genuine hard-earned expertise to see what’s going on underneath.

Close-up of tiny flower

While daunting, the story of figuring out this species also taught me how much magic remains to be discovered. Deb, John, and Mark have all spent a lifetime examining Iowa’s native plants, and even they had to put in some real legwork to unravel this mystery.

It speaks as well to the importance of finding those connections. Working alone, I probably never would have felt comfortable offering an ID based on the subtle differences offered up on websites and in field guides. I needed someone who had gone through the steps before, thousands of times.

That expertise is a precious resource, and one for which I am extremely grateful. Organizations like the Iowa Native Plant Society and the Iowa Prairie Network help to foster and maintain those connections. Websites like this one bring that field work to the computer screen for those who cannot put in the time on the ground.

John Pearson leading a group of Master Conservationists at Soule’s Prairie

Finally, it goes to show that those giants of the field here in Iowa need help from hacks like me, and you, and anyone else who can foster their sixth sense for weird plants.

After getting a positive ID, one of the coworkers in my office said “Well now what – do we have to protect that spot or keep people off it or…?”

A fair question, given the conservation status of this plant. Ironically, the spot where they have appeared is arguably one of the most trampled bits of the entire non-trout stream portion of the park. Each year we host field trips up there in the spring and fall, and I relish the chance to show students the cavalcade of native flora recovering year by year.

MFL MarMac student removing Japanese Barberry from Bloody Run

Agalinis, both gattingeri and skinneriana, survived for centuries amidst the trampling hooves of bison and elk, the sweeping prairie fires, the cycles of drought and wet years, even the digging and cutting and harvesting of native peoples, but it has started to disappear only when we took those disturbances away.

“Dynamic equilibrium” was the order of the day for thousands of years, a constantly-shifting mosaic of prairies and savannas and woodlands assembling and dissembling, retreating and advancing, colonizing and then succumbing to competition only for the cycle to begin again when a herd tramples through or a tornado tears the forest down.

We can’t go back to that now. The present day offers completely novel conditions, between invasive species and climate changes and habitat fragmentation. So how do natural resource managers gauge success with a greatly altered baseline? Biodiversity makes for a simple shorthand.

Agalinis gattingeri flower under 10x magnification

If I see more native plants, especially more unique ones, I generally call it a success. Plants, as the foundation of the food web, are the language of the landscape. When we learn to listen, we improve our relationship with the land.

But sometimes, we all need a translator. I am eternally grateful for all of the plant enthusiasts out there in our fair state, many of whom read and contribute to this blog and others, for helping hacks like me interpret the message.