Special Places: Background Exploration

The Flora of Columbia County

Columbia County has on the order of 1300 different species of wild-growing plants, more than a third of the plants currently known from the entire State of New York (New York State Flora Atlas). Two thirds of our current flora is considered native to our region, but about a third is composed of non-native plants that have been introduced within the last 400 years. Most of the introduced species come from Eurasia, but some are also from the western or south-eastern US and a few even from the tropics. Some plant species are pretty common throughout the County, for example common grasses, legumes, and “weeds” of pastures, hayfields, and roadsides. Others are quite limited to certain uncommon habitat types, such as freshwater tidal marshes, acidic bogs or outcrops of calcium-rich rocks. Beyond habitat preferences, there are also patterns of geographic affinity. Certain plant species with a generally more southern distribution occur in our county mostly along the Hudson and the lower reaches of its tributaries, and are limited to the relatively flat, western half of the county. Plants of a generally more northern affinity occur mostly in the higher elevations of the mountains in the eastern half of the county.

Most of these plants were first documented for the county by Rogers McVaugh in his “Flora of the Columbia County Area, New York”. He collected at the order of 3000 vouchers which are deposited in the State Museum in Albany, and the majority of the “historical records” of rare plant occurrences in Columbia County kept by the New York Natural Heritage Program date back to his work. His observations on habitat preferences and geographic distributions of the various plant species in our area still hold today. Beyond that, the book is also an excellent review of our county’s geology, soils, and climate, together with the resulting habitats, and biogeography of our flora.

 

McVaugh, Rogers: Flora of the Columbia County Area, New York. 1958. New York State Museum and Science Service. Bulletin # 360, 433p. Available for less than $10 at the New York State Museum. The book is also available in digital format through the New York State Library. (Download the index too!)

 

A visit with Rogers McVaugh

In the spring of 2008, we were fortunate to visit with 98 year old Dr. McVaugh at his home in North Carolina. He spoke with us about his work in Columbia County and shared his note book and photographs of that time. We were enchanted by his gentle manners, fascinated by his deep knowledge of plants and astounded by his astute memory, which allowed him to recall exciting botanical finds from “special places” more than 70 years ago. His parents had acquired a farm in Kinderhook and moved there from New York City to establish an apple orchard.  As a graduate student in Botany at the University of Pennsylvania, Rogers spent several summers exploring the wild plants of our county. Rogers’ early work in Columbia County was only the beginning of a very long botanical career which did not involve any more work in New York but focused mostly on the Flora of western Mexico.  His list of 12 books and 200 shorter articles in the history of botany, floristics and systematic botany (see complete bibliography posted by the University of North Carolina Herbarium) attests to a very active and productive professional life.

For his work in Columbia County, Rogers felt deeply indebted to the late Lyman Hoysradt, a schoolteacher and avid botanist of Pine Plains, just across our southern county line. Hoysradt’s “Flora of Pine Plains” had been published in eight parts in a series of supplements to the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club between 1875-1879. The young and old botanist met a few months before Hoysradt’s death in 1933. In his book, Rogers wrote: “it is with sincere appreciation of such a botanist of an older generation that the present study is undertaken. It is only after the careful and critical work of local students like Lyman Hoysradt that more comprehensive studies over longer periods of time can be successfully carried out.”

With the on-going Participatory Plant Surveys, we invite your participation in the current effort to build on the invaluable work of “the botanists of older generations” and to continue the documentation and monitoring of wild plant populations in our county.

What has changed?

While most of the information compiled in the “Flora of Columbia County” still sounds astonishingly true 70 years after it was written, it also provides a wonderful point of reference to document some of the changes in the county’s flora since then.

A number of the most notorious and now all-too-common invasive plants in the county had obviously not yet arrived to the area when Dr. McVaugh made his observations in the 1930’s: Japanese Barberry, Multiflora Rose, Japanese Knotweed, Japanese Stiltgrass, Oriental Bittersweet and Norway Maple are not at all mentioned in his Flora.

Tartarian Honeysuckle (which now is only one of several invasive honeysuckle species) is the only non-native honeysuckle listed and it is described as “common in cultivation, occasionally established in woods and along roadsides”. Similarly, Dame’s Rocket, which many of you know as the white, pink, or purple “Phlox” that now graces roadsides and floodplain forests, was described as “an escape from cultivation, occasional along roadsides and streams”. Garlic Mustard, which now is often considered villain #1 amongst the invasive plants, was observed only “occasionally along roadsides and in cultivated ground”. Reed Grass, or Phragmites, which now dominates many wetlands, was observed only “rarely, in calcareous marshes”. Not only were these plants still rare, there also did not yet seem to be the conditions that facilitated their rapid spreading witnessed today.

Not so with some other species now considered as invasive, which already seemed to be “on the move” 70 years ago. For example, Dr. McVaugh reported the now very common wetland plant Purple Loosestrife from the marshes along the Hudson, where it was “common and often formed dense stands”. He described it as “becoming the dominant plant over large areas” along the Hudson, but it was still “unknown away from the river except in isolated colonies”. Similarly, he described Spotted Knapweed, which by now is omnipresent on dry meadows and roadsides, as “locally abundant as a weed along roadsides and in waste grounds, apparently spreading rapidly and becoming common”. Another example is the now quite common non-native orchid Helleborine, which he found only at three locations in the county, but described as “a European species not previously reported from our area, and apparently spreading from western New York, where it is extensively naturalized”.

How about examples of plants that were once common, but –in the true sense of the word- have lost ground? Well-known examples are the beautiful Canada Lily and Ragged-fringed Orchid, which Dr. McVaugh described as “common in meadows and wet woods, especially in the Hudson Valley” and as “frequent in meadows, open fields and woods”, respectively. Similarly, the showy Cardinal Flower was “common along the margins of streams and ponds, and in wet meadows of the Hudson Valley”. Not any more! When have you last seen a Cardinal Flower or Canada Lily growing wild, outside the garden of a native plant enthusiast? Such sites still exist but they’re few and far between. We are not quite sure why these plants have become such uncommon sights. We still seem to have plenty of suitable habitat! Dr. McVaugh himself suggested that the increased nutrient input and more frequent mowing of hay meadows has not favored some of these species. This is to say, that the meadows 70 years ago might have provided a very different habitat for wild plants than meadows do today. We also have the creeping suspicion that the increased density of deer might have something to do with their demise. In plant surveys of floodplain forests, we regularly find young Canada Lily plants in the spring, but upon returning in early summer, few are ever seen in bloom and if the plants haven’t totally disappeared, they have often been browsed. Leatherwood is another example of a plant described by Dr. McVaugh as “frequent in rich moist woods”. We have so far been able to locate only a handful of places where individual plants or very small colonies of this pretty shrub grow. One of these colonies was found by deer last winter and when you see their tremendous impact on this group of 20 shrubs, it is very easy to imagine that deer could love this plant to death.

Another group of plants that has clearly diminished since the 1930’s was associated with “dry fields and hillsides” (think abandoned pastures!). Wild Indigo, Bushclover, Venus’ Looking Glass, Whorled Milkwort, and New Jersey Tea are all examples of native plants once common in dry meadows, but now hard to find because most of their habitat has since reverted to forest.

Pinkster

The gorgeous Wild Azalea bush, often called “Pinkster”, which sometimes was “the most abundant shrub in rocky abandoned pastureland” in the eastern part of the County, is now mostly found in the rocky forests of the higher eastern elevations, where it flowers in profusion during the month of May. Curiously, although immature individuals can be spotted in many oak-hickory forests throughout the county, they hardly ever seem to set flowers and produce seed. Could it be that deer have a hand (or mouth) in that, too?

Natural Areas of Regional or Global Significance

According to the “Hudson River Estuary Wildlife and Habitat Conservation Framework", Columbia County contains four Significant Biodiversity Areas of regional importance: the Hudson River itself, the Freshwater Tidal Marshes, the Taconic Range, and the Harlem Valley. These areas house plants and animals that are rare in other parts of NY State (e.g., Timber Rattlesnake) and, in some cases, even national rarities, such as Bog Turtle or Atlantic Sturgeon. A small aquatic plant, the Hudson River Water Nymph, occurs nowhere else in the world but in the Hudson River and has recently been documented by the Natural Heritage Program in a tidal marsh in Columbia County.