CLERMONT — On quiet fall mornings, when most of Central Florida buzzes along I-4 and State Road 50, an unlikely team gathers in the parking lot 20 miles west of Orlando. They sling shovels, gloves and black plastic pots into the flatbed of an ATV and trek up a steep hill on the property’s corner.
At the hill’s crest, the manicured lawn gives way to yellow sand and pine straw, flowers scattered like confetti on the soft earth. This is Castle Hill — and this team is its guardian.
Thirty years ago, the 125-acre site was a priority for conservation under the land acquisition program now known as Florida Forever. But it was too expensive and negotiations with the owner were unsuccessful. Today, the plot has been divided and sold to the point of near disappearance. Much of what was once longleaf pine, turkey oak and wiregrass is now pavement.
Enter the concept of plant-rescue ops.
Volunteers with the Florida Native Plant Society have dug, moved and transplanted more than 4,800 of the state’s rarest specimens from Castle Hill. They’ve preserved an enormous amount of biodiversity and protected dozens of species from near-extinction. But rescues save only a tiny fraction of the site’s ecosystem.
With final development on the horizon for 2025, volunteers race to salvage what they can. They spend their Thursday mornings digging elbow-deep in brush, stopping only briefly to look at rooftops through pine canopies and mourn what has been lost.
Seeds and shrubs of the Sunshine State
From the sabal palm on Florida’s flag to the sprawling live oaks along the Suwannee River, few things are more deeply embedded in the state’s iconography than its native plants.
“What a magnificent grove arises on its banks!” wrote naturalist William Bartram of the St Johns River during his travels through Florida in the 18th century. “How glorious the Palm! how majestically stands the Laurel, its head forming a perfect cone! its dark green foliage, seems silvered over with milk-white flowers.”
Florida has more than 3,200 native plant species, Bartram’s palms and laurels among them. The state ranks third in the nation for plant diversity. But 448 species are endangered and another 118 are threatened.
On Castle Hill
Speeding east along State Road 50 in Clermont, Castle Hill is a blur of green punctuated by construction fences, ‘for lease’ signs and plastic garbage tossed from a car window.
Step into its greenery, though, and it’s an oasis.
Valerie Anderson gets emotional describing it. “The sand hills – they're like cathedrals. I mean, just towering huge longleaf pines, a mid story of turkey oaks, beautiful yellow sand, these fat millipedes just crawling around. And then just rare plants everywhere, rare plants.”
Delicate tendrils from light-pink Warea amplexifolia burst from its petals like fireworks. Bushy silver-gray silkgrass beckons bees and butterflies with its yellow flowers. Curiously named Sandhill tippitoes, found in only four Florida counties, scatter tiny olive green leaflets in the breeze.
“People would not think that we have this in Florida,” she said, “it's amazing.”
Anderson is the Director of Communications and Programming for the Florida Native Plant Society. The 7,000-member organization coordinates the Castle Hill rescues and has done dozens of others statewide. Founding member Chuck Salter staged the first series of rescues in Tallahassee in the 1970’s and volunteers have carried on ever since.
Nationwide, support of plant rescues is mixed. In Georgia, volunteers rescued 400 carnivorous hooded pitcher plants from a highway expansion project in July, calling rescues a “major effort and integral part” of the state’s Native Plant Society.
Virginia’s group meanwhile, says that “rescues do not serve the society’s mission,” as developers may use them to neutralize opposition or feign environmental care.
This could explain why, according to Anderson, developers are generally receptive to plant rescues.
For those that are hesitant: “They’re worried that we might find something that would stop them,” Anderson said, “but we can’t.” State law requires developers to relocate gopher tortoises if they find the threatened animal’s burrows on site. There is no such requirement for threatened plants.
In 1994, Florida Forever listed the Castle Hill site as a priority for acquisition, but didn’t acquire it.
“Every year we would send a letter to the Governor,” said Anderson. “‘Hey, Castle Hill is really important. We really think that you should fund it.’ And then the money would not be appropriated. We have a very firm policy that we will not rescue plants unless we’ve exhausted all options to save the land that the plants are on.”
With the acquisition of Castle Hill off the table, the Society began plant rescues in 2016. Developers were receptive. Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital, the Mattamy Homes Waterbrooke subdivision and UP Development all signed off, allowing volunteers (properly insured and permitted) to relocate plants.
By 2018, volunteers had done 1,262 hours of work at Castle Hill and rescued 121 plant species.
Encompass finished construction in 2023. One hundred acres of scrub became 75, then 40. Some plots changed hands and agreements with UP development fell through.
In a phone call, a representative from UP development said he wasn’t sure why rescues stopped.
Today, rescuers work the last half-mile sliver of the lot – and even that is destined for a county road project in 2025.
The plant rescue process
Plant rescue operations themselves are less action-packed than the name implies — though plant lovers speak in hushed tones about secret, midnight rescues on plots where developers aren’t as welcoming, risking trespassing for ecological preservation Robin Hood-style.
The Florida Native Plant Society has an annual budget of less than $400,000. The group doesn’t own a trailer, an ATV or any sort of special equipment. Instead, Anderson said, “a little email chain goes out the night before. And it's like, ‘hey, can Ben bring the truck and the trailer?’”
Sure enough, Ben Gugliotti of the St. Johns River Water Management District pulled into the parking lot in a white Chevy Silverado on Oct. 17, completing the team of four cheerful volunteers.
There was Julie Becker, blonde-haired and leather-gloved; Laura Bennett-Kimble, a native Michigander and English graduate turned Florida naturalist; and Anderson, accompanied by her loyal cattle dog, Dixie.
Up on the sand hills, each volunteer filled pots with precision, rattling off genuses.
“There’s Pityopsis, Liatris,” Anderson said, gesturing to spiky stems and towering fuchsia buds. The latter is one of her favorites with, “a long flowering stalk, maybe three feet long that you can see waving in the breeze.”
There are less-technical names, too. For Seymeria cassioides: “If you look straight down, the branching – it’s a square,” Bennett-Kimble said, “and so we all adopted the term ‘the square plant’ and then one of the other rescuers decided to embellish that name, so now it’s called ‘Sponge Bob square plant.’”
As she laughs, Bennett-Kimble lines the base of a quart-sized pot with “duff”: leaves, needles and other dead plant matter. She adds in a scoop of sand, still moist from recent rain, and sinks her trowel into the ground around a Pityopsis aequilifolia. She carves a careful cone, airlifting the plant and its gnarly roots into the sandy bed she created. Another scoop of soil and a douse of water on top and the pot is ready to go.
Volunteers collected 82 plants in all, loaded them into the trailer and carefully cataloged them by species and recipient site.
Becker took a few plants to the Oakland Nature Preserve, a sandhill site on the edge of Lake Apopka. Gugliotti drove the rest to “Little Italy,” a boot-shaped sandy habitat on the 20,000-acre Lake Apopka North Shore property that receives 60-100 plants during each week of the Native Plant Society’s rescues.
At each site, the plants rest in misty shade for a week before being planted in a habitat that closely resembles (though can never perfectly imitate) their home’s sandy soil ecosystem.
“You can’t take those plants immediately and just shove them in the ground. Even in the perfect place, even in the same conditions, they're stressed,” Anderson said.
“We usually will wait ‘til we get anywhere from 600 to 900 and then we'll do planting with volunteers and staff and whoever else we can, you know, beg, borrow or cajole to help us,” Gugliotti said.
“It's a great relationship for us. As land managers, when you're doing restorations, you're looking for plant material,” he added, and commercial nurseries, even those that offer Florida native plants, can’t match rescues’ ecological diversity and hyperlocal genotypes.
A freezer full of genetic diversity
While the Florida Native Plant Society focuses on urgent, emergency rescues, the similarly named but wholly separate Florida Plant Rescue Initiative centers its efforts on long-term conservation collections.
Partners of the initiative aim to collect and preserve populations of Florida’s native plants.
Florida Plant Rescue pays partners $3,000 per collection, part of which goes toward a seed spa session. Partners carefully wash and dry the seeds so they don’t rot during storage, then pack some 3,000 of them into aluminum foil packets for storage at -20 ℃.
Some seeds stay local, waiting in the wings at botanical gardens throughout Florida. Others travel across the country to the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation in Ft. Collins, Colorado: a hub of global plant diversity.
“It could seem kind of anticlimactic opening what looks like a normal chest freezer. But then you think about all of the different plant species being conserved in what is sort of an innocuous setting, it's actually really interesting, really amazing to think about,” said Shannon Fowler of the Center for Plant Conservation, parent organization of the Florida Plant Rescue Initiative.
The seed banks are a massive backup system: a reservoir of genetics. If a certain plant population takes a hit, whether from a hurricane, development or food web change, seeds can be reintroduced in the wild to keep its numbers stable.
A local microcosm of global decline
Plant rescues and seed banking aren’t just hobbies. They’re an effort to preserve a part of Florida’s natural identity that is slipping away.
Hanna Rosner-Katz of the Florida Plant Rescue Initiative uses historical records (some 80,000 of them) to scope out where to find rare plants. As land use changes drive biodiversity loss, a problem arises.
“This plant was last seen here 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and we go and we're just not finding it. It's not there anymore,” she said.
Those losses reverberate through the ecosystem, said Doug Tallamy, a professor of agriculture and natural resources at the University of Delaware.
“We've already lost 3 billion breeding birds in this country. That's a third of our North American bird population already gone. We've got global insect decline. None of that is an option,” he said. “We’ve forgotten that they provide the life support that keeps us on this planet.”
A state of development
Castle Hill, with its shimmering for lease signs amid a sea of shrubbery, is emblematic of a statewide trend. Development spans 5.4 million acres in Florida: 15% of the state.
If current patterns hold, development will claim more than a third of the state’s land by 2070. That’s according to Florida 2070, a collaboration between the University of Florida’s Geoplan Center, 1000 Friends of Florida and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
Central Florida is a particular hotspot for development’s sprawl. It’s shielded from coastal flooding, innervated by I-4 and funded by increased tourist spending. Lake County, home of the Castle Hill site, makes statewide development rates seem slow.
By 2070, more than 46% of the county could be under parking lots and Publix supermarkets.
But it's not a lost cause. Nearly a third of the county is in conservation land, and last year, the number of acres sold to conservation doubled compared to 2022. The cost of those sales tripled.
According to a 2024 Assessment of Florida’s Conservation Lands by the Office of Economic and Demographic Research, Florida agencies would need to pay more than $41 billion to acquire the 3.2 million acres federal, state, county and local plans have listed for conservation.
At the current rate of spending on land acquisition, it would take 488 years.
Copyright 2024 WUFT 89.1
