Botanist Finds Rare Plant--in Back Yard : Missouri: Topsoil delivered to his home sprouted trifolium stoloniferum, also known as running buffalo clover, which had all but vanished in the wild.
For someone who makes his living studying plants, George Yatskievych is an indifferent gardener.
It took the botanist several months to notice that a load of topsoil delivered to his home in St. Louis was sprouting several clusters of trifolium stoloniferum-- also known as running buffalo clover, a native plant that had all but vanished in Missouri.
“I was out weeding a flower bed near this topsoil, down on my knees, when I sort of came nose to nose with these things,” said Yatskievych, who works at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.
“You spend all this time and effort looking for this in nature. . . . (The discovery) was so unexpected.”
Yatskievych and other botanists took the six clovers found in his topsoil and began a project to reintroduce the plant to Missouri. Now, about five years after his discovery, the Missouri Department of Conservation oversees 700 seedlings in 25 experimental plots statewide.
Yatskievych, who serves as an adviser to DOC botanists, says results have been mixed. Botanists need several years to learn what habitat the plant requires and whether it will be able to reproduce naturally, Yatskievych said.
The clover, which once ran wild from the eastern Great Plains to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.
“By clover standards, it’s a very pretty plant,” Yatskievych said. “It has larger flowers than the common weedy clover, and the plant itself is a very elegant plant.”
Buffalo fed on the plant’s long runners, and botanists think they helped propagate the plant in two ways, Yatskievych said: They trampled areas, wiping out the clover’s natural competitors and giving it an open space to take root, and they spread the seeds through their droppings.
The decimation of the buffalo herds may be one reason the running buffalo clover declined, experts say. The last known geographic sample in Missouri was found in 1907.
In recent years botanists have found “remnant populations” in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, Yatskievych said.
But botanists in Missouri still haven’t found it occurring naturally despite intense field surveys in 1990, 1991 and 1992 after Yatskievych’s back-yard discovery.
His topsoil was traced to an area along the Meramec River near St. Louis in Jefferson County, but Yatskievych and others have not found clovers at the site.
“We don’t know whether the seeds I got in my topsoil were washed downstream from some population that’s still growing or whether they were buried some time ago and simply remained in the soil layer until they were exposed when the topsoil was moved,” Yatskievych said.
Botanists know of other seed species that have survived in rodent holes for hundreds of years.
In Kansas, the last known sample of running buffalo clover was taken in Miami County in 1895, according to Ralph Brooks, a senior environmental scientist at a Kansas City engineering firm. He was one of 13 botanists from universities and colleges who collaborated on the book “Flora of the Great Plains,” published in 1986.
“As far as we know there are no living (buffalo clover) plants in Kansas,” said Brooks, who at the time was assistant director of the University of Kansas herbarium.
Botanists in West Virginia have had more luck finding running buffalo clover in the wild, though it’s still rare, said P. J. Harmon, a botanist for the state’s Natural Heritage Program.
Yatskievych said the seedlings that came from the clovers in his topsoil are “quite precious” because they are the only genetic material for the clover from the state of Missouri. It will be unfortunate if they can’t be coaxed into growing naturally, he said.
