Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 22, 1994 TAG: 9404280002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM STOLZENBURG
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Last May, a crew from the U.S. Forest Service and the Virginia Division of Natural Heritage set fire to a grassy patch on Peters Mountain in Western Virginia, where seeds of the endangered plant had lain dormant for decades.
One month later, the mallow had all but risen from the dead, with more than 500 sprouts poking from the ashes.
Peters Mountain mallow, a shoulder-height perennial bearing pink, hibiscus-like flowers, grows only on the mountain for which it is named. Since its discovery in 1927, the population had dwindled from a scant 50 to a dire four when the plant made the Endangered Species list in 1986.
Investigating botanists soon realized that the plants had historically relied on fire to check invading brush, and fire to crack and stimulate their seeds to germinate - fire that had been suppressed by modern society. The mallow's salvation became obvious.
In 1992, with the mallow's habitat newly encompassed by a Nature Conservancy preserve, conservancy and natural heritage ecologists lit a small experimental fire that was followed by 12 seedlings, four of which survived. A year later, a similar burn produced the bumper crop of 500.
"We never expected that many plants at once," said Caren Caljouw, the heritage ecologist who directed the burns. "But the real test is to see how many survive through the next growing season."
The mallow's prospects so far are good: An unusually high 85 percent of the 1993 crop survived its first summer.
And ecologists, hoping to awaken more sleeping seeds, have scheduled experimental burns again for this summer.
It appears that keeping Peters Mountain mallow in the fire is one good way of keeping it out of the frying pan.
William Stolzenburg is associate editor of Nature Conservancy magazine, where this first appeared.
by CNB