Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction

Georgann Eubanks cares passionately about native plants. I love the way she writes! Her purpose in penning this volume is to urgently sound the alarm to raise awareness of the plant species that are being lost each year to human encroachment and development. Saving the Wild South highlights several of the most threatened and endangered florae of the Southeast; this is Georgann Eubanks’ forum to plead for protection for these and countless other as-yet-unappreciated species, many of which science is racing to catalog before they disappear.

I’m a fairly serious gardener in the mountains of Tennessee. I have learned the hard way that native plants are the happiest plants in my USDA Zone 6(b) garden. As a young gardener, mother nature taught me that, while I could almost always coax exotic plants to grow here, only the hardy Tennessee natives would reliably return and thrive in my landscape. And with only a modicum of care, I should add.

Eubanks’ style is conversational, and she is a great storyteller. The entire volume is filled with short tangents, trivialities, and tales which I found hugely entertaining. The volume is a travelogue of her adventures across Dixie with her boon companion, photographer Donna Campbell, as they assembled this volume.

I have to share a brief passage that made me laugh aloud. By the sixth chapter, the author had written eloquently about her treks and hikes into the field with biologists and botanists to view the rarest of the rare southern plants in their native habitats. I naturally assumed that Georgann Eubanks was a hardcore hiker and survivalist who could navigate field and forest like a backwoodsman. I pictured her as emerging from woods and swamps covered in mud, scratches, and insect bites after days alone in the forest primeval. But this is not quite the case, as she shared in a story about a hike she took in suburban Huntsville, Alabama.

Though I had not realized it until that point in the narrative, in every story Eubanks related about wading into a gator-infested swamp or climbing a mountaintop to see an imperiled species, she always had a guide leading the way to the secret locations of the threatened plant populations. These locations must necessarily remain hidden to prevent profit-driven collectors from raiding the plants that survive.

On the day that this story took place, Eubanks planned to hike to see a plant population in a nature preserve in the suburbs of a small city. For some reason, she was by herself that day.

“Going into a forest alone is not my usual practice. I had actually bought an air horn before I left home, anticipating this part of the trip. But it wasn’t likely, I realized, that anyone would hear the horn if I used it to scare a bear or to summon help. The description of the preserve said it is surrounded by private land and to stick to the trail. You bet I would stick to the trail….

In the end, I walked thirty minutes in, and a little more quickly out. I had not found Morefield’s leather flower or the sinkhole. I had not twisted my ankle or been bitten by anything more dire than a mosquito or two, and I had not fallen on my backside. I was glad to get back to the car, feeling a bit overwhelmed.” (p.125-6).

I love the mental image that quote invokes - of a naturalist so timid that she was afraid to go on a short hike in the suburbs without a megaphone for survival.

But the cited quote makes me appreciate this book all the more, knowing that the author had to deal with irrational panic to complete her field studies for this work.

High marks for Georgann Eubanks! My rating: 7.25/10, finished 1/16/22 (3608).