The Nature of Eureka

365

Leatherwood Matters

Being in Maine, makes me think of touchstones – significant moments, places, people, even plants that for one reason or another define a lifetime. For me, it is coming back to Cumberland, Maine, to visit my family, where my dad has lived in the same house since 1939.

Coming home is coming home. Here I find genetic touchstones. I discovered on this trip that the ancestors of three of my four grandparents arrived on different ships from different countries in the first wave of European immigrants in the 1630s, all landing in Essex County, Massachusetts.

My touchstone to American history was learning that not one, but two 7th great-grandfathers, served in the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. Other touchstones are more subtle, like a non-native wild celandine plant (Chelidonium majus) that has survived as a weed in flowerbed in the same spot for more than 40 years. A simple plant, and a weed at that, is a touchstone.

Eureka Springs has a unique botanical touchstone – Leatherwood, namesake of the various branches of Leatherwood creeks, and, of course of Lake Leatherwood City Park. What makes it more than a namesake, and truly an indigenous botanical touchstone for all of us is that most of the Leatherwood shrub (or small tree) is an unique and globally rare, species Dirca decipiens, or Ozark leatherwood. So rare and unique, in fact, that it was a species new to science in 2009.

First collected in Arkansas a decade ago, the obvious place to look for it was in Lake Leatherwood City Park, itself. And throughout the Park, we (the botanical nerds among us) are beginning to get the sense (and data), absent a formal botanical survey of the entire Park, that the largest concentration in the world of Ozark Leatherwood is in Lake Leatherwood City Park.

Jill E. Web, a consulting botanist on a plant restoration project at Acadia National Park in Maine, when describing saving rare plants at that park, said, “Species matter, they just inherently matter.” (June 29, 2019 “Acadia on my mind” blog).

That struck a nerve. As Eureka Springs resident, Sharon Roberts, demonstrated in her public comments at the June 16, 2019 Parks Commission meeting when she showed the remains of a Leatherwood tree that had been cut along a trail (unwanted, unidentified vegetation), the words “species matter, they just inherently matter,” rings true.