Apalachicola National Forest sits just southwest of Tallahassee. It’s about a thousand square miles of protected land housing a huge variety of different ecosystems.
Amy Jenkins is a botanist for the Florida Natural Areas Inventory, and she’s leading a day trip for a group called the Florida Native Plant Society.
“We are going to go look at a population of Harper’s Beauty which is Harperocallis Flava,” Jenkins says. “It’s a federally endangered plant that almost only occurs in this forest.”
Harper’s Beauty is one of four federally protected plants that call the forest home. They all depend on fire to clear groundcover so they can grow. But finding them can be difficult. The flowers are tiny—Harper’s Beauty is only about half an inch wide, and when it’s not in bloom it can be really difficult to spot.
At the first stop Jenkins describes its habitat.
“This population is in the most typical habitat you see it in,” Jenkins says, “which is not thousands of plants in an open prairie like at Ann’s Bog.”
“It is along the edge of these thinner, narrow wet prairie eco-tones, you could call them, and it’ll grow right up to the palmetto,” Jenkins says. “So for the first two years I actually wasn’t even looking in the right place.”
The group makes its way out to the spot along a narrow path through the palmetto. Harper’s Beauty does well where wet prairie meets wet flatwoods, but there’s more to it than just the intersection of the two. It clumps at different points rather than growing all down the line. Jenkins hasn’t figured out why quite yet—she says it might be moisture, or soil chemistry, or something completely different. One of the group members, Scott Davis, works at the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, and he’s brought along a pH tester.
“I’m getting readings that would suggest the soil is basic as opposed to acidic,” Davis says, “which normally you think of acidic soils in these ecosystems—or at least a shallow layer on top that’s acidic.”
The patch of ground where the flower’s growing is slightly higher and drier than the rest of the grassy area surrounding it.
“So maybe it creates an environment, a microclimate—microhabitat—where the pH is high enough for them to proliferate. Not sure yet. It’s just initial stuff, yeah, we’ll see,” Davis says.
As much as Harper’s Beauty is hard to find, the carnivorous plants are tough to miss. In the same small space there are at least five different species.
The pitcher plants come from the genus Sarracenia. The most common one looks like a thin yellowish cone standing straight up. It’s got a small flap covering the open top.
There’s another that’s green and dark purple sitting low to the ground. It collects water in a handful of bulbous pitchers.
A third has one big flower surrounded by pitchers topped by what kind of looks like a bird’s beak.
Jason Drake is an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. He says the pitcher plants are pitfall traps.
“But there’s also like Sundews would be more of like sometimes called like a fly paper kind of trap,” Drake says. “They have that kind of sticky substance there that—and even tentacles that kind of bend and hold onto the prey as they try to escape.”
And Drake says the Forest has way more than just plants that are picky about habitat or a bit unique in their eating habits.
“The Apalachicola River area—the kind of water shed around it that includes the Apalachicola National Forest—is really one of five hotspots for species rarity and richness,” Drake says.
That means the Apalachicola forest not only has species that are hard to find, but it also has a significant amount of biodiversity. There’s a lot to see, and there are many different ways to see it. The forest has numerous recreation areas for hiking, fishing, camping and other outdoor activities.
