Tennessee Flower Bounces Back from Extinction

Tennessee’s Purple Coneflower. Photo by Paul Kingsbury.

The purple coneflower grows in only one place in the world: Middle Tennessee. Right now, the wild Echinacea is on the verge of winning a conservation battle.

“It’s a rather large and deeply colored flower and you couldn’t help but notice it if you passed it on a roadside or a field side.”

That’s Dr. Elsie Quarterman, the now 100-year-old botanist who rediscovered the Tennessee purple coneflower in the late 1960s, when it was thought to be extinct. Lately the bright purple flower with a spiky dark center has rebounded. Soon, the Environmental Protection Agency will announce if it’s back in force enough to be removed from the federal list of Threatened and Endangered Species.

Geoff Call, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says it’s taken 30 years to get the small flower back from the edge of extinction.

“We seldom have the opportunity to de-list species and to really point to recovery work as the reason for doing so,” he said.

 

To save it, conservationists have done everything from fencing off park areas to using fire and even goats to kill competing species. There are currently 35 colonies of it in the world, all of them in Middle Tennessee’s Cedar Glades.