The grass was way too high for a picnic. So drivers headed east from Gary, passing the vacant land along the south rim of the Indiana Toll Road that Saturday afternoon in early August, must have assumed they were looking out over some kind of grisly crime scene. Why else would a cluster of seven adults, two in vaguely military-style uniforms, be wading slowly through waist-high weeds, armed with clipboards, heads down?
The second is: Where did it go?
Even thousands of wild Thismia growing together would be virtually invisible to nearly anyone other than a botanist looking for them. It’s not only a small plant, but also a clandestine one. According to the studies Pfeiffer did for her doctoral dissertation, the plant grows mostly underground and may be visible only when it’s in flower. Pfeiffer, who never saw any above-ground leaves or stalks, determined that Thismia is a saprophyte, a plant that grows in dead or decaying organic matter like the discarded leaves and dried mosses that collect on the soil’s surface around the base of prairie grasses and flowers. It has no chlorophyll, the stuff that makes plants green, so it doesn’t have any reason to emerge from the soil until it’s ready to be pollinated by insects.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But Wilhelm, who has spent two decades identifying and classifying Chicago’s native plants, says searching for Thismia is scientifically legitimate. Because only a tiny sliver of the midwest’s native landscape remains unplowed, undeveloped, or unpoisoned by the march of progress, finding the inconspicuous little native might say a lot about the state of the planet. “That something [like Thismia] still survives would say something very special about the location where it was found,” he says. “It would signify that there is still a little bit of living earth tissue left in this part of the world.”
At 10:45 AM the group left the cars on a dusty scrap of asphalt and started out on foot through a gorgeous, sun-drenched landscape dominated on one side by a sand ridge topped with muscular black oak trees and on the other by ten-foot cattails quivering in the gentle breeze. The slope in between was painted with the purple rocket-shaped blooms of wild vervain, lavender bunches atop joe-pye weed, the honey gold and black heads of black-eyed susans, and assorted greens, from the spiky rattlesnake master to the grassy, almost fluid knee-high sedges. “I look at a landscape like this and feel wistful about what it must have looked like when the Native Americans were alone here,” said Sue Crispin, the Nature Conservancy botanist. “It’s like going back in a time tunnel.”
When Norma Pfeiffer first found Thismia in 1912, she was doing exactly what modern botanists who are looking for the plant do: she was crawling around in the mud. A key difference, as more than one female hunter pointed out on Thismia Hunt day, is that Pfeiffer would have been wearing a long dress. The fact that these days women botanists, just like their male colleagues, mostly wear jeans to do this kind of work would have meant a lot to Pfeiffer, who was a lifelong “women’s libber,” according to her nephew Ralph Wood, a Chicago financial planner.
