Tough Little Beauties

The Dwarf Lake Iris blooming in late spring on Beaver Island. Photo by Diana Fairbanks.

When we think of rarity and value, precious stones may come to mind, jewels whose glittering beauty is condensed and crystalline.  Gems are scarce; close to indestructible, hence their worth.  Fragility also can render things rare and precious.  Rare means few, although the rarity may once have been abundant, even common.  Human activity has affected the rarity of many once-common plants, animals, and kinds of natural communities.

At French Bay State Natural Area on Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan, there are abundant arrays of the Dwarf Lake Iris (Iris lacustris).  From the iris, I learned that fragility is situation.  Although the plant is regarded as a threatened species by both the state and federal governments, these bright, beckoning 1 ½-inch high irises are both fragile and not.

When they are flowering, around Memorial Day, it looks like there's a welcoming scatter of stars upon the conifer duff, striking pale-lavender irises with white blazes leading to saffron-colored stubbly beards.  Fans of scimitar-sharp jade leaves outnumber the flowers and denote the irises' presence.

Stephanie Mills, left, and other members of the expedition, Betty and Peter Mann, "airlifted" containers of cookies to summer students and faculty at the CMU biostation on Beaver Island. Photo by Diana Fairbanks.

The blossoms won't wait, and the iris won't grow just anywhere.  It was necessary, and a rare pleasure at the end of May, to take a break from another project to fly to Beaver Island to see the irises in bloom.

During the last glaciation, Iris lacustris probably migrated as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee.  They now live on the shores of northern Lake Michigan and Lake Huron in a narrow zone of dynamic extremes in coastal forests at the margins of limestone gravel and cobble beaches.  Irises require the partial shade of the cedar, hemlock, and other evergreens that grow between the open water and the hardwood forest a little further inland.  To flower, they need some, but not too much direct sunlight.  "Calcophiles," the irises also need that limestone chemistry, the soils that derive from this northern Michigan parent rock.  What's more, they need the lakes' tribulation:

"Lakeshore disturbance in the form of wave action, ice scouring, fluctuating water levels, and wind damage to the adjacent forest edge," write James Van Kley and Dan Wujek in a monograph on the iris, "may help maintain the openings, small trees, and thin soils essential for Iris lacustris."

These threatened plants are tough enough to endure through the years up near the Straits of Mackinac; tough enough to endure wind and ice and blowing sand; to survive under the snow; to cope with the fluctuating lake levels and changing precipitation. They've occupied their niche, and it has conditioned them for millennia.

The view looking south from the landing strip on Beaver Island. Photo by Diana Fairbanks.

In their natural habitat, Dwarf Lake Iris seem plentiful.  During their brief moment in the sun, they're certainly the showiest of the wildflowers.  My companions and I noted many swaths of iris leaves and flowers by the path that led down to French Bay.  We saw them back under the low-slung cedar boughs in the shoreside forest where the light could angle through and in places a little farther from the beach's edge, where a gap in the canopy might let the sunshine fall.

The walk to French Bay takes you down from the level of ancient Lake Algonquin, which existed about 11,000 years BP (before present), towards today's Lake Michigan.  We threaded a narrow trail down a twenty-foot bluff, admiring the abundant jacks-in-the-pulpit, wild sarsaparilla, Solomon's seal, and the numerous delicate sedges, ferns, and mosses of the forest floor.  Along the way to the shore were swampy, tea-colored ponds, their dark surfaces perfectly mirroring the enormous leaves of skunk cabbage.  White birches shone among the grey trunks of beech, maple, hemlock and their equally somber-barked associates.

In this emerald realm under the hardwood canopy, Black throated green warblers called "zee zee zee zoo zee," black and white warblers "weeza weeza weeza," their songs mingling with those of pewees, wood thrushes, and countless others.  Breeding season bird surveys on Beaver Island have found almost ninety bird species there.

Arriving at French Bay, all the colors change.  There's a long, bleached sweep of pebbly shore, an acid-green, algae-rich slough, and sand and gravel bar exposed by falling lake levels.  Shorebirds skitter on the bar, while tadpoles shimmy in the warm soupy water left in the slough.  Visible across Lake Michigan's deep-hued waters, other islands of this archipelago float, forested.

Ram's head orchids, also fairly uncommon, blooming on Beaver Island. Photo by Diana Fairbanks.

More than once I've heard old-timers say that their folks thought the woods would never end.  Like most forested places in the Lakes states, Beaver Island was cut over a few times.  Sure enough, the trees have grown back, but with each cutting some richness of the forest is lost.

It takes more than three or four kinds of trees, trout lilies, and trilliums to make a Great Lakes forest.  It takes a rich and fitting community of wildflowers like the irises, violets, polygala, wild lily-of-the-valley, and starflowers.  It takes snags and stumps and root wads, tip-ups and widow makers.  It takes fallen tree limbs and trunks crisscrossed like jackstraws to structure the niches for all the animals necessary to the forest's flourishing.  The habitat preferences of the many bird species can be as various as their songs and plumage, ranged from treetops to cavities in snags to quiet places on the forest floor.

To maintain a water regime that can sustain a diverse Great Lakes forest, it takes mosses and ferns and unbroken canopy.  It takes the kinds of ants that plant some of those wildflowers' seeds, takes the squirrels to plant the heavy-seeded trees, and even wood turtles to plant may apples.  All unseen by aboveground eyes, it takes webs of fungus-the mycorrhizae-to connect the roots of the forest plants and enhance the subtly linked plant community's ability to take up nutrients form the soil.

It takes uninterrupted millennia to grow a real forest on a dune-covered hunk of limestone in Lake Michigan, and only some form of natural areas protection can secure the time for the forest to continue.  One hundred and fifty years ago, the old-growth forest communities around French Bay would have been nothing special.  More of Michigan was natural than not.  Soon enough there was woodcutting at French Bay, as in most places where there were woods to be cut. Moss- and lichen-covered stacks of cedar bear witness to that cutting today. Dating from the wooding days, these firewood stacks rest low and linear a little way back from the shore, resembling old stone walls.

Logging is drastic, but even light visitation can undermine the integrity of wild places.  Spotted knapweed, a ruinous invasive species, was growing on the beach at French Bay.  There are only a few knapweed plants there so far, but ecological invasions begin with only a few alien organisms.  Like other visitors, I may have carried in a few exotic seeds on the soles of my shoes and served as another vector. This innocent human potential to damage nature is difficult to own.

There's nothing natural about a crowd of tourists, however respectful and careful each one of them may be.  It's a good thing that there wasn't a well-marked trail to facilitate streams of visitors to French Bay.  The dwarf lake iris aren't fragile, except that they could be quietly loved to death or, worse, annihilated by the clearing and soil disturbance that inevitably accompany lakeside construction.  What is fragile, then, is the integrity of the habitat and its natural community as it has developed over time. 

Preserving and protecting places like French Bay-the once-common places that have become rare, precious, and fragile-means that there may be a future for all those tough little beauties like the Dwarf Lake Iris.  The existence of French Bay, and all of Northwest Lower Michigan's nature preserves, means that we, as a people, are showing respect for other life communities, showing the restraint that is a sign of decency.  We can afford to let those places be as they are and protect their integrity.  This means that the future just might include a new abundance of sweet old beauties that passed through a perilous time of being threatened and rare.

Stephanie Mills is a bioregionalist and author and also serves as president of the Bay Bucks board.