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by Pete Diamond, Horticultural Taxonomist
N.C. Zoo
photo: Rob Gardner/NC Botanical Garden
In a sea of autumn’s yellow blooms, the slender, yellow sunflowers are indistinguishable to many people. As a symbol of Randolph County’s irreplaceable natural heritage, the sunflowers clearly stand out for plant-loving other local residents in much the same way as the Seagrove potteries, the Pettycord Airplane Museum or NASCAR. Schweinitz’s Sunflowers, whose fleshy roots nurtured early residents of the North Carolina Piedmont, are losing out to increasing urban development.
N.C. Department of Transportation (NCDOT) roadway improvements and paving along Mountain View Church Road, northwest of Asheboro, are spelling the end of a long era for literally thousands of federally endangered Schweinitz’s sunflowers. Armed with shovels, picks and grim determination, workers from the NCDOT, the N.C. Zoo, the N.C. Plant Conservation Program and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set about the daunting task of rescuing the Schweinitz’s sunflower plants from the narrow road shoulder and ditches of Mountain View Church Road. Because this is a state road and no federal funds are involved in the paving project, there were also no funds available for restoring the plants to a secure location.
With the ominous sound of earth-moving and road-grading equipment in the distance, the 22 workers carried bucketloads of sunflowers to an adjacent site for transplanting. Under a conservation easement drafted by the Piedmont Land Conservancy, Asheboro residents Ellen Howell and David Norcom will donate a one-acre, triangular tract of their land for protection of these plants. The landowners say they are not against economic growth or progress, but they do believe in protecting wild places and the natural beauty of Randolph County.
The site is managed by Zoo horticulturists to provide a protected, off-road site for the sunflowers to grow. Over time, the area will be shaped to replicate a slice of piedmont prairie, the sunflowers’ native habitat. The sunflower relocation effort was prompted by NCDOT efforts to complete road improvements to this unpaved stretch of roadway.
Arcing west from Caraway Mountain Road and south to Old Lexington Road, Mountain View Church road is paved along its north-south span. But the east-to-west corridor has remained unpaved.
Back in the mid-1970s, reluctant landowners living along this stretch of the road prevented its completion. The make-up of local residents has changed in the intervening decades and so has their desire for a paved road. These citizens are welcoming the day when airborne dust from speeding cars and four-wheelers will become a thing of the past.
They look forward, they say, to an era when deer hunters will cease to drop off unwelcome animal carcasses along their road and visibility is improved when sharp curves are straightened. Life will surely be better, these residents insist, when a paved road will whisk them to their homes.
When the road resurfaced on NCDOT’s list of priority paving projects, the population of Schweinitz’s Sunflowers raised the possibility that the project might once again be delayed. Some residents living along the unpaved roadway reacted with frustration, impatience and resentment towards the sunflowers.
Named in honor of Alfred von Schweinitz, an intrepid Quaker botanist who traveled North Carolina’s Piedmont in the 1700s, the fall-blooming sunflowers have persisted along the unassuming stretch of Mountain View Church Road for hundreds, even thousands, of years. NCDOT officials, utility companies, botanists and even some Mountain View residents have long known the presence of these sunflowers.
Unfortunately, progress that comes in the form of blacktop roads too often comes at the expense of lost or severely degraded habitats for many rare or endangered plant species across North Carolina. Many would argue that this practice is merely a backdoor approach to conservation because the plants are no longer growing in a completely natural environment. Relocating plants does not address the problem of habitat loss. Protecting habitats, they say, is the key to conserving species. Because of local outreach programs and rare plant monitoring by the Zoo’s horticulture staff, this particular population of Schweinitz’s sunflowers will not become just another historical record of a bygone era. The timely, Zoo-led relocation project prevented the sunflowers’ extinction in this corner of Randolph County.
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