A rare flower makes botanists think again
The Brooksville bellflower, once thought to be extinct, is found where it's not supposed to be.
By MARTY CLEAR, Times Correspondent
Published September 24, 2007
The pretty blue flower was so tiny and seemingly insignificant that Carmel van Hoek almost overlooked it.
It was just as an afterthought that she decided to pick the flower and bring it home.
"I was bending down to pick another plant, and I saw this vivid blue color and I thought, 'Well, I might as well get one of those too,'" van Hoek said.
It took a while, but eventually van Hoek, a 71-year-old amateur botanist from Tampa, realized she had discovered something truly extraordinary in a cow pasture at Hillsborough River State Park. It was a find that would excite scientists around the state and set them off searching for clues to an intriguing botanical mystery.
It was Campanula robinsiae. The Brooksville bellflower.
"It's one of the rarest flowers in the world, absolutely," said Cheryl Peterson, conservation program manager at Historic Bok Sanctuary in Lake Wales. Peterson said that investigating the implications of van Hoek's discovery has become a pet project for the Bok staff.
The Brooksville bellflower is a bit of a wallflower, and there's a reason for that.
Until van Hoek made her discovery in early 2006, botanists thought that the flower existed in only one place in the entire world -- a hillside near Brooksville in Hernando County.
Richard Wunderlin, director of the botany department at the University of South Florida, said in a 1982 book that the Brooksville bellflower was "probably extinct." A few years later, a USF student discovered the plant growing in Hernando County.
It had never been seen anywhere else, so botanists figured it needed unique soil and water conditions. So firmly entrenched was that belief that van Hoek, who volunteers to collect and catalog plants in Florida's state parks, simply couldn't convince herself that she held in her hands a genuine Campanula robinsiae.
All the tools and reference books at her disposal kept indicating that she had found the Brooksville bellflower growing in Hillsborough County, but she didn't believe it. "It kept coming back to this bellflower and I said, 'This can't be. Where am I going wrong?'" she said.
She went to see Dr. Bruce Hansen, the curator of the USF Herbarium and asked him to show her the error in her methodology.
Hansen inspected the flower more closely and declared that she had, indeed, found Campanula robinsiae in Hillsborough State Park.
Not much is known about the Brooksville bellflower. The main thing that botanists thought they knew -- that it could grow only in the Brooksville area -- now turns out to be wrong.
Here's what they do know: It was first discovered in the early 1900s. It's an annual plant, so it only grows from January to early April, and apparently only near ponds. For most of that time, it's an inconspicuous ground cover plant, smaller than a blade of grass.
It blooms for a couple of weeks in late March and then dies out. Its seeds can stay dormant for at least a few years and then come to life when conditions are exactly right.
"There's not much money available to study rare Florida plants, so we don't know a whole lot about it," Peterson said.
One mystery that Peterson and other scientists will now look into is how the bellflower made its way from Brooksville to Thonotosassa without growing anywhere in between.
It's possible that an aquatic bird picked up some mud on its feet in Brooksville, and some of the minuscule bellflower seeds -- which look like ground black pepper -- were in the mud. The bird may have flown to Hillsborough State Park, where the mud dried and the seeds fell off.
It's possible that underground water flows in such a way that seeds could have spread from Brooksville.
Or maybe the two known populations of Brooksville bellflowers came from a third colony that died out years ago.
That's something Peterson will be checking out in the months to come. If the bellflower grows next year, she'll take DNA samples from the Hillsborough and Brooksville fields and see how closely related the flowers are to try to get some clues.
And maybe the Brooksville bellflower is misnamed.
Perhaps it actually started in Hillsborough, and then somehow got to Brooksville. It may have been growing there undiscovered all along.
"We didn't think it could grow there," Peterson said. "So we never looked."