With a cold wind to her back, and on her hands and knees, Beth Cripe stabbed the ground with a tiny trowel to make quick work of unearthing a batch of sprouting wildflowers.
Ecologists and horticult
With a cold wind to her back, and on her hands and knees, Beth Cripe stabbed the ground with a tiny trowel to make quick work of unearthing a batch of sprouting wildflowers.
Ecologists and horticulturists shudder at the thought of someone digging up the delicate prairie plants, because even the slightest disturbance less than a week before bloom can cause wildflowers to wilt and die.
But Cripe and about a dozen members of Citizens for Conservation-culminating their Earth Day activities-did exactly that Thursday as they foraged a wooded area near the border of Lake and McHenry Counties on a mission to save native plants.
The crew of volunteers plucked wildflowers from a hilly area on the outskirts of Tower Lakes in Lake County and immediately replanted them on 38 acres of protected lands in Lake Barrington.
"You have to try everything you can to make sure these flowers can be seen and enjoyed for years to come," said Waid Vanderpoel, a retired investment banker and a past president of the Barrington-based conservation group.
The purple anemone, red trillium and wild geranium were a few of the 150 plants removed by the group.
In recent years, about the most common thing sprouting up from the countryside in rapidly growing McHenry and Lake Counties has been the pitched rooftops of scores of new homes. Many of the homes sit on expansive tracts of land with plush green lawns.
"There's a real good chance these plants would be under a cement driveway in a year or so and they won't do anybody any good then," Vanderpoel added.
The conservation group has been holding what it calls plant rescues annually since it was formed in 1988. Before venturing in to remove plants, the group obtains permission from landowners. Each flower is replanted in the Flint Creek Savanna, which is owned by the conservation group.
At the site where the plants were removed Thursday, tiny red flags marked the grounds where septic lines soon will be excavated for new homes. Construction in the Tower Lakes subdivision, among towering 40-foot oak trees, is slated to begin this spring.
But in the Flint Creek Savanna, where the conservation group has invested more than $500,000 to preserve natural lands, the wildflowers are expected to thrive right along with the 75 other species of prairie and savanna flowers commonly found in the Midwest in the 1800s.
Wayne Schennum, an ecologist and botanist, said, "This is the right time of year, and if the plants are carefully dug up, they will probably survive just fine." He also is natural resource manager with the McHenry County Conservation District.
"The soil and water chemistry has to be similar for them to survive in the new area. (The conservation group) has had real good success," he added.
Charles Westcott, a prairie restoration expert with the Cook County Forest Preserve District, said he supports the effort because it preserves endangered plant life. But he said he was a bit unsettled by those who believe humans are capable of great success in replicating or moving nature's prairies and savannas.
"The idea that we can create something as good or better than nature is flawed," he said. "Once it's altered, it's just not the same anymore."
For their part, conservation group members sai