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The Plants Also

I was doing a bonus working with biology and botany for Lord Sinjin's Next Comfy Couch stuff when I was reminded that I hadn't checked on the plant habitat situation. So after having asked a friend to make a few tiny posts on my Animal Project to get awareness on the ones we are losing spreading. I was like ... you can't wait on plants.


And then I went looking for the numbers needing the fatest documentation. These next facts were pulled based on a search.


Deforestation Added So Much to the Plight
Deforestation Added So Much to the Plight

Number of Plants Facing Extinction


5702 lifeforces ending and needing documented and help. And that isn't even the most breaking thing to me...




Imagine that we DON'T EVEN KNOW!!!! We don't know the lives in danger. We don't know what they mean and do. There could be some plant in there that cures diseases. There could be plants that are being lost causing those declines to the animals.



Conservation is important for all of us and we all matter, the plants matter, for we all matter.


And here is information Claude Sonnet 4.6 pulled for me.... I need real researchers helping me on these projects. Volunteers .... botansists, herbalists, doctors, medicine makers, heck the local witch doctor as your old medicine "woman" well she knew things like no one else.

ARMERIA ARCUATA

I vanished and no one noticed.



Where: One place only. Vila Nova de Milfontes, southwestern Portugal. Atlantic cliff coast inside a protected natural park. Nowhere else on earth.


What it looked like: Low-growing, woody subshrub. Tight mound of stiff, narrow, dark green leaves resembling ornamental grass. Pink to white globe-shaped flower clusters on slender stems rising above the leaves. Purplish papery bracts beneath the flowers.


(Imagine that kids a little soft thing like the breath of imagination)



Scent: Minimal. Quiet coastal green floral note consistent with the family. Not fragrant in the traditional sense.


(Kids this means understated, not overwhelming. Not bold and announcing but quiet just like it's leaving us.)


What it did: Held ground on salt-soaked cliff faces that almost nothing else could survive. Fed bees, butterflies, beetles, flies, and moths. Copper-tolerant. Salt-tolerant. A foundational cliff plant with no replacement.


(It was a fighter that clung to the hard place. Salt is often a killer of all plants but this one found a way.)


Medicinal: The dried plant has antibiotic properties. Historical use for urinary infections, nervous disorders, obesity, tuberculosis, and hangovers. An ancient belief it treated lead poisoning — which is where the family name Plumbaginaceae comes from. Cannot be used as an external poultice — causes skin irritation.


(Imagine that an antibiotic! Most folks have an allergy to something even if they didn't have it. I'm allergic to the Cillans and a list of things. Every single different one helps and is used to treat different things.)


Cultivatable: Yes. Sandy, well-drained, full sun, lean soil. Drought tolerant. Propagates from seed or cuttings. Needs the right conditions or it rots.


(Plants if they have bonus methods of life stand often a better chance of regrowth from even a SINGLE plant.)


Why it's gone: Hybridized with a related species. The hybrid survived in a Dutch botanical garden. The original did not. Science confirmed the distinction too late.


(Hybridizing is often a result of trying to survive or a botanist splicing, but this happened when no one was paying attention. They confirmed the change too late as a subtle change sometimes escape human eyes.)


What to do if found: Distribute to multiple botanical gardens first. Stabilize numbers. Then reintroduce to the Portuguese coast.




DIGITARIA LAEVIGLUMIS — Smooth Slender Crabgrass

I Only Had a Single Home

It was destroyed

When it ended

I left the skies never more to spread my leaves and give breath to other things.


Where: One place only. Rock Rimmon — a prominent rock outcropping on the West Side of Manchester, New Hampshire. Unionleader Specifically in dry peaty hollows in gneiss bedrock. BioOne Nowhere else on earth.


(Not found anywhere else doesn't mean there might not be a place with it in bonus, but if we find another we must hold onto it and be careful.)


What it looked like: Dense tufts. Culms 50 to 115 cm tall, erect, firm, slender, glabrous and lustrous. Leaves narrow — about 1 mm wide and up to 25 cm long, folded or involute and slightly flexuous. Small delicate spikelets. BioOne Not the aggressive lawn weed people picture when they hear crabgrass. Smooth slender crabgrass differs from the weedy non-native crabgrasses found in lawns. Nh Slender. Quiet. Easy to overlook.


(Sort of makes you think of something praying or lifting their head up to sing. That's rather a spiritual moment.)


Why one place: Rock Rimmon is a botanical hotspot. Records dating back to 1899 document ten state-endangered and state-threatened plant species. Unionleader The geology created conditions that supported things that grew nowhere else.


(This was a unique ecosystem. And that makes it harder to survive. This region lost means multiple plants need help here. One casualty that eradicates a species so now I mean to document the others.)


How it was lost — this one is complicated: Heavy recreation use, severe soil erosion on the summit, and competition from non-native crabgrasses all contributed. Nh But there is a painful additional detail — the high number of collections from 1931, made by botanists as a way to formally document the species, may have inadvertently contributed to its demise.


Nh The people trying to preserve the record of it may have helped finish it off. Twelve rare plant surveys conducted between 1992 and 2021 were unsuccessful in relocating it. University of New Hampshire


(Sometimes, you can't take the cowboy out of the country into the city. Things are too foreign. The air, the soil, the environment.)


The Mexico hope that didn't hold: Scientists found similar plants in Mexico and Venezuela and hoped. Recently concluded scientific studies determined those samples were not a match. Nh Gone.


(Sometimes you think you have the same plant. You know its sort of like looking at identical twins. Neither one is fully identical, but they do fool face readers and cameras at times. But you look you will find or sense it, this one, ah yes this one is different. There were twins and triplets in my school and you felt them being different souls.)


If found: Botanists cannot prove 100% extinction — there is slim hope it may exist on some outcrop in Maine. Granite Geek The habitat requirement is very specific: dry peaty hollows in granite ledge. Full sun. Urban setting acceptable — rare plants do exist in city parks.


(Rare plants in city parks... this is something I want a scientist to tell me. Are they talking this plant or are they talking something related. As they believe extinct, I want to assume its something related and it lends hope they'd survive there.)


Scale of the loss: First documented plant extinction in New Hampshire and only the fifth in New England since European settlement. Nh


(THE Fifth wave....plants tend to go in groups. Imagine a rainforest and it being stripped HOW MANY WERE LOST?)


DELISSEA SINUATA

Another Single Home

It was lost

Now where are

The Singing Birds


Where: Known only from the Waianae Mountains on the island of O'ahu, Hawaii. Last observed in 1937. Mongabay Nowhere else on earth.


(This was my place. A mountain peak where the birds fly high.)


What it looked like: It grew up to four feet high and bore striking purple berries. The Revelator Easy to spot if it still existed.


(These berries are beautiful and I have never tasted them. I'd love to know if they aren't poisonous.)


What destroyed it: Nonnative species heavily degraded its former habitat. The Revelator Hawaii is frequently referred to as the extinction capital of the world for exactly this reason — introduced species consistently overwhelm plants that evolved in isolation with no defenses against them.


(CrOwDeD yep crowded like that where the letters close in and in to where suddenly there was no room. This is sometimes why plants evolve. They sometimes adapt for that reason and other times they can't. Survival of the fitest is a sad thing at times, but both were trying to hang on.)


Scale of the problem in Hawaii: Five Hawaiian honeycreeper bird species were recently declared extinct, removed from the US Endangered Species Act — the Kauai akialoa, Kauai nukupuu, Maui akepa, Maui nukupuu, and po'ouli. IFAW Delissea sinuata is part of a pattern of island-wide loss.


(Birds gone and vanished for the death of this plant. They need to be documented as fast as I can while their voices still sing in the mind and maybe someone has their calling songs on top. The vanishing loses are growing wider in both directions. Loss of the plants loss of the life. The dominos fall together)


If found: Habitat restoration would need to come first. Removing invasive species from any rediscovery site before the plant could survive there again. Propagation from seed or cutting if any specimen exists in herbarium collections with viable material.


Declared extinct: 2025, IUCN Red List.


(To give them life back they need room same as other living things do. Room and space and a place to be uniquely them.)


When things are vanishing someone has to capture them. It is the reason why diaries are so valuable. That is the record. That is the moment. They are best aided with photographs. I found but one with images and I am calling for aid for all information so we can preserve what we can. Plants and animals cannot write for themselves so I mean to write for them.
When things are vanishing someone has to capture them. It is the reason why diaries are so valuable. That is the record. That is the moment. They are best aided with photographs. I found but one with images and I am calling for aid for all information so we can preserve what we can. Plants and animals cannot write for themselves so I mean to write for them.


I am calling also for this. But this will not be the end of my project to document everything on earth and the call in my heart to save and preserve the voices hiding in silence. I hope you felt the call and if you have information will share it with me. This is not something I can do alone. But I will do all I can.


Of the three plants, only one had pictures created. Check the reference sheet, and this is why this added project matters.


Plants are so very close that it is hard to know them, but even if you spotted something close it is a start and hope. Sort of like what children are to humans.


Children are the extension of our souls. The hope and light going forth. But we are all unique, we all broke the mold, and even two plants have different stories. But extinct means no more relations, no more continuance. Being remembered is vital to all of us. This project means to grab hold of all we can so we can hold onto the past.

One by one as the dominos fall guess who will also fall?
One by one as the dominos fall guess who will also fall?

 
 
 

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