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Ohio’s Rarest Plant, the Lakeside Daisy

© Gregg Pasterick

Ohio's not a place that comes to mind when thinking about rare species, plant or animal, but the Buckeye State has done its share of destroying wildlife. The Karner Blue butterfly, for example, once called NW Ohio home; attempts to reintroduce it have not been as successful as hoped. And where wildflowers are concerned, more than a fair share have been plowed under, paved over and strip-mined.

Incredibly - to me, anyway - there are more than 200 plants currently listed as endangered in Ohio. The rarest of these is probably the Lakeside Daisy (Hymenoxys herbacea ). It was listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a Federally Threatened species in 1988, and has been listed as Endangered since 1980.

The Lakeside Daisy occurs in only four locations in North America; the Bruce Peninsula and Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron in Canada, in Illinois, where it was reintroduced, and Ottawa County, in northern Ohio. It is a member of the Aster or Composite Family (Asteraceae), in the Hymenoxys genus. In fact, it is the only member of the Hymenoxys genus east of the mighty Mississippi.

In Ohio, Lakeside Daisies thrive on barren sun-baked limestone with all the gusto of a cactus in the desert. When in bloom, that inhospitable limestone disappears beneath a carpet of golden yellow. It is a long-lived perennial, blooms in May, and reproduces both by seed dispersal and new growth from rhizomes. And like many of its cousins in the Aster Family, the happy yellow flower heads of Lake Daisies follow the sun across the sky each day.

As the only member of its genus east of the Mississippi River, it was once thought Lakeside Daisies were introduced from the west by native Americans. Science had other ideas, determining genetic differences between the eastern and western species, which in turn lead to the conclusion that the Lakeside Daisy probably spread east about 8000 years ago during an extended period of hot, dry weather when many drought-tolerant prairie plants spread eastward. As the Midwestern climate cooled and became more humid, plant populations became physically and genetically isolated, giving us what we now know as Lakeside Daisies.

Saving this plant from extinction has involved the "good" fortune of how slowly mining is destroying its habitat, the Ohio Division of Natural Areas and Preserves acquiring 19 acres of abandoned limestone quarry from Standard Slag Company in 1988, and the work of Marcella DeMauro, who earned her Master's degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago studying the reproductive biology of the Lakeside Daisy. As a consequence of all this, new sites in the quarry have been created over the years, the Division's Lakeside Daisy site became Ohio's 48th state nature preserve, and De Mauro, who showed that self-pollination and crosses between closely related plants does not produce fruit, crossed the remaining Illinois plants with Ohio plants, propagating plants in a greenhouse in Chicago for restoration. In addition to all this, the Lakeside Daisy population in Ottawa County is regularly monitored, and an experimental population has been established at Kelly's Island State Park.

Lakeside Daisy

Lakeside Daisies

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