Steve Blackwell is the Conservation Collections Manager at Desert Botanical Garden. Among other things, his job is to try and rescue endangered plants.
The work is never trivial, but recently, Blackwell and his team found themselves stumped by a particularly delicate orchid — the Spiranthes delitescens, better known by its common name: the Canelo Hills Ladies' Tresses.
Blackwell joined The Show to talk about the innovative approach he’s taken to rescue the flower from extinction.
Full conversation
STEVE BLACKWELL: The flowers actually make this spiral as they flower, and that's how they get the GS name. And then the flowers themselves are just white, and they're beautiful, and they have this little lacy bottom part as well. So it's relatively small. They're not like your normal showy orchids, but you know, if you look at them real close, you can see that it also has the same features as, you know, as other orchids.
SAM DINGMAN: And you have this one here in the studio, and it is flowering, and that's a big deal.
BLACKWELL: It is a big deal because we have, this is the first year that we've ever gotten these to flower in culture, since 2020.
DINGMAN: Since 2020 OK, so five years.
BLACKWELL: Yeah, so five years. And so we've, you know, just through trial and error have finally gotten it to where we can produce these pretty quickly now.
DINGMAN: So that means, just for the lay person, like you're growing it in a lab environment, rather than in the wild?
BLACKWELL: Yes, we grow them in a lab environment, because orchids are kind of a unique group of plants in that they actually need a specific fungus for their seeds to germinate. So the fungus, you know, in nature, provides it with nutrients, and we just do the same thing. We replicate that in the lab.
DINGMAN: Got it. It's a fungus that is naturally occurring in the environment where the orchid normally grows?
BLACKWELL: Yes, exactly.
DINGMAN: And tell us about that environment, because it's a sort of a unique environment, particularly in Arizona, right?
BLACKWELL: Yes, cienega. So cienega wetlands are unique to the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico. And so there's essentially just marshlands that are saturated and they're spring fed. And so it's one of the most threatened habitats, also because of groundwater pumping and development and things like that.
DINGMAN: And this particular orchid, the Canelo Hills Ladies' Tresses, is endangered, correct?
BLACKWELL: It is. It's federally listed as endangered.
DINGMAN: So this would already be a remarkable story, given the fact that this is an endangered plant, and through all of this extensive effort, you have successfully created the conditions in the lab to grow them, get them to flower. But there's another layer to this story, which is that they're very difficult to find in the wild, right?
BLACKWELL: They are. So as you can see, this plant, it's about 20 inches tall, but the habitat grows in really dense vegetation, typically grasses, and those are about two feet tall. So when you're walking through, it goes up to your knees, and it's so it's really difficult to find a white in fluorescence, so it blends in really well with the rest of the vegetation.
DINGMAN: So you need to find them in the wild so that you can harvest seeds from them, right?
BLACKWELL: Well, part of it is that, but also we want to assess the population size and see how they're doing, and just to get an overall idea of how many plants are in this general area, and as of now, there are only two populations left of it in the wild, only where in historically, there used to be five.
DINGMAN: So to address this challenge of how difficult they are to find in the wild, you guys have been using an innovative resource. Tell us that resource.
BLACKWELL: We have. So we've been working with a company called K9 Inscentive, and Laura Lee Oliver is the owner of that and her company is focused on ecological scent detection, and she uses trained dogs to do that. And so she's been training dogs for years to find things like endangered rodents, turtles, snakes and things like that, but she hadn't worked with an orchid before.
So when I approached her, I asked her if she wanted to work with an orchid, and she jumped at it. And she jumped at it. And so we've been using two dogs. Two of her dogs are Muon and Circe. And, you know, they're incredible at what they do out there.
DINGMAN: I saw some video of Muon and Circe. One of them is like a black lab it looks like?
BLACKWELL: Yes, one's a black lab, and the other one is a Belgian Malinois mix.
DINGMAN: OK. And how quickly were they able to find the Ladies' Tresses orchids, as compared to you or other members of your team out there in the wetlands looking?
BLACKWELL: That's a great question, actually. So let me just rewind a little bit. So in order to train the dogs, because there are so few of these, this species left in the wild, what we actually had to do was use another species in the same genus that we collected from Nevada, that there's 1,000s of those plants out in the wild, because we needed something for the dog to train on.
So what we did is we took some of those plants to the training facility, and we wanted to see if they could distinguish this species, this orchid, amongst other types of plants. And then the tricky part was going to be OK, does this plant smell similar enough to our target species that we're trying to get in the wild?
DINGMAN: Right.
BLACKWELL: And so we were hopeful that they were successful at training on the other species ...
DINGMAN: The Nevada species?
BLACKWELL: ... the Nevada species at the facility. And then, when we first took them down into the wild, we wanted to see, Ok, first of all, they're working in a very different habitat. They're working in, you know, these wild conditions, this dense vegetation.
So at first we were concerned. We weren't sure if they'd be able to find them. And, you know, I mean, they had a lot of things working against them. But as amazing as dogs are, you know, we went out there, and within 15 minutes, they had found the first plant.
DINGMAN: Fifteen minutes?
BLACKWELL: Yes, and so it was almost, it was incredible to see them. And the funny thing is, too, when we went out there, it wasn't in flower. The leaves were just emerging from the soil, so maybe two inch long leaves, and we actually had to get down on our hands and knees to see what they were pointing at. And so we were ...
DINGMAN: Oh my god!
BLACKWELL: ... so we finally got down there, like, ‘Yep, there's orchid leaves right there’, you know, because we have all this other vegetation, and a lot of times. You know, it looks very similar, but when you get close to it, you can tell the difference between the orchids.
DINGMAN: That must have been an extraordinary moment. In particular knowing that the plant is endangered.
BLACKWELL: Yes, it was incredible when, when it first happened. And we because it was just so unexpected, we weren't, you know, expecting them to find them that quickly and so And once they, once they were able to do that, then they found, you know, quite a few other ones throughout the population, and that was pretty exciting as well. But the very first time that they did it, we were all pretty excited about it.
DINGMAN: What do you feel like this experience has taught you, if anything, do you feel like there are learnings here that you can apply to other endangered species in your purview?
BLACKWELL: Well, definitely. Well, like I said, this is the first orchid I've ever worked with, but we also have 25 other species in Arizona and ...
DINGMAN: Of orchids?
BLACKWELL: ... of orchids, yes, and a lot of those are rare as well. So what this does is opens up our ability to actually grow more of these species. And that's what we would like to do, is have at least maybe some representation of the plants themselves, these different orchid species, not only in plant form, but also in seed, in our seed bank.
DINGMAN: Last question for you, you mentioned this was the first orchid you had worked with.
BLACKWELL: Yes.
DINGMAN: Do you feel like, I mean, obviously you're a plant lover, somebody who cares about plants very deeply?
BLACKWELL: Yes.
DINGMAN: Do you feel like your relationship to orchids changed as a result of this process?
BLACKWELL: As a great question, because people always ask me. It's like, "what is your favorite plant," you know? And I always tell them, "Oh, it's, you know, it's whatever plant I'm working on at the moment." And it's no different with this one. So at the moment, this is my favorite species to work on. I love it. I think it's a beautiful plant, and I hope that, you know, it flowers in time for people to see it in the garden.
