Sunlight brushes tall grasses, like frost across a tawny beard. The scene is an oil painting. Renaissance-era. Impressionistic. Golden. Chiaroscuro. High-key. Dreamy. And diffuse.
Hidden in this grass are pops of sunlight so yellow, the goldenrod looks limp in its presence. Helianthus schweinitzii. Schweinitz’s sunflowers. Indigenous to York County and parts of the Charlotte region.
Schweinitzes don’t look like sunflowers you might be imagining. They’re not towering, not filled with toaster-bound seeds. They’re barely the size of a lemon. Their leaves are rough like cats’ tongues. They’re waist-high to an adult. They have imposters that fool the uninitiated.
And they’re endangered.
Which is what brings the almost-dozen of us to this meadow deep inside the Anne Springs Close Greenway in Fort Mill; to find the sunflowers growing in the wild.
For the past few years, in early October, Greenway staff and volunteers have set out through this brushstroke meadow to learn whether these endangered sunflowers are coming back to where they’ve bloomed before.
Looming over our heads are deer fences casting meshy shadows across the wheat-colored idyll. It’s a relatively small enclosure that protects a relatively small sample of Schweinitzes from grazing animals. The protected flowers grow taller than their more wild brethren. It’s something the Greenway has just found out.
Beyond this fenceline is where the search party bends and sifts and misidentifies lookalikes in its efforts to find data: How many are growing? How tall do they get? How many are not in bloom, but soon will be?
We won’t find the answers today. This is only one day of several on which the counts, the data, and the search continues.
What we do know, says Eric Mischker, the Greenway’s natural resources manager and probably the region’s top expert in Schweinitz’s sunflowers, is that people took these yellow sunbursts for granted until they were almost gone. And little, really, is known about how they live within their ecosystem.
Mischker is trying to standardize the data.
“I really want to hold ourselves accountable in really pushing that needle forward, learning what we can from these flowers, and also learning about prairies out here,” Mischker says. “We're kind of working toward the same goal [of] reestablishing prairies out here, what we used to have hundreds of years ago.”
A few hundred years ago, Schweinitzes blanketed a much more wild and rolling Fort Mill. A few calendar years ago, their numbers had dwindled to an almost literal few. A concerted effort to save the native flower in the 2020s happens here at the Greenway and at the Catawba Nation just down the road in Rock Hill.
From 13 colonies of Schweinitzes in 1991, when the flowers were placed on the federal endangered species list, York County now hosts about 94 colonies.
On this cobalt, gilded day, we don’t find quite that many. But “citizen science,” as volunteer Schweinitz finder Robin Buchanan calls it, is a critical step to keeping the Piedmont’s brightest endangered wildflower alive.
Check out the audio story above for a deeper look into the tawny grasses, and the bumble bees helping to give us something to count.
