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6 The Wildflower Child Isle Royale National Park You can tell Joan Edwards by the flowers in her eyes. They grace her labor, life, and spirit, and she feels fortunate that they do. “I’m lucky,” she says. “I feel privileged to do the work I do.” A botanist, Joan studies wildflowers , including Sagina nodosa, the knotted pearlwort. She tracks a community of them on a rocky stretch of shoreline on Isle Royale. “They’re so tiny, we call them belly plants,” she says. “You have to get on your belly to see them, and they smell wonderful.” This is a world where Joan Edwards is Paul Bunyan; where the harebell flower, the size of a dandelion, is a towering white pine; where a four-inchhigh facet of rock is an escarpment; where a crack is a canyon. Angels could not dance on the knotted pearlwort. “These flowers are smaller than shirt buttons,” Joan says. “When you look across the rock, it looks barren. It looks like there is absolutely nothing growing. And then, if you get down on your hands and knees and really look carefully, there are these rare plants growing in the cracks, and they’re so small you need a magnifying glass to see some of them. I think it’s a pretty amazing world.” Knotted pearlwort, one of Michigan’s rarest wildflowers, is one of twenty-one arctic flowers in North America that grow on Isle Royale which, along with a scattering of places on the north shore of Lake Superior, is their southernmost range. Lake Superior “helps shape Isle Royale” and provides a favorable habitat for arctic flowers. The cold lake, Joan explains, “acts like a big refrigerator all around the edges of the island. That’s why these little rocky shoreline communities have these arctic plants.” Joan, a professor and researcher at Williams College in Massachusetts, has been studying the knotted pearlwort on the south shore of North Government Island near the northeast tip of Isle Royale since 1998. Her thirty-footlong work area is neither pebbles nor boulders—rather, it is a mass of fractured rock that rises gently from shoreline to crest. The higher up on the 78 % chapter 6 land, the more vegetation: arctic flowers give way to scrub cedar and other bigger plants, and then, on the high point of the island, trees take root. The knotted pearlwort ekes out its existence on the cold shoreline, Joan notes. “Glaciers, the theory goes, left behind pockets of these species in suitable habitat.” As with all plants that attract her attention, Joan simply wants to learn more about the knotted pearlwort; she suspects that the fate of this species might be linked to global warming. “On Isle Royale, we have these arctic species that love cold temperatures, and with global warming, this plant is right in the line of fire. I think those might be the first species we’ll lose. But no one will know if we’re losing them unless we track them.” Isle Royale, about forty-five miles long and nine miles wide at its most far-flung points, is a national park located fifty-five miles north of Copper Harbor, Michigan, and about fifteen miles south of Thunder Bay, Ontario. This archipelago is comprised of one big island and hundreds of little islands—a total of half a million acres. Indians called Isle Royale the “lone isle of the sea,” and Minong, which means place where there are good berries . According to an engaging little book, Place Names of Isle Royale, published in 1999 by Smitty Parratt and Doug Welker, French Jesuit missionaries and fur traders reached the island in 1669 and changed the name from Minong Island to Isle Royale, after King Louis XIV of France. Fur-trading companies established fisheries on the island before 1800. The U.S. government bought the island from the Ojibwe in 1842, on the eve of Upper Michigan ’s copper boom, which lured mining ventures to the island. It wasn’t unusual for the mining operations to burn off trees and other vegetation on the various islands in order to expose the copper-bearing rock. As well, there were lightning-caused fires. But it was human activity that was especially devastating, destroying half of the island’s plant and animal species, including the woodland caribou. Nevertheless, as early as 1921, there was a call to make the island a national park, which it became in 1939. It has reverted to...

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