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This single plant was the target of our quest today. And finding it was extremely...EXTREMELY surprising. This plant (i.e. a stem from apparently the same underground rhizome) was first discovered in about 1984 by me. At the time, I tentatively identified it as Trillium gracile, a species of southeast Texas and eastward. The ID has been debated and the remarkable occurrence of the plant at this location is very curious (long story). I had rechecked this plant probably 15 years ago and it was still present, and now--some 35 years after its first discovery, it is still putting up a flower in a lonely attempt to propagate. (There is, and has always only been, just the one plant here.) All of us, including eminent botanist Bill Carr (4th image) and Dr. George Yatskievych (U.T. Herbarium, 5th image, kneeling to photograph the plant) were just floored that we could refind the plant.

The plant is found in a mesic shaded canyon head at a permanent spring. The plant is in moist silty loam at the base of a bluff adjacent to the springhead pool, with abundant leaf litter, under mature oak-ash-elm-juniper woodland. Aside from a wealth of recent invasives (Japanese Honeysuckle, Glossy Privet, etc.), the site includes several relictual species of very local occurrence in Travis County, including:
-- Spicebush (Lindera benzoin)
-- Cross Vine (Bignonia capreolata)
-- Bristly Greenbrier (Smilax tamnoides [= S. hispida])
-- Eastern Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)