In 2014 I set out to capture the scent of New York’s only federally protected flora, the Agalinis acuta. Over the course of a year, I visited nature preserves, biology laboratories, and US Fish & Wildlife offices across the Northeast, meeting with botanists, biologists, land managers, wildflower advocates, and conservationists. While I spoke to them about their work with the flower, I heard time and again, that the tiny Agalinis acuta has no scent.

In fact, the flower does release traces of volatile chemical in the wild—amounts undetectable to humans. I wanted to smell her. Together with chemists and perfumers from International Flavors & Fragrances Inc, we captured the aromatic molecules released during the blossom and recreated her aroma for our perception.

That year, I visited 6 of the 11 remaining communities, the largest of which appeared as a small field of pink. At the time, extinction felt distant. But in the years since, the flower’s numbers have dwindled. As I watch the Agalinis acuta disappear, her scent comes into focus.

Natural History

Before the pavement, this land used to burn. Some point to lightning, others to the Lenape, who lived here four hundred generations before the Dutch arrived, then the British, and eventually, the rest of the world.

The Lenape burned land to keep the ground open—better to spot prey and make their kill. But their flame enabled life for another: a flower, a tiny pink one, once grew wild under this sky.

After the melt, then came the invasion.

Lichen, mosses, grasses, wildflowers, everything wants to become forest… and will, save some disturbance regime.

10,000 years ago, the Agalinis arrived—around the time the humans came.

Her habitat of choice is the grassland.

So much rain falls in this place that sky-fallen seeds from passing birds will soon grow to scrubs, then shrubs, and eventually trees.

Left alone, things don’t stay as they are for very long. What Marker called “the impermanence of things.”¹

In this place, grasslands may simply be a stage in succession to forest, rather than an ecological endpoint. Thus, maintenance of land in perpetual grassy equilibrium might be less ecological restoration, and more—

One botanist dreamily imagines a strip of “sandy glacial outwash near the ocean shore,”² where the Agalinis might survive unaided by human hands.

The herbarium is now the only place within city bounds she’s known to be found. A library of lineage, a mausoleum for plants.

In here, we see the truth change, note by handwritten note.

In 1901 she was named: the Agalinis acuta; and seventy–six years later, declared endangered by law.

Illegal “for any person to pick, pluck, sever, remove, damage, or carry away”³ this pretty little plant.

Bloom

Just one morning a year, she blooms… by noon, she’s already starting to fall.

A thousand invisible seeds flood the air.

To make up for these odds, our pinky can self-pollinate.

But what is good for survival in a desperate moment may be poor strategy in the long term.

Selfing is the worst form of inbreeding.

Still, for these few morning hours, I’ve never seen so many bumblebees.

Settlement

“What is deemed important in a landscape depends on who is looking.”⁴

Our little pink beauty has expensive taste: Montauk, Martha’s Vineyard, Connecticut shores.

“The thing of it is, we must live with the living,” wrote Montaigne.

While we drive out one species with our tools, we introduce another with our shoes.

Massapequa, Patchoag, Shinnecock, Montauk…. or, Paumanok, the land of tribute, before the ships and seeds, the cattle and disease.

What one person sees as just a piece of meat, another will declare agent of ecological imperialism.⁵

I’ve read that plant diversity in New York may be twice that of 1609. Still, though we celebrate a rich cultural diversity, the cosmopolitanism of our flora tends to draw considerably less celebration.

Fear of invaders, those “exotic and alien” species, inspire such titles as: Science-Warriors: The Battle Against Invasive Species and, Plant Invaders: Beautiful but Dangerous. The epithets of melodrama.

Experts claim they’re taking over, threatening entire food–chains.

Other experts counter, that elimination is impossible, other species will always appear as weeds in the future.⁶

Hempstead Plains,
prairie remnant

Through plenty of wars, Hempstead Plains has remained a military landing strip, with all the mowing and fences preventing human trampling that airports bring.

Today only nineteen acres remain, “every last scrap infiltrated by invaders.”

Every week, a group of devoted citizens gather, to kill the unwanted species.

Recently, the absurdity of wildlife preserves waging an ongoing mechanical and chemical genocide, has started to sink in. A much more palatable form of weeding has been introduced: Nubian goats.

They come with liability insurance and a hunger guarantee. The goats seem happy enough, fenced in, munching on these proclaimed marauders.

Villa Condos, Front Lawn

Welcome to the Villa Condos, a home for retired humans—and, fenced off, just at the edge of the lawn:

Thirty-one specimens were found this year. A genetically minimal scene.

The management strategy of choice? A lawnmower, that symbol of darkest suburbia.

Making room for our precious pink to grow.

Some call it a gardening solution for an ecological problem.

I rather like the thought of her keeping those retirees company.

Warhol Nature Preserve

Wildness can be wildly complicated.

It’s not well known that soup cans aren’t the only legacy Warhol left behind. Amidst the beach–front mansions, a strip of land, preserved, just for her.

Fire rarely meets land here anymore, only in the driest heat will the occasional spark catch flame. Burning dead vegetation allows sunlight to reach ground, preparing the seedbed for new grass and wildflower colonies to take hold.

These days, only the historians manage land with fire: town records, charcoal analysis, newspaper clippings. The one who starts fires in service of the Agalinis, uses old photographs as guides.

A picture, reconstructed.

Disappearance

What is the value of a species?

One botanist answers my question with a question: What is the value of a person?

So what then, when two species become one?

It’s not known how our precious little pink, jumped three hundred miles from Maryland to Montauk, never a specimen recorded in–between.

One botanist has a truly contentious theory. A little story about a southern cousin, a train, and a northern market for hay.

“Even science, which prides itself on objectivity, depends on testimony and memory. Science deduces and infers, testing theory against all known facts… but not all facts are known and what is known is not necessarily a fact.”⁷

Specimens collected, leaves ground up, cell walls broken, genes released.

Genetic analysis reveals her near identical to Agalinis decemloba. And since decemloba, a rare southern flower, has provenance, taxonomic custom would have the decemloba name reign.

But it’s only acuta that’s protected by law—suddenly, a legal fiction—