St. Lucie County is home to species that live nowhere else. Some don’t walk, fly, swim or burrow. They’re plants.
On Saturday, July 15, volunteers will help save a plant that only grows in five known places on the Treasure Coast – the Lakela’s mint.
“They’ll be hand-removing and hand-clipping weeds, exotic plants and others that are competing with the Lakela’s mint,” said Amy Griffin, environmental resources director at the county.
The volunteers will be at the county’s Lakela’s Mint Preserve.
“We’ll be meeting at the Ocean Discovery Center,” Griffin said.
Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute’s Ocean Discovery Center is at 5600 N. U.S. 1 in Fort Pierce. The volunteers will work from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. They’re urged to take gloves, hand tools, water, sunscreen, hats and insect repellent. A light lunch will be provided.
The federal government listed the Lakela’s mint as endangered in 1985. The perennial with soft lavender flowers lives only on a small range of about three miles straddling St. Lucie and Indian River counties. Griffin said to understand why this plant exists only on that small range, one must remember the Florida Peninsula has gone through numerous geological changes.
“Florida, in ancient times, was islands when the seas were higher,” she said. “Only the highest elevations poked out of the water.”
Today those lands are generally among Florida’s ridges, thin strips of elevated land. Part of St. Lucie is on the Atlantic Coastal Ridge.
Griffin said that plants such as the Lakela’s mint specialized in the areas where they started speciation on those ancient islands. Sea levels varied over the eons for two reasons. One is ocean levels; they’ve varied mostly due to the amount of water locked into ice around the polar and adjoining regions. The other reason is crust elevation underneath Florida. Earth’s crust, of course, has bumps and other imperfections.
Plants, along with amphibians and birds, often adapted to where they were on islands and didn’t move very far. Today those places are usually scrub habitat. That presents a survival problem today as Florida undergoes another change.
“Scrub is really desirable development property,” Griffin said. “The scrub ridge on (U.S. 1) is prime development sites.”
And that’s where the Lakela’s mint lives.
St. Lucie has at least two other plants that exist nowhere else, and both are also endangered. One goes by various names — the Caribbean applecactus. The other is the savannahs mint. Griffin isn’t optimistic the savannahs mint will survive.
“There’s possibly seven plants left in the wild,” she said.
Efforts to save the Lakela’s mint started in 2002. The county joined with Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales to keep the plant alive.
The botanical organization and county cultivated and planted Lakela’s mint into a new area in hopes that expanding its range could ensure its hardiness. But challenges started soon. One was the 2004 hurricane season and its multiple back-to-back storms. Silt fencing for roadwork also stressed many of the cultivated plants.
But the worst happened in 2014. People ran over the plants with ATVs.
“They cut our fences and were coming into the Indrio Savannas Preserve,” Griffin said. “They were getting firewood and dragging it.”
More than half of the observed plants were destroyed by the ATVs. There’s evidence people continue to take ATVs into the preserve and damage Lakela’s mint and other endangered plants.
Botanist Olga Lakela discovered and named the plant in the 1960s. The county bought the Lakela’s Mint Preserve in 2010. It’s 15.5 acres.
To volunteer, call the county’s Environmental Resources Department at 772-462-2526.
