growing like wildflowers
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
It may be remarkable when a tree grows in Brooklyn, but it's even more surprising when a cactus blooms on Nantucket.

This is only one of the lessons picked up by Nantucket Lighthouse School students, ages 8 to 11, who traveled and traipsed through all kinds of Nantucket ecosystems to document the island's most rare flowers for a calendar whose sales will benefit the Nantucket Land Council's Loring Campaign - which is $2 million short of the full $14 million needed buy conservation restrictions on the 270 acres currently owned by Linda Loring.

"In addition to assisting the Loring Campaign, the primary goal of the whole study was to educate kids about the natural world and in particular their own home," said Lizbet Fuller, the Lighthouse School's director. "Often, you don't really stop and look at that purple flower that seems abundant on Nantucket - meanwhile, it's a flower of concern in Massachusetts. We wanted the message of the project to be 'Open your eyes. What you drive by everyday is a habitat some of us take for granted, and a lot of these flowers will disappear if we don't take care and take notice."

Since the beginning of summer, the children were on-call for sightings of notable plants growing on island, including St. Andrews Cross and the New England blazing star.

"First, we made a list of endangered, threatened or uncommon plants we hoped to find on Nantucket, and then Jeff would call me and say, 'Okay it's in bloom. We've got to go.' And then we'd throw all the art materials in the car and ramble out to wherever that flower happened to be," said Fuller, who brought the kids out to such remote places that periodic tick checks were part of the process.

"Jeff" is Jeff Pollock (father of student Mary Pollock, 11). He is a property supervisor for the Nantucket Land Bank. With the help of his fellow earth-savvy peers (like Sara Trainer from the Conservation Foundation), Pollock stayed on the lookout for plants like the prickly pear cactus since the beginning of the year. He would call Lizbet Fuller with his find, and the kids would run out to the site with their materials.

"Each class had a flower to write about - like what color they were, how tall they were, what family they were in, what the name of the plant was and where they lived," explained Molly, whose drawing on the Salt Pond Penny Wort will be in the calendar. While visiting the cranberry bogs, the class encountered the Salt Pond Penny Wort growing in a small amount on a tiny patch of grass. "They only grow in that area, and they kind of look like lily pads, except they're really small and they stick out of the ground," explained Molly.

Nantucket Lighthouse students, top, paint flowers in the Miacomet area. Calendar illustrations: St. Andrew's Cross (top); Blunt leaf Milkweed (center); and New England blazing star (bottom).

Fuller said that this particular age is the perfect time to introduce concepts of scientific classification to students. "Because it's at that age that they start getting interested in categorizing and naming; it really is appropriate to where they are developmentally."

Because the whims of Mother Nature are not at all concerned with a calendar deadline, the project sprawled out for months - until finally all the remarkable little sprouts had been found, studied, painted and researched, and it was time to arrange the students' work for the calendar. (Anne Chequer designed the calendar, the complimentary printing of which was organized by Diane Nabel of Hanson Printing in Brockton, Mass.)

This project has been about two years in the making, said Jeff, who first visited Lighthouse students to discuss his work with prescribed burning two years ago.

"Part of our maintenance program for some of these plants is prescribed burning, and I introduced this idea to their classrooms because I love to manage land with fire," Jeff said. "I explained that we were burning fields to try to maintain a healthy habitat that housed special flowers and plants. So kids can understand how fragile this habitat and this island are."

The calendars cost $20 - all of which goes to the NLC's Loring Campaign - and are available this week. Calendars can be purchased at Parchmant, Nantucket Looms, the Toy Boat and the Nantucket Lighthouse School.

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