“E.D.” and the elusive Bidens

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

By Julia Beros.

Sitting on a 5-acre green space and playground in Cooper’s Poynt Waterfront Park in Camden, New Jersey is a public art piece called Camden Turntable. SLO Architecture used discarded plastic bottles and facemasks to build Turntable. (photo by Andreas Symietz)

Here is a new lawn of grass; which means here also are clovers and violets, arabidopsis, interloping purslane, a line of cherry trees, stalky earthbound lamiales, some broadleaf plantains, sagewort, and some type of vetch. “My brother operates that type of crane at his job,” he begins as he points across the grassy lawn to fields of industry, spotted with clusters of these cranes sprouting upward as they lattice the sky with their branching arms appointed with yellow hooks that sway gently in the wind. The points hang downward like the achened barb awns of Bidens bidentoides, burrs ready to claw their way into a new spot of dirt.

Bidens bidentoides along a freshwater intertidal shore. (photo by Timothy G. Howard, courtesy of New York Natural Heritage Program)

“He once saw a new guy lift a shipping container up for the first time,” the story continues, “but he forgot to lock it properly and it tipped in the air. One by one, brand new BMW cars came sprinkling out.” He bobs his head in dismay at the very story he has surely told before and continues on his walk around the park leaving our conversation as seamlessly as he entered. I look out to the edge of the bike path and watch the waves of the Delaware River like pleats unfolding as they enter New Jersey. Now the site of a 5-acre green space and playground, Cooper’s Poynt park in Camden, was once the site of a jail, and before then a site of growing industry in a push to increase the use of these ports. And before that this was the site where Elias Diffenbaugh plucked a branching cluster of yellow-topped Bidens bidentoides just before their achenes could sprinkle to the ground. While on site installing a public art piece invoking the history of the changing ports and illegal industrial dumping, attracting the attention of park-goers and passersby, I wondered too about the ecological history of this site defined by urbanization: how has this landscape been defined by botany?

“Beggarticks,” or just Bidens, is an estuarine composite genus with a wide temperate and tropical global distribution. Bidens bidentoides is an increasingly rare species confined to just a straggling few pockets of tidal marsh in the Northeastern United States: the Delaware estuary, the Hudson estuary, and (somewhat debatably) the Chesapeake estuary. In a genus with a diversity described as “chaotic,” B. bidentoides itself made its way through three name revisions, described first by Nuttall as Diodonta bidentoides, then revised as Coreopsis by Torrey and Gray, and finally landing in Bidens under Britton’s description. A plant that grows in mostly disturbed areas, often observed growing among detritus and decaying wood, this species is distinguished from other local ones by its lack of ray florets, simple lanceolate leaves, and antrorsley barbed awns (Smith 2014). As its seed dispersal is adapted to local diffusion near the parent plant, B. bidentoides’ greatest threat is habitat destruction. Clusters of remaining plants remain isolated from each other as well, diminishing the gene diversity which could heighten the vulnerability of this species to extirpation.

Bidens bidentoides. (photo by Stephen M. Young, courtesy of New York Natural Heritage Program)

Noted in Smith’s (2014) discussion of a recovery plan for B. bidentoides, the species has not been well studied and while it clearly remains a rare species on decline little is understood about its life cycle and role within these estuary ecosystems. In 1990 an “Element Stewardship Abstract” was written for the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry outlining the need to protect B. bidentoides. It is clearly not a new practice or idea to protect native species, but over 20 years later the state of B. bidentoides seems to remain ambiguously vulnerable yet understudied and unmanaged. However, as part of a recent revision of Gleason and Cronquist’s 1991 Manual of Vascular Plants and an ongoing conservation assessment of the Hudson River estuary at the New York Botanical Garden, Rob Naczi’s work on Northeastern American flora is bringing species like B. bidentoides to the forefront of research. While B. bidentoides and other estuarine species are uniquely adapted for these highly disturbed areas, it is unclear how viable they are under the rapid changes and industry of urbanization. Gathering more data about estuarine species, many of which are endemic and highly vulnerable to habitat destruction, can deliver trends and insight into the ways we can better support these ecosystems as human intervention alters their habitat. Bidens bidentoides is particularly elusive, with few collections held in a handful of herbaria, and a recorded decline in collections and sightings, this species and the information it carries remain vulnerable to erasure.

Bidens bidentoides, E.D. s.n., New Jersey, U.S., September 1868

The U.S National Herbarium holds 13 B. bidentoides specimens (plus one that was annotated by J. Reveal in 1979 as “definitely NOT bidentoides”) with only one collection from within the last 30 years. Two of these specimens are from Camden, New Jersey and one of these was collected by “E.D.” on September 20, 1868 from “Cooper’s bridge”. “E.D.” who “is almost certainly Elias Diffenbaugh” was a native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and an avid plant collector. His obituary appears in v.12 of the May 1870 Gardener’s Monthly edited by Thomas Meehan and available for “two dollars per Annum, invariably in advance.” He is described as “a journeyman printer by profession [who] imbibed a love of flowers,” and it is believed that his passion for botany helped to prolong his life after being stricken with consumption as it afforded him plenty of fresh air and activity. His work collecting made such great contributions to botanical research that he was even elected as a life member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (without paying the fee). This single collection of B. bidentoides along the Delaware in Camden, now neatly stacked in the depths of the U.S. National Herbarium and digitally translated, links the history of this landscape through a botanical lens. Diffenbaugh’s collecting work in and around the Delaware River estuary in the late 19^th century built a foundation for present day research on the species of this region. With each pressed specimen is a unique moment captured and catalogued in the herbarium, with it offering clues and a glimpse into a grander view of the natural world.

The freshwater tidal marsh habitat of Bidens bidentoides. (photo by Stephen M. Young, courtesy of New York Natural Heritage Program)

Here is an estuarine landscape whose history has been layered by human disturbance; a history that spans the lives of the indigenous Lenape people, a short stint by the Dutch West India Company, a growing Quaker colony, the Coopers the Kaighns and the Mickels, the increased rail and waterways of the Industrial Revolution, Walt Whitman’s lyrical musings, Elias Diffenbaugh’s botanical excursions, the Campbell’s soup factory, the Victor Talking Machine Company, more bridges, a gift of cherry trees, and a hollowing out of industry that lands in a liminal moment swaying between the past and the potential. Today the Camden community seeks to revitalize the waterfront and define this landscape, beginning with this reclamation of space along the river. A landscape that embodies prosperity, movement, industry, trade, and a source of life itself, the waterfront is a site with its own deeply embedded history. The identity of place is largely characterized by its ecology, the life that underlines and roots a place below the torrent of human potentials and ambitions, be them benign, beneficial, or damaging, and warrants an understanding of how it relates to the present. To reclaim space requires a thorough investigation of its history and the evolution of our relationship to it beginning with the ecological infrastructure, and to rebuild a relationship with the nature of a place acknowledges ways in which humans have altered and shifted its habitual for our own means. What was here, what is here, and what should be here? Through one lonely specimen of B. bidentoides over 100 years old, Diffenbaugh has invoked this line of reflection and questioning in reconnecting with an ecological system that has and will continue to be at the will of human disturbance. It is from our herbaria collections, that serve as a record of biological history and provide various data about species, that we can also be reminded to continue a conscious learning and cultivation of our relationship to the natural world. Within what we believe to be intimately known is room for discovery.