WBEZ’s Curious City answers questions from listeners about Chicago and the region. We include the public in our storytelling, making journalism more transparent and interconnected.
Back in the summer of 2014, a botanist named Rachel Goad was on a canoe trip to see a very rare flower. One of the rarest on the continent, actually. It’s called the Kankakee mallow, and it’s native to just one small island in the middle of the Kankakee River, about an hour south of Chicago.
The canoe trip was part of an annual conference for native plant enthusiasts. They’d chosen to meet near the Kankakee River specifically to see this famous flower in its only native habitat.
It’s a lovely little pink flower that grows on six-foot-tall stalks. Hundreds of years ago, it grew in the tallgrass prairies that spanned much of the American Midwest.
But when Goad and the other botanists got to the island, they could barely get off the boat. It was overtaken by thick, large bushes of invasive honeysuckle, leaving no room for most native plants to grow.
The Kankakee mallow was missing from Langham Island. Was this very special plant gone for good?
This week, Curious City is doing an exchange with Interlochen Public Radio, who bring us the story.
Points North is a podcast that tells great stories from the Great Lakes. For more stories like this one, go to pointsnorthpodcast.org.
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