The "For Sale" sign caught his eye as he was driving from Santaquin to Parowan two springs ago. Yikes, Paul Ames thought, another hillside of sego lilies about to bite the dust.
So Ames set about trying to salvage at least some of those segos. He got permission from the developer of the land, then grabbed his shovel and went to work digging up bulbs. It took him the better part of two months to harvest enough to fit into a 5-gallon bucket, because sego lily bulbs — though they loom large in Utah folklore as a food source for starving pioneers — are meager little things that like to grow in hard, rocky soil.
This past spring he went back for more, spending about 150 man-hours collecting enough to fill about two-thirds of a bucket. The 100 acres on that hillside were once home to about a million segos, he says. "I was in a frenzy to get out as many as possible before the bulldozers came."
It is painstaking, sometimes heartbreaking work rescuing wildflowers, but at 44, Ames has finally found his life's work.
In addition to gathering sego lily bulbs, he collects seeds from Utah indigenous wildflowers. On Saturdays in the summer he sells the seeds and the bulbs at the Farmers Market in Pioneer Park. His goal is to keep urban areas abloom in native plants even as developers bulldoze over the last of the foothills.
"I get sick and tired of people treating the native plants of Utah like they're weeds that deserve Roundup and a bulldozer," says Ames, who lives in Eureka.
He spends most days from early spring to early fall hiking in the East Tintic mountains with his gunny sack, a milk jug full of water and his lunch. When he finds a hillside full of harvestable meadow fire or Palmer's penstemon or Robinson lupine he scoops up the seed pods and takes them home, dries them out, separates the seed from the chaff, then packages the seeds in tiny envelopes. These are standard-issue envelopes, no picture or anything fancy.
This year his seed-collecting has been hampered somewhat by the plague of crickets that has infested parts of Utah. "It was a race between me and the crickets, and sometimes I lost," says Ames. "They got a lot of the sweet pea and Indian paintbrush population. They go for the high oil content of seeds."
Ames is one of a handful of Utahns — including Virginia Markham of Salt Lake City and Merrill Johnson of Great Basin Natives in Holden — who gather indigenous wildflower seeds and either sell them or grow them into plants to sell. Markham will have a booth at the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District Garden Days Fair on Saturday, Aug. 4. The Utah Native Plant Society, which has 10 showcase Heritage Gardens throughout Utah, also promotes the use of indigenous wildflowers.
There are some wildflowers, notes Ames, that can be found only in Utah, in fact only in one little corner of Utah. The Little Cut penstemon, for example, grows on talus slopes only in Wasatch, Summit and Utah counties and nowhere else in the world.
Indigenous wildflowers, adapted to Utah's climate and soils, use less water than imported varieties, he notes. He says he especially hates petunias and pansies, which require too much water and soil supplements. And the kinds of wildflower seeds you can buy at most nurseries come mostly from plants indigenous to Europe and Asia. "People should celebrate the place they live in instead of trying to make it into something else," he says.
Ames, who has a degree in forestry from Utah State University, has worked for the U.S. Forest Service and as a respiratory therapist and baker. "A checkered employment history, I guess," he says. "Those were just a job, rather than what I had an undying passion for."
Once you sprinkle the wildflower seeds onto your soil (September or October are best for planting, ideally right before a snowstorm), show restraint, Ames says. Most pentstemons, for example, need water only once or twice a month. Too much of what seems like good care can kill them.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com