A close-up photo of the Georgia Calamint, an endangered species.

A close-up photo of the Georgia Calamint, an endangered species.

WADESBORO — Becky Dill has been photographing wildflowers on roadways across Anson County for over a year now as part of a project curated on inaturalist.org.

In the process, she’s recorded endangered plants that haven’t been found in the area for decades.

“Puck’s Orpine is an endangered plant that grows on granite outcrops,” explained Dill. “ We quarry granite here in Anson County. I found the Puck’s Orpine in Wadesboro. The other endangered plant I found is called Georgia Calamint. Georgia Calamint has not been recorded in the state since 1972. That recording was in Richmond in County. There was a previous recording of the plant in Anson County in 1900.”

iNaturalist is a nature website and app. Dill came across the site when the storage on her phone began to fill up with all of her nature photography.

“I started looking at how I could save all these photos,” Dill said. “I came across inaturalist.org You can upload all your photos there and they save them permanently, you can access them anytime.”

There is also a social media aspect to iNaturalist.

“Whatever you post on there, there are other people interested in the same thing and they’ll help you identify it,” Dill said. “They also allow valid researchers access to this data that you’re putting on there in the form of photographs. The metadata from the photographs also gets uploaded. So, the researchers know where something was found and on what day.”

Eventually, Dill began getting involved with a project on the site that was looking at roadside flowers in the Piedmont area of N.C.

Dill has posted over a thousand plants that she has found growing on Anson County roadsides.

“I decided I would make myself a little goal,” said Dill. “I want to record wildflowers on every road and street in Anson County. I’ve got a bit of a dilemma in that I don’t have a perfect list. I know there are over 500 roads. So far, in the past year, I’ve recorded wildflowers on 120 roadsides in Anson County.”

The person overseeing the project chose roadsides because they are accessible and they are more likely to retain plants that have been growing there for years, due to how they’re maintained.

Dill’s interest in nature goes back to the days of her youth.

“My dad was a gardener,” said Dill. “And so I’d always follow him around the yard, helping him plant trees or tomatoes. I lived on the edge of a small town and all us neighborhood kids would get together and go play in the woods all day. I always noticed flowers, berries, animals.

“When I got older, I went off to the woods and riverbank by myself and just noticed things.”

Dill’s interest in nature and horticulture kept growing. She became a Penn State Master Gardener when she lived in Pennsylvania and is now a Master Gardener in North Carolina. Master Gardener programs are volunteer programs that train individuals in gardening. These people then advise and educate the public on what they’ve learned. Dill also completed a native plants course at UNC Charlotte.

“I’ve been using all that education out here on the roadsides,” said Dill. “It’s been a lovely experience. A lot of Anson County roads are really quiet. I can go on some of them and look at flowers for an hour and not a single car comes by. If I’m on a busier road, people stop and say, ‘are you alright? Is everything ok?’”

“When you pay attention to something, you’re honoring it,” Dill added. “I feel that’s very much what I’m doing with these wildflowers. I’m honoring a wildflower that maybe has been growing there for 1000s of years.There’s a very common wildflower here that I never even saw until I started doing this. It’s called Wild Quinine. It was used by the Catawba Indians, medicinally, for many different things. It was then used by white settlers to deal with malaria. Here’s this plant with a whole history with people, and here it is on the side of the road in Anson County. When I pay attention to the plant, I’m honoring it and all the people that used it through all the years.”

Reach Charles Wood at 704 994 5471 or cwood@ansonrecord.com