PORT TOWNSEND — Fred Weinmann remembers in October 2008 when East Jefferson Fire-Rescue control-burned the Kah Tai Prairie Preserve, leaving behind a blackened acre in its aftermath.
The short-term burn has proven to have long-lasting benefits. The native plants are blooming like wildfire.
“The results of that burn have reached their glory this year,” said Weinmann, a Port Townsend member of the Washington Native Plants Society.
“The prairie is as beautiful as it has been in the last 20 years.”
Weinmann has served as the society’s statewide president and is a career botanist with a doctorate in ecology who frequently leads society-sponsored native plant tours.
Those who nurtured the Kah Tai Prairie Preserve back to its big splash of living color say this spring wildflower bloom is exceptional.
Unusually abundant blooms
“I have never, ever seen it better,” said Dixie Llewellin, a society member who has known the prairie for 20 years.
She has seen it recover in the past 10 years in large part because society volunteers have replanted it with native plants and removed prairie non-natives, such as snowberry, wild roses, tree lupine and Scotch broom, all of which threatened to take over.
Local society members also planted and reseeded native plants, receiving up to $1,000 in grant funding from the state nonprofit organization.
Forest Shomer, owner of Inside Passage Seeds, which sells native seeds of the Pacific Northwest, harvested native plant seeks and replanted them at the Kah Tai preserve.
Purple-blue camus now dominates at the city’s oldest native plant garden, with spring gold, biscuit root, goldenrod and several types of local grasses also accenting the preserve’s rise and fall to the entry road at Port Townsend Municipal Golf Course, Blaine and Walker streets.
Weinmann and Llewellin are among those in Port Townsend marking the prairie’s colorful show during Native Plan Appreciation Week through Saturday.
Field trip Friday
Weinmann said the Native Plant Society urges residents this week to visit the Kah Tai Prairie Preserve with a trip at 9:30 a.m. Friday, beginning at the golf course site off Blaine Street near Walker Street.
“We take a group out here for Native Plant Week every year and most say they have no idea it was here,” Weinmann said.
The trip will continue from the preserve to Fort Townsend State Park and then to Kala Point where more native plants and wildflowers are blooming.
At Fort Townsend State Park, the hike will be among old-growth trees. The Calypso orchid are flowering along with several species of parasitic plants that are a signature of the park south of Port Townsend off state Highway 20.
The hike will end at what is described as the most floriferous of the dun and beach strand communities on Quimper Peninsula at Kala Point.
There, paintbrush, delphiniums, chocolate lilies and several other species are in flower.
Last remnant of larger prairie
The land at Kah Tai Prairie is the last remnant of what was once a much larger prairie and woodland area.
It wasn’t discovered that this was prairie land until about 17 years ago, Weinmann said.
Over the years, several non-native species had begun to flower in the prairie, choking out the growth of native plants.
Controlled burns serve as the best way to take care of that problem, he said.
The 2008 burn facilitated the regeneration of rare and endangered plants and stunted the growth of non-native species.
In fall 2000 the prairie was burned only partially.
According to the Nature Conservancy, the prairie responded with one of it’s strongest blooms in years.
The eight-year gap between burns is not ideal, since the conservancy would prefer to do it every two years, Weinmann said.
Open burning rules
The reason for the delay is because updated regional air quality regulations prohibit open fires in locations where the density of people exceeds 1,000 per square mile — meaning no open fires any place in Port Townsend.
According to the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency, open burning was banned in the city of Port Townsend in 2001 and the state’s urban growth area burning ban became even more restrictive in January 2008.
In 2008, County Commissioner Phil Johnson, a member of the clean air agency board, was able to secure a special purpose permit for the burn this year, but Weinmann said Tuesday that nothing is guaranteed in the future.
If the burns don’t continue, there is a chance the prairie will become overgrown with non-native species and the rare plants in the area will fail to regenerate.
The preservation and stewardship of the property by the Washington Native Plant society has been a story of cooperation between the society and golf course Manager Mike Early and his team, Weinmann said, inviting residents to celebrate the success of the effort.
“We’d like people to come and see it because it’s part of the town,” said Weinmann, who in 2006 was named as a fellow of the society along with his wife, Ann.
Both received the organization’s lifetime achievement award.
Llewellin, principal biologist with Olympic Wetland Resources Inc. in Port Townsend, can be contacted at 360-385-6432 or by e-mail at dixie@cablespeed.com, to answer questions about wildflower hot spots on the Quimper Peninsula.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.