On the morning of August 9, 1909, pioneer Washington botanist Wilhelm Suksdorf set out from his usual camp on the southeast slopes of Mount Paddo (now Mount Adams) to collect samples of the local flora for his personal herbarium and to sell to herbaria elsewhere in Europe and North America. On the talus slopes above Hellroaring Canyon, Suksdorf found a tufted sedge with stems 10-20 inches tall and clusters of tawny and green sac-like flowers. Suksdorf did not know it at the time, but he would be the last person to see this sedge alive. Though he thought it was the widespread Liddon sedge (Carex petasata), Suksdorf’s collection would become the type specimen of a new species named by John W. Stacey, an amateur botanist from San Francisco. Stacey noticed that the Mount Paddo plants had shorter and narrower floral scales than C. petasata, and more flower spikes and channeled leaves than Davy’s sedge (C. davyi) from California. “Constanceana” commemorated Lincoln Constance, an expert on the parsley and waterleaf families from the University of California at Berkeley, who started his professional career as curator of the Washington State University herbarium in the mid 1930s.
Unfortunately, no botanists have been able to relocate Suksdorf’s population on Mount Adams, and this species is now thought to be extirpated in Washington. David Biek and Susan McDougall, authors of The Flora of Mount Adams, Washington, suggest that heavy sheep grazing in the 1920s and 1930s may have been the downfall of this edible, grass-like plant. The species was synonymized under C. petasata in the Flora of the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s, but later resurrected by Joy Mastrogiuseppe, former collections manager of the Marion Ownbey Herbarium, in the Carex treatment for the Flora of North America. More recently, geneticists have demonstrated that C. constanceana and C. davyi are the same taxon, with davyi being the older and accepted name. So, C. constanceana is gone again (taxonomically speaking), though intrepid botanists exploring Mount Adams should still keep their eyes out for it. Regardless of its Latin name, this is one of Washington’s rarest plant species.
– Walter Fertig, collections manager, Marion Ownbey Herbarium.
