Paul Showalter looked like a kid who had wandered into a candy store for the first time.
Showalter, who hails from Shawnee, was paying his first-ever visit to the Lehigh Portland Trails in Iola, along with two dozen or so of his fellow Kansas Native Plant Society members.
There, they spent much of Sunday studying the plant species that occupy the 300-plus acres that are about to become Kansas’s newest state park.
The excursion marked the Plant Society’s spring meeting, where members spent day Saturday touring private grounds in Anderson County before heading to Iola Sunday to focus their sightseeing on Lehigh Portland.
The excursion had barely begun when Showalter began identifying the scores of plant species that fill the landscape.
First on the list was a pocket of dames rocket, the colorful purple wildflowers that bloom this time of year.
“Dames rocket is not a native plant, and I wasn’t expecting to find it here,” Showalter said.
Rather, the biennial species was brought to Kansas by settlers who introduced it to their flower gardens.
“Since there were farmsteads here, it’s here now,” he said. “It’s just lingering on from the old days.”
Not far down the path, Showalter found a thin layer of soil atop a thicker layer of limestone where he discovered a swath of widows cross, a small but hearty wildflower that thrives in arid, rocky conditions.
“This is just astounding,” Showalter gushed. “It is shockingly thick here.”
SUCH SURPRISES were common during the weekend excursion, which led the Plant Society members first to John Brown’s Cave, then to other areas along the trails.
Lehigh Portland offers up a goldmine of information, noted Krista Dahlinger, former Plant Society President who now serves as the group’s secretary and was the de facto organizer of the weekend trip.
“I was coming back from the spring meeting and stopped by (Iola) for a minute,” she said. “I thought, ‘wow, this is quite a sight.’”
The Lehigh Portland area is ideal, she explained, because of the diverse types of topography nestled in a relatively condensed space.
You have the wetlands along Elm Creek and along the banks of the former Elks Lake, as well as the nearby woodlands, which sport the treetop canopies, which tower over a separate layer of shrubs and low-growing plants below.
