Four decades rescuing flowers

Columbia Gorge News

THE GORGE — Just before the fall rains came, the Gorge celebrated a long-time conservationist who shaped its best-known wildflower preserves and restoration efforts. Barbara Robinson spent four decades preserving pristine land and poking thousands of native seeds into overgrazed hillsides. Now programs she helped start and volunteers she trained follow her footsteps all across the Mid-Columbia Gorge.

Robinson handed packets of lomatium and balsamroot seeds to about 20 early risers on Nov. 6, putting aside election night results to seed these long-lived species into the museum grounds.

“Come back in 10 years,” Robinson told them. That’s how long it takes an average balsamroot to bloom, after someone’s stomped the seeds into a fragment of bare earth. After more than 26 years of Robinson’s seed-planting and advocacy, the grounds are thick with purple lupine; golden, sunflower-like balsamroot with its massive flower-clusters; and other April-blooming natives.

Seed packets empty, the crowd trailed inside — growing until it filled the auditorium — to share stories and watch the premiere of “The Wildflower Woman,” a 19-minute documentary that grew from a stroll with Monique Trevett, a videographer with Friends of the Columbia Gorge.

“... For someone my age, they think Jane Goodall would be someone that they really want to meet. But it’s meeting someone on the local level, who’s active as much in your own community — which was kind of crazy to know that she’s still around, and I don’t just get to read about it,” said Trevett. Hired just 15 months ago, she initially thought the documentary would be short enough for social media content. “... We so often forget to celebrate. We forget to celebrate victories, and most importantly, forget to celebrate people,” said Kevin Gorman, executive director at Friends of the Gorge. “... It’s a love story to this woman who has made a profound difference in the Gorge, as so many others have before her.”

Robinson’s influence is felt across the region. In earlier years she worked with Nancy Russell, who died in 2008, to buy properties for nature conservancies. She helped preserve famous Gorge wildflower walks, including at Tom McCall Point, Coyote Wall and Catherine Creek. She’s worked with what Gorman called “head-down focus” through 10 presidential administrations — half Democrat, half Republican.

Behind her, she’s left a trail of inspired hikers. For ten years, Debbie Asakawa and her women’s hiking group have stomped balsamroot seeds at Catherine Creek under Robinson’s guidance. Just a year ago, Asakawa found no sprouts. “I was pretty discouraged,” Asakawa recalled. “... Barbara’s in for the long game. She said, ‘Oh, maybe we’ve been planting them wrong all this time!’ But last June, I went up on a cold, stormy day, and we found all these big, big plants of balsamroot ... I was overcome. I think I was in tears. And I called Barbara from there, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this is incredible.’”

That’s because balsamroot is spectacular in flower, long-lived, slow-growing, easily wiped out, hard to restore.

Robinson told an interviewer in the film, “I first saw the Rowena Plateau when I was 23, 24 years old, 1969-1970. I fell in love with it, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh gosh, is this preserved?’”

The answer: No, not all. Determined to keep the plateau “just the way it is,” Robinson bought private acres for $5,000, selling them for the same price to the Nature Conservancy just a day later. She was 34.

Such intact wildflower habitat is rare. An estimated 10% of oak forest understory remains. “We haven’t successfully characterized the percentage of habitat we think might still be intact,” East Cascades Oak Partnership manager Lindsey Cornelius told Columbia Gorge News in 2023. Grazing is partly responsible, along with fire suppression and other land-use change. Cattle can wipe balsamroot from the landscape in just a few years — and a truly biodiverse field of balsamroot can be hundreds or thousands of years old.

Even at the Discovery Center, the 30-40 species of native herbs and flowers that accompany balsamroot on ungrazed land have not yet returned. “There’s so much you can’t restore,” Robinson said. Unlike the Willamette Valley, the Gorge has stretches of poor, rocky land unsuitable for development, where some lucky pristine patches of habitat remain.

Robinson experimented with seeding and transplanting balsamroot back onto grazed-off land in the 1990s. While most transplants failed, seeds succeeded, but it took them an average seven years to flower, and 15 years for her plants to seed nearby children of their own.

Some seeds didn’t even begin to sprout for five years.

But here’s one of her favorite stories: During this experiment, two fully-grown balsamroots sprang unplanted from the grazed ground, blooming. “The only thing I can think is that those roots had hibernated in the ground,” Robinson said. If so, the roots slept quietly from the 1970s until 1990, “when they finally said, ‘Oh, let’s try again!’”

Robinson also discovered the blue, white and yellow wildflower fields of the Klickitat River during a Forest Service plant survey, becoming instrumental in creating the Klickitat Trail. That happened after the railroad stopped running, and landowners began to fence the area with “No Trespassing” signs. After someone was cited for trespassing on state parks land, Robinson’s group offered to raise $5,000 if the Forest Service would rehabilitate and open the trail. The Forest Service accepted — Robinson and her friends hastily incorporated themselves as the Klickitat Trail Conservancy to successfully raise the money.

Robinson went on to teach in the Master Naturalist program, leading field trips that — of course — included seed-stomping work parties, returning slow-spreading balsamroot to grazed parts of Catherine Creek State Recreation Area. Oregon State personnel attended to thank her inciting the program, which has trained 140 people and committed 16,000 hours of volunteer service so far.

When the Discovery Center opened in 1997, the Forest Service asked Robinson to take a look. The new irrigation meant invasive moisture-loving weeds thrived at the museum, intended to display native plants.

“If it hadn’t been for AmeriCorps and these kids coming out and pulling weeds and throwing them into huge dumpsters, I would be in a hospital with a broken back and the Discovery Center would be a disaster,” Robinson says in the film.

That whole career almost didn’t happen. On Robinson’s first hike in the Gorge, a 75-foot fall from a trail near Horsetail Falls nearly killed her, leaving one side of her face paralyzed for some time. Her college roommate stood up to recalled fetching her blood-stained jacket to the cleaners, to see if it could be saved. “Barbara came out of this,” they said. “She survived, she cried, she learned to love the Gorge anyway. So, the dark days end.”

Or, as Robinson summarized it: “I got a skull fracture, and I’ve been crazy about the Gorge ever since.”

“A long time ago, I remember you two giggling like kids ... and you’re talking about all the trails that you had created early on, without permission,” an audience member told her. “... It reminds me of the bumper sticker, back in the day: ‘If the people lead, the leaders will follow.’”

Watch "The Wildflower Woman" on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TdStXr1vx0.