One sunny morning in early May, four high school boys stood on a flower-dappled prairie in southern Dallas holding shovels. On the ground before them stood a Texas blazing star, an imperiled member of the aster family. The oldest boy, a senior, made two putts on either side of the plant and was beginning to wedge it out when a police siren sounded. He paused, his foot on the blade. There were no signs or fences barring entry to this place. But it is — like 97 percent of the state — private property.
“Hopefully that’s not for us,” he said.
The siren faded, and the teens — who attend an elite, all-boys prep school on the other side of town — got back to work. They are the most dedicated members of its prairie club, which finds them rising early on weekends to “rescue” rare plants from bulldozers and transfer them to restoration sites. Such unauthorized efforts have rattled some professional conservationists in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex; but in an era infused with climate anxiety, it offers a tangible way to make a difference — and a dose of adrenaline. “It’s like collecting Pokemons,” one said.
Max Yan (top, with shovel) and other members of the Blackland Prairie Restoration Crew at St. Mark’s School rescue plants at Coneflower Crest, a prairie in southern Dallas slated for demolition. Laura Mallonee / Grist
Coneflower Crest — as the boys call this place, after the dusty pink flowers that bloom here — is a nearly 300-acre stretch of undeveloped land north of I-20 that they say constitutes the last large prairie in the county. But heavy machinery is expected to crush the majority of its flowers, making way for a self-billed sustainable development with hundreds of homes and businesses that promise to revitalize a neglected corner of Dallas. But even eco-friendly projects come at a cost: The city is trading an ecosystem that naturally mitigates the effects of climate change for more impervious sprawl that only exacerbates them.
Blackland prairie once stretched 12 million acres in Texas from the Red River to San Antonio — an area twice the size of Vermont. Its limestone geology was formed by an ancient inland sea that enriched its soil, feeding more than 300 species of native grasses and forbes like big bluestem, lotus milkvetch, and devil’s bite.
But since European colonization, agriculture and urban development have swallowed 99.9 percent of the prairie — and are still taking their fill. Last year, a solar farm claimed the majority of the state’s largest remnant, which spanned 2,100 acres near the border with Oklahoma. Over the past five years in Dallas County alone, more than 320 acres have succumbed to data centers, parking lots, high-rises, and warehouses with no coneflowers in sight.
All that concrete increases flooding, pollution, aquifer depletion, urban heat island effects, and greenhouse gas emissions — the same problems prairies naturally alleviate, said Norma Fowler, a plant ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Long grasses slow rainfall, giving the ground more time to soak it up. Their roots spread in fine webs and reach a depth of 20 feet, producing humus-rich soil that holds water and releases it slowly, filtering out excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Prairies also cool cities, temper the impact of wildfires (a fire on a prairie is easier to put out than one in a forested area), and sequester carbon — up to 1 ton per acre per year. It’s why biodiversity loss and climate change are inherently linked. “Everything we do for conservation is also mitigating the effects of climate change,” Fowler said.
Environmentalists have rallied to save area prairies since at least the 1970s, when one patrolled Pioneer — an 100-acre remnant off I-30 — with a shotgun. By the 1980s, development loomed, prompting naturalist Ken Steigman to start digging up plants. Steigman even used a sod-cutter to roll up ribbons of sod — bugs and all. “It’s like Noah’s Ark,” he said. “You want to save everything you can.”
But the work has its ups and downs. Activists were relieved when development stalled at Pioneer. But in 2018, a native plant grower named Randy Johnson saw workers pulling cores for a new project. Johnson, 62, rode his minibike through Pioneer as a kid, but by his twenties, that youthful abandon gave way to wonderment. He tried and failed to convince the landowner to spare its most ecologically sensitive areas. “It’s depressing,” he said with a drawl. “[It’s] something you love, and every day you get in your car and see it being destroyed.”
He had nearly given up hope when a lanky freshman named Akash Munshi wandered into his school’s glass greenhouse, where Johnson worked part-time, in 2019. Munshi was “hyper,” Johnson said, and extremely bright. His extended family are rice farmers in south India, and he wanted to learn how to grow food. But this interest gave way to native plants, and within a couple years, Munshi was as fluent in their Latin names as in their common ones.
He started the school’s first prairie club his senior year to restore a stretch of bermuda grass along a bike path nearby. To source the seeds, he visited local prairies, including ones he found by scouring satellite imagery. He counted six high-quality sites fated for development, underscoring the need to also salvage plants. Within two years, all but one — Coneflower Crest — were under construction.
“I didn’t realize how quickly I would lose them,” he said. “There were some sites where there was no sign of development, and I’d come back [the] next week, and the whole thing was scraped.”
The destruction coincides with unprecedented biodiversity loss. An estimated 40 percent of all known plants are potentially threatened with extinction, and they are disappearing at a rate many magnitudes higher than they have on average historically — the result of both human activity and climate change. Those recently discovered — like glandular blazing star, an imperiled plant first described in 2001 that is only found in Texas — are even more likely to suffer extinction before scientists can understand their ecosystem role or potential application in medicine or agriculture. As the populations of at-risk plants shrink, their gene pools become less diverse, making them more vulnerable to collapse.
From left: Plants for sale at Native Plants and Prairies Day at White Rock Lake in Dallas. Monarch caterpillars crawl through a plastic container on display at the Texas Conservation Alliance’s booth during a native prairie event at White Rock Lake. The organization annually cultivates thousands of seedlings at its Native Plant Propagation Center at the Dallas Zoo. Laura Mallonee / Grist
“Each one of those that’s lost is threatening an already under-pressure system,” said Canaan Sutton, a botanist at the National Ecological Observatory Network. Invertebrates, some of which have unique relationships with specific host plants, lose their food and habitat. There are fewer caterpillars to feed the birds and fewer bees to pollinate blooms, including crops like Texas’s famed Fredericksburg peaches.
Rescuing individual plants won’t save these historic ecosystems, but it can help prevent some species from undergoing “a silent extinction,” Sutton said. Though conservationists focus on collecting seeds, they aren’t always ripe when developers allow them on site. Some are still so poorly understood that no one knows how to germinate them, and others, like compass plants, take years to bloom. Keeping an individual alive helps bridge the gap, enabling a bumblebee to find its way to the pollen it depends on to survive.
“What we’re in now is this perpetually shifting baseline of, ‘This is what we have, and this is as good as it gets,’” Sutton said. “Ultimately, people doing these rescues are trying to move that baseline back in the direction of the past and a more interconnected, natural world — even if that’s just [with] a handful of plants.”
The summer after his senior year, Munshi was leading a high school tour through another prairie destined to become a highrise. Stopping for a water break, he noticed a tiny yellow flower against a girl’s black shoe. “Oh shoot!” he said. “That’s dalea hallii!”
Commonly known as Hall’s prairie clover, this globally imperiled plant, listed as threatened by the state, grows nowhere else but chalky, south-facing slopes on limestone prairies, a subset of the blackland prairie where the bedrock surfaces, creating a unique microclimate where rare plants thrive. They face a unique risk, Sutton said: They survived the centuries because they were too rocky for the plow, but as developers seek more land to build on, that same rock now offers an ideal foundation for sprawl.
At the time of Munshi’s discovery, less than 1,200 hall’s prairie clover were officially known to exist. He counted at least a hundred and shared his find on Instagram, where it caught the eye of a conservation botanist at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, which banks obscure seeds. She used the organization’s heft to arrange an official rescue that October.
The developer gave them three hours to dig up what they could. Wearing a straw hat shaped like a circumflex, Johnson showed 40 volunteers how to pry open the limestone with pickaxes, knives, sledgehammers, and pneumatic drills. Afterward, he hauled more than 200 daleas to the greenhouse in Forney that he now co-owns with Munshi. Johnson, whose long gray hair and narrowed eyes evoke something of a wizard, nursed the plants with a mycorrhizal fungi tea. A month later, he texted Sutton a picture of a flourishing dalea ready for transplant. “Check it out, dude!” he wrote.
Despite this success, it wasn’t enough time to save the thousands of other plants at Penstemon Point. So, when Kay Hankins, a conservation botanist at BRIT, offered to contact the developer at Coneflower Crest, Munshi asked her not to, fearing they wouldn’t be given enough time. He and others have spent dozens of hours relocating thousands of plants from Coneflower Crest and other patches to the bike path 30 minutes north — casting trespassing worries aside as easily as the rocks their shovels sometimes hit.
Munshi said no one has ever asked them to leave. Neither have the cops. Once, while he was at another prairie, a passerby suspected him of burying a body, and three police cars pulled up. When the officers saw the plants, they left, merely annoyed. “They don’t care,” Munshi said. “They’re literally about to scrape the entire site.”
Johnson fears requesting permission could backfire. In Texas, plants deemed threatened or endangered by the state’s wildlife agency aren’t protected by law, but landowners who don’t want the hassle or liability may destroy them more quickly. “This is a war between us and the developers, and nobody’s calling uncle or throwing up no white flags,” he said. “You can get out of jail, you can post bail, but once the [plant] genetics are gone, they’re gone.”
But the approach vexes some in Texas’s native plant community who view permission as essential for “ethical” digs that promote trust with landowners and developers, eventually helping get more on board.
“If all the experience developers have [with conservationists] is negative, we’ll always be initiating the dialogue from a disadvantaged position every single time,” said Kay Hankins, a botanist with BRIT’s Plant Conservation Team, which has participated in four other rescues since its inception in 2019.
Developer involvement could ensure that activists don’t inadvertently remove plants that grow outside construction boundaries, and more volunteers are willing to help if it doesn’t involve breaking a law. It also enhances the plants’ value for research and conservation, Hankins said, since reputable institutions, seed banks, and herbaria don’t accept plants collected without paperwork.
But it’s difficult to convince people of the long-term benefits when the few prairies that remain can quickly vanish. Developers aren’t easy to get a hold of, either. Ali Bocaum, who started the Central Texas Plant Rescuers in Austin in 2022, said one 1 of 10 respond. Some deny owning the land, though taking cookies to their offices helps. “They can’t ignore you when you’re there,” she said.
Ashley Landry, who founded the Native Plant Rescue Project in Williamson County, north of Austin, in 2023, also plays “a long PR game” to gain access. She monitors building permits to watch for new development, then emails, snail mails, and drives by to try and catch landowners in person. In February, her team of volunteers succeeded in relocating 900 square feet of MoKan, the 30-acre “crown jewel” of central Texas prairies. Skid steers excised 56 sections, each as thick as a mattress, and pieced them like quilts at two nearby sites. If the plants survive, the method could be scaled.
“I just always feel so thankful to have seen these places before they’re gone,” said Landry. “It helps frame your understanding of what the landscape is supposed to look like.”
That sense of place isn’t easy to come by for the average kid in Dallas. A few prairie patches exist in public parks, preserves, and liminal spaces like power easements. But concrete – in the form of thousands of roads, highways, and bridges — has reshaped the city, and it’s anyone’s guess what’s buried under it all. The prairie club boys grew up in neighborhoods manicured with shrubs from other continents. They say they lacked a strong connection to the land — a quality that the environmentalist Wendell Berry has written is necessary for living in a locale without destroying it. But encountering landscapes like Coneflower Crest has transformed them.
Munshi, now a plant science major at Cornell University, vividly remembers the morning two springs ago that he climbed up a roadside embankment and glimpsed part of what quickly became his favorite prairie. Butterflies frolicked amid more echinacea than he had ever seen, indicating the area was likely never plowed. “This is, like, a 10!” he exclaimed, filming the scenery. “Imagine what else is in here!”
Munshi has explored about 140 acres and said that they contain several rare species, including hall’s prairie clover and white rosinweed, another plant only found in Texas. But in May, just two days after the boys uprooted the last Texas blazing star, a dozen men and women in business suits lined up with shovels to break ground. The young activists knew it was coming, but it still angered them to imagine the landscape razed — even as they grappled with a sense of complicity. “All of our homes were built on indigenous lands and biodiverse areas,” said the senior.
Stacked against this tremendous loss, their efforts felt almost trivial. “The thought of what was here once and is gone forever will not leave me as long as I live,” Berry wrote in 1968. “It is as though I walk knee-deep in its absence.” But long after the bulldozers at Coneflower Crest move on to the next job, hundreds of its rarest plants will persist, swaying in the breeze along the bike path. Before the boys even transplanted the last ones, a few uprooted daleas bloomed, just as they had for centuries.