Stick around to see the shoal lilies resurrect

If you’re still around 10 years from now, you may wander lonely as a cloud that floats on high over vales and hills, ‘til all at once you see a crowd, a host … of spider lilies, say, continuous as the stars that shine, and twinkle on the Milky Way.

That’s the plan, anyway: To replant the river here with shoal spider lilies, which gradually will colonize the whitewater course, so that for eight summer weeks around 2026 or so, you will go down to the river to play, and instead of bare rock amid the waves, see a blanket of bright, white, starlike blooms.

They won’t be lake poet William Wordsworth’s daffodils, but if a thousand you saw at a glance, as the waves beside them danced, it still might fill your heart with glee.

For two weeks this year volunteers working in collaboration with the Chattahoochee River Warden and Nearly Native Nursery of Fayetteville, Ga., here in the river will plant 400 lilies germinated from seeds collected from colonies on Flat Shoals Creek, and if it all works out, you like Wordsworth one day may see stands of long-stemmed lilies that bloom like starbursts amid the current.

Like around 2023. The first bloom won’t open until May 2018. A plant needs three to four years to mature.

And it’s threatened — not just legally, but literally: Because it adapted to running water along the Southeastern fall line, it grows only in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. It’s primary threats are dams, and those we have removed for our whitewater course.

But they remain upstream, for flood control, and the way dams release water in a flood differs from the way a natural flood gradually builds. An abrupt release from upstream reservoirs can wash the lilies away.

Another threat is silt that can bury the plants. Silt typically settles in still water behind dams, but washed out tributaries dump truckloads into the river, turning it that coffee color we see after hard rains.

So once the plants are placed, they have to be protected.

Another threat’s in the picking. Some people might want lilies for table settings. Some people might get ticked their bait and tackle’s snagged in them. Some people might think they’re fighting the EPA.

Some people looking forward to some long-ago William Wordsworth epiphany might want to stop that.

Jim Rodgers of Nearly Native Nurseries suggested those people consider two ways to stop that: “The Southern way or the police way.”

Imagine calling 911 to report shoal lily theft.

This story was originally published April 13, 2016 at 2:14 PM with the headline "Stick around to see the shoal lilies resurrect."