Meet Our Fellows: Jessamine Finch

Conservation can seem like a lofty goal, one of which has been made increasingly more challenging by the threats of climate change. It can however provide opportunities for new and necessary adaptations to the ways researchers and scientists look at solutions for plant conservation. Organizations such as Oak Spring Garden Foundation and the Native Plant Trust are poised to play an important role in these efforts. 

Our 2022 Plant Conservation Fellow, Dr. Jessamine Finch, is focused on plant conservation through applied investigations of the environmental tolerance ranges for plants and the intersection of seed ecology, ecological restoration, and climate change. 

To learn more about the Native Plant Trust and their conservation efforts, visit https://www.nativeplanttrust.org/. 

Please introduce yourself:

My name is Jessamine Finch, I’m the Oak Spring 2022 Plant Conservation Fellow and a Research Botanist at Native Plant Trust in Framingham, MA.

How do you feel your upbringing in Maryland shaped your current interests? 

I’m sort of predictable in some respects, I spent a lot of time outside hiking, camping, sailing. When you’re from Annapolis, a lot of your life revolves around that part of Maryland and I was always curious about the organisms around me, the non-human organisms specifically. I didn’t make the connection to the career until much later, which often happens for a lot of people, particularly for a field as niche as botany. That career option isn’t modeled for many kids but the kind of curiosity and interest in nature, did lead me to take a couple of biology classes and connect with some professors who steered me towards this. I also reflect a lot on the fact that I was raised in a former colony in the United States, I live now Massachusetts so I’m back in the colony space and I’ve been thinking a lot about, as have folks in Environmental Sciences more broadly, the legacy of colonization in our work and what that means for how we carry out this work today.

Can you tell us about your research and what you are working on currently?

The big frame for my research is native plants and within that I tend to focus a lot of my energy around investigating how they respond to climate change and how they’re already responding to climate change, which has framed what I’ve been working on with Oak Spring and throughout this year. In New England we use a regional list called the Flora Conservanda, which identifies plant taxa in need of regional conservation. It was first published in 1996, and updated for the first time in 2012. I’m currently working with my colleagues to update it for the third time, so that’s a pretty big undertaking. It requires a lot of data synthesis as well as meeting with a regional advisory committee of botanists throughout New England.

What is your approach to this work and to plant conservation at large? 

Plants are in decline for a number of reasons, one of them being climate change, and one conservation strategy is human assisted migration. This is helping plants out with tracking how rapidly the climate is shifting. The native flora has experienced climate change before, this is not a new thing, what's new is how rapidly it’s happening and all the barriers we’ve put in the way. One option is for us to help them jump those developed areas and track that shifting climate envelope. That’s what I was using my time here at Oak Spring to help get set up, using specifically botanic gardens as a kind of chaperone for these plants that are translocated beyond their native range. We all know that moving plants in the landscape can have unintended consequences that can be damaging but with this chaperone approach we can catch any kinds of invasive tendencies early, remove the material, and rule it out.

You mentioned the role that botanical gardens and places like Oak Spring serve in facilitating that migration, could you expand on that more? What hopes do you have for expanding this type of plant conservation?

There’s definitely a ton of potential there, I’m not the first person to recognise that. The term we’ve been using, Chaperone Managed Relocation, was coined by the Missouri Botanical Garden. Almost ten years ago now, they recognized there was a lot of concern about plant loss due to climate change so they introduced a modified way to do it at a botanic garden. Botanic gardens have a lot of assets, they have horticultural staff with the know-how to grow them in the landscape, they often have researchers assisting with data collection and documenting the success of that trial. It’s also an opportunity, and one of my favorite things about botanic gardens is connecting the public with these plants. I think these spaces have a lot to offer and I’m very interested in botanic gardens up along the east coast and how we are going to work as a community to do this plant conservation work.

What is one interesting plant species or plant community you’ve worked with recently? 
The one that came to mind, which was the last species I collected seed from, was Appalachian gentian, Gentiana austromontana. It’s one of the latest blooming wildflowers we have and it has this really beautiful pop of bright purple in the landscape. This particular species is not a bottled gentian but many gentian do have that fully closed flower which is a unique and curious flower type. It’s a southern Appalachian endemic found at higher elevation, but it’s not currently found in Massachusetts or Maine so it’ll be interesting to see if it can grow there. I’m hoping to germinate them this spring and plant them out in early 2023.

What do you hope people learn or take away from your research?

When people think about climate change, I want them to think about plants. Often we think of the more charismatic animals that get a lot of attention around climate change and their plight is important but plants in some ways are even more challenged. They’re rooted in place for the most part except for when they’re seeds, which is their opportunity to migrate, so if you’re migrating over generations, it takes a very long time. I also, taking a page out of Robin Wall Kimmer’s teachings, remember that we as human beings have the ability to positively impact the environment, not just negatively impact. We often think that whenever humans get involved with nature, we are damaging it but we know that’s not the case throughout human history. The Indigenous people of North America did and continue to do incredible stewardship and we also can rise to the occasion and use strategies like managed relocation to preserve biodiversity.

Any final thoughts about your work or time here at Oak Spring?

I feel so much gratitude for my time here at Oak Spring and also gratitude that this is the beginning of a relationship and not a closed chapter. I see so much alignment with the work of Oak Spring and the work of the Native Plant Trust and would love to foster that further. As a biologist and a botanist I don’t always have a lot of opportunities professionally to talk to artists, writers, farmers, or herbalists. I appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of the residents and the incredible cross pollination of folks. As much as I’ve enjoyed getting to know Oak Spring, the broader community that you bring here is also something that I’m grateful for.