Sandwiched between a railyard and a Ford assembly plant lie 150 acres of native ecosystem: Indian Ridge Marsh Park. Here in the South Deering neighborhood, birdsong harmonizes with the lowing of a train as we walk into the soggy prairie. The grass is up to our shoulders. The ground is thick with nat ive plants. The mud pulls at our shoes. We’re searching for something smaller than a penny: Thismia americana.“The vegetation looks nice and lush,” says Trevor Edmonson, restoration ecologist with The Nature Conservancy in Indiana. “We’re here at the right time. The weather seems to be right. Why not?”Thismia americana is a tiny, blue-white flower first discovered in Chicago in 1912. By 1916, the plant had vanished, never to be seen in the wild again. Still, scientists like Edmonson search for it, despite the odds.Why, after more than a century, do scientists continue to look? The disappearance of Thismia americana tells scientists how humans have changed the environment, but the ongoing search for the plant finds hope in restoration efforts.Origins of a mysteryThe last remaining Thismia americana specimens are housed in the Field Museum’s Botanical Collections. It’s locked up along with other federally regulated flowering plants — coca, cannabis, opium poppy.“We keep our Thismia in here just because people get very excited about it, and we’re excited that people are excited about plants,” says Kimberly Hansen, collections manager for flowering plants. In 2011, a search party, organized by the Field Museum, hunted the Thismia americana. Samples of the plant are kept in the museum’s Botanical Collections.Sun-Times Media In alcohol, Thismia americana looks like a translucent orb with thin, alien appendages poised above a bulbous flower. Its characteristics are strange too: Unlike most plants, those in the Thismia genus don’t photosynthesize; they get their energy from fungi instead of sunlight, which leads to them flowering only sporadically. These samples were donated by Thismia americana’s discoverer herself, Norma Pfeiffer.In 1912, then a botany student at the University of Chicago, she was collecting moss in a swampy prairie at what is now 119th Street and Torrence Avenue when she happened upon this small, strange plant.At the time of Pfeiffer’s discovery, there were only 18 known species in the Thismia genus, the most similar being Thismia rodwayi, a plant native to Australia and New Zealand. Thismia americana was the first of its genus found in the Northern Hemisphere.Pfeiffer studied Thismia americana from 1912 to 1914. For her work, she received her PhD from the University of Chicago at 24 — the youngest PhD recipient in the school’s history at the time.However, in 1914, Pfeiffer reported a barn was built atop the site where Thismia americana was found. According to a journal entry, Pfeiffer last saw the plant in 1916. Norma Pfeiffer pollinating lilies, date unknown. Courtesy of The Boyce Thompson Institute Because Thismia americana’s story is so strange, some have speculated it is an elaborate botanical conspiracy.“I’ve heard the theory that it was brought in by ballast waters from a ship that was traveling from East Asia that passed through Lake Michigan and came into Lake Calumet,” says Katie Kucera, lead ecologist at the Chicago-based Wetlands Initiative. “I don’t know if I believe the ballast water theory.”Like Kucera, most scientists believe it’s unlikely Thismia americana came and went by nefarious means. Really, it was lost because of industry around the Calumet region.“We’re very unlikely to ever find Thismia [americana] there again, because the history of that site is that it was a wetland complex, and then humans filled it in with a bunch of construction debris, soil, concrete, slag from the steel industry,” says Harry Kuttner, Calumet program manager at the Wetlands Initiative.Nevertheless, scientists hope that Thismia americana could be found again. Over the past decades, organizations around Chicago have taken steps to restore the city’s green spaces, including Indian Ridge Marsh Park, where Thismia americana was discovered.Thismia in a haystackIn 1948, armed with a map gifted by Pfeiffer herself. Chicago botanist Floyd Swink went hunting for the plant. Not only did he fail to find it, but he lost Pfeiffer’s map. That was the first in a long-running but infrequent tradition of Thismia-hunting in the region.By the 1990s, these Thismia hunts came with a measure of fanfare. For instance, one hunt included a slow, gentle drumming that came from the woods. “We all filed back along the little woodland trail,” says Gerry Wilhelm, botanist with the Conservation Research Institute. “As we approached the little glade where we were instructed to go, Norma Pfeiffer emerged.”There, she handed out paper Thismia specimens to the hunters. This wasn’t actually Norma Pfeiffer, who passed away in 1989, but an actor dressed as the botanist.During another hunt, scientists scattered hundreds of small white beads into the prairie to train people’s eyes as they searched for Thismia americana. After the hunters were told where to look, they still could not find all of them. Today, a Thismia hunter is perhaps as likely to find a Thismia bead as the long-lost flower. Trevor Edmonson and Nick Kostidis search for Thismia americana in Indian Ridge Marsh Park on a recent summer day.Andrew Stojkovich Trevor Edmonson knows what he’s up against searching on a recent summer day. At Indian Ridge Marsh Park, several aptly named plants command our attention: gray-headed coneflower, northern blue flag iris, cardinal flower, swamp rose mallow. Part of searching for Thismia americana isn’t just about looking for a plant that no one alive has seen, but for the plants that indicate it could be nearby, like common boneset or swamp milkweed. Once we find the correct indicators, we slow down.“Little flowers off the mint also are good mimics, not to mention all the little shells and anything white that’s small,” Edmonson says.He pauses at a small, bell-shaped flower. It looks ”so much like Thismia,” he says. Sadly, it is a flower off the obedient plant, a type of mint. A fallen flower from the obedient plant looks similar to Thismia americana.Photo by Trevor Edmonson After scouring the mud for a few hours, we give up our search. Still, the day is not a failure.Thismia americana is a symbol. It represents the power of Chicago’s unique natural environment and the people who take care of it.“There is a story of recovery here, and that’s super exciting,” Edmonson says. “If you can do that here, you can pretty much do that anywhere.”Andrew Stojkovich is a writer in Chicago. You can find him on Instagram @AndrewStojkovich. ...read more read less