This shot was taken in Murphy's Point Provincial Park just 45 minutes from my home. I was using Fuji 400 ISO slide film at 1/60 and f/8 on a rainy day with my Nikon 135mm lens, a basswood lending me cover as I stepped down a steep ditch into a drying cattail marsh of late spring. The water adds vitality to the purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) flowers that only makes the blurred premonitions of fallen pedals lying on an oblique blade of grass all the more poignant.

The purple loosestrife has wreaked havoc on marshes and wetlands across the colossal breadth of North America: starving out species of orchids in the states that are already on the federal endangered species list, destroying waterfowl habitat by drying up wetlands until what once was nourishing, bountiful, and diverse is now unwholesome, dry, and monotypic. It invades and spreads, sucking up all the moisture like locusts on crops. But officials across all countries are working with local activists and volunteers to maintain this problem within the copious expanses it already strangles. The forlorn pedal in the foreground, though melancholy because the flower is beautiful in its own respect but dying, dually serves as a source of hope, that in the destruction of this alien species in North America marshlands is the salvation of native species.

For more information of the Lythrum salicaria, visit http://www.ducks.ca/purple/. For a quick-shot to information concerning the use of biocontrol insects to combat the problem of purple loosestrife, click on http://www.ducks.ca/purple/biocontrol/biocon1.html.

Although one would probably be hard pressed to find someone who has not heard of the importance of wetlands, one would be equally hard-pressed to find someone who knew the depth of why they are important. For a comprehensive, science-based paper on the importance of wetlands, see http://www.ducks.ca/conserve/wetland_values/pdf/nvalue.pdf (Adobe Acrobat file - 604Kb).