Millions of Orchids Are Blooming in an Abandoned Iron Mine

But hidden in a wooded marsh directly across the street, curious road trippers would find an even more surprising deposit: Millions of orchids have been flourishing for over 60 years on the damaged industrial waste site.

The colorful flowers are growing on top of a wetland that started to exist at the base of a pile of tailings—crushed rock left over when iron ore is extracted from its surroundings. As part of her research, graduate student Grete Bader calculated a total number of the plants within 20 predefined plots, and her work suggests wildflowers now cover up the hundred-acre wetland.

That includes amazing amounts of native terrestrial orchids, such as the rose pogonia (Pogonia ophioglossoides) and the grass pink (Calopogon tuberosus). The site also boasts the state’s largest group of threatened pink shinleaf (Pyrola asarifolia).

 Bader,studied conservation biology at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). “But I was seeing hundreds of individuals in each thick patch, and when you extrapolate that up, it’s believable.”

Fungal Friends

The former Benson Mines site, just 96.5 kilometers from the Canadian border, is outside of the massive Adirondack Forest Preserve in upstate New York.

At its peak in the 1940s, the Benson Mines pit provided iron ore for government war attempts, changing in the 1950s to providing iron for steel used in the developing automotive industry. The fairly low iron content of the ore and the area’s isolatedness led to the mine’s eventual decline, and it was closed in the 1970s.

But decades of activity caused in the extraction of hundreds of millions of tons of waste rock. Approximately a million gallons of fuel oil spills also built up at the site over many decades but were only found in 1988. As late as 2004, fish caught in the nearby Little River were still characterized as tasting like fuel.

The fungi grow throughout the orchids’ roots, increasing the plant’s ability to take in water and nutrients. In turn, the fungi get benefit from the plants’ photosynthetic energy. The fungi are also necessary for the dustlike seeds of these orchids to sprout.

But why the orchids flourish in the wetland and not far away, practically identical areas is a question that remains unanswered.

Rocky Future

Nevertheless, the orchids’ future on the site is unsure. An invasive species of reed called phragmites threatens to completely cover the whole area. Now, it takes up nearly nine acres and is expanding at a rate of 3 percent a year. Although the Benson Mines orchids appeared and very strong and healthy without human help, Bader says intervention is probably now needed to keep the site’s rich diversity.

The tailings pile itself is also a valuable and important economic resource.

No new mining or blasting is anticipated, but a project to renovate a rail line that once connected the mines to Carthage, New York, funded $9.9 million from the state.

Leopold mentions that the site’s boundaries lack the signs in a public place and that he, Bader, and others thought the entire area they made survey was public, county-owned land.

Mark Hall, a previous elected official in the nearby town of Fine, has been involved in efforts to clean up the mine site and redevelop it for new industry. He says that the discovery of the orchids is amazing, but limiting the use of the tailings site for the benefit of the plants is probably not a high priority for area residents.

Bader and Leopold both expressed the hope that the site might be took control next to the nearby Adirondack Forest Preserve, not only in order to help the orchids but also to keep some of the area’s cultural history, in which the mine played an important role.

Judy Drabicki, the regional director for the state’s department of environmental conservation in St. Lawrence County, says it’s too early to say for sure whether that’s a possibility. And Benson does not have plans to sell the property at this point.