Botanical Rescue

In the years after the Great Depression, the USDA Forest Service constructed hundreds of small cabins in remote locations on National Forest System lands. These have generally been known as Guard Stations, and for many years they were inhabited by Forest Service employees and their families, especially during the summer months. These Forest Guards would manage livestock grazing, recreation, or forestry projects, and suppress fires as necessary. Usually the stations came with barns and bunkhouses for horses and work crews.

With dramatic improvements in communication and transportation over the decades, however, these Guard Stations became obsolete: It is just as easy to live in town and drive over to the project area in a modern four-wheel-drive as it is to move your family to a little mountain cabin for the summer. As a result, many of these cabins have been boarded-up, torn down, abandoned, or destroyed. Our local version of this story—the Vermillion Castle Guard Station (pictured here in 1941)—met its fate last summer. The Dixie National Forest had the cabin removed because it was becoming an increasingly derelict eyesore—full of trash and graffiti.

Before it went, however, I was up there looking around at what it used to be and I found that someone had once planted a couple of domestic iris bulbs in front of the cabin. They were dry- and yellow-looking and being crowded out by weeds and rabbit-brush. I decided to try rescuing (stealing?) a couple of them so I dug them up with my knife and brought them back to The Homestead. I put them in at the end of a row of other irises against a little portion of fence. They sat there, small and brown, for a couple of years. This week, though, they exploded. They are currently producing the most spectacular purple flowers ever.

The Vermillion Castle Guard Station is now gone. But, at The Homestead, we have salvaged one of its doors (that is another story) and three of its irises.