Plant Science & Conservation
Garden Stories
Can a Wasteland Become a Garden?
On Chicago’s Southeast Side, a wetland scarred by decades of steelmaking has yet to heal. But against the odds, a single endangered flower has bloomed here.
The only wild lakeside daisy in Illinois, blooming on Chicago’s Southeast Side under a protective wire cage. Photo by Casey Beidelman.
The lakeside daisy, successfully transplanted at Big Marsh Park. Photo by Erin Snyder.
The sight was once unimaginable: a lemon-colored lakeside daisy emerging from the hardened remains of molten steel, four decades after wild populations of the species were last seen in Illinois. The bloom this past spring is a small but striking sign of recovery.
Its presence is thanks to the Chicago Botanic Garden and conservation partners who set out to test whether an industrial dumping ground could host plant life.
“The conservation community is always looking for new ways to offset the impact of human activity on rare species and critical habitat,” said Jeremie Fant, Ph.D., a conservation scientist at the Negaunee Institute for Plant Conservation Science and Action at the Garden. “This wetland was so damaged that we know it will never be a wetland again. So we asked ourselves, can we support a new type of Illinois plant community here?”
A lakeside daisy transplant before being planted at Big Marsh Park. Photo by Erin Snyder.
From wasteland to "what if?”
To grasp the marvel of this daisy, look beneath it. It grows not in soil but in slag: a rocky, nutrient-poor byproduct of steelmaking. Few plants can handle slag’s extremes. It floods in spring, bakes dry in summer, and holds traces of heavy metals.
Slag is why this once thriving wetland became barren. For decades, nearby industrial plants dumped molten waste here, which hardened in layers up to 15 feet deep. Local activists, like environmental justice foremother Hazel Johnson, spoke up against the harm the pollution posed to the residents of the Calumet region and beyond. Ecologists doubted anything would grow in the area again.
Then, in 2011, the Chicago Park District began restoring what is now Big Marsh Park. Though designed for recreation, the project brought a welcome surprise: rare plants began returning to the landscape. Slag, it turns out, mimics two ecosystems once common in the Midwest but devastated by quarrying: alvars and dolomite prairies.
The resemblance sparked an idea: what if slag could be a refuge for the plant species with nowhere left to go?
Lakeside daisies growing in slag in the Garden's greenhouses as part of Erin Snyder's research.
Testing the theory
“There’s no undoing the steel mill pollution at Big Marsh,” said Erin Snyder, a Northwestern University graduate who was part of the Garden’s Graduate Program in Plant Biology and Conservation. “If we can’t reverse the damage anytime soon, how can we get creative with the space and add value back in?”
In 2022, Snyder set out to do so with the lakeside daisy (Tetraneuris herbacea), a federally threatened plant lost to Illinois for decades. It couldn’t have survived Big Marsh’s original wetland, but slag had transformed the site into something resembling the daisy’s almost nonexistent native habitat. This was a rare chance for the species to return to the state.
Her first challenge was finding seeds. Lakeside daisy seeds are rare, protected, and difficult to obtain. Fortunately, the Garden's Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank held a small supply collected decades earlier. Snyder planted them in the Garden’s greenhouses in both slag and topsoil, assuming the daisies would do better in the dirt.
The results surprised her.
“Even with 25-year-old seed, the daisies grew taller on slag than they did on topsoil, and more survived,” she marveled.
Encouraged, Snyder contacted the Park District about moving the experiment outdoors. Despite its delicate name, she knew the lakeside daisy was tough. She once saw it thriving on a quarry roadside as trucks with wheels the size of cars rumbled past.
The lakeside daisy didn’t flower its first spring (April 2023) or its second (April 2024).
The loneliest daisy in Illinois
The 44 transplants had a promising start in November 2022. But after surviving the winter, a drought followed by an unusually hot spring day proved too much. By summer, only one daisy remained. For the next two years, the lone survivor held on but never flowered.
In April of this year, everything changed. This wild daisy bloomed—a burst of yellow that sparked new hope. Staff at Big Marsh even gave the daisy the nickname “Bloomy” in honor of the flower that beat the odds.
“We shouldn’t write these lands off just because they aren’t what they once were,” said Casey Beidelman, one of the natural areas staff at Big Marsh who cares for Bloomy and has since installed a protective cage around the plant. “By working with what’s here, we can continue to create something new that’s worth protecting.”
Ph.D. candidate Rafael Urbina Casanova collecting lakeside daisy seeds at Kelleys Island State Park in Ohio.
Restoring what’s possible
But one blooming plant can’t bring back a species. Lakeside daisies are self-incompatible, meaning they need nearby plants with different genetics to reproduce. The Park District plans to sow hundreds more seeds this winter, turning Bloomy’s lonely corner into a field of possibility.
Planting at this scale wouldn’t be possible without the work of another graduate student at the Garden—Northwestern Ph.D. candidate Rafael Urbina Casanova. In collaboration with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Urbina Casanova has collected and saved seed from the last remaining lakeside daisy populations across Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario. He grows them at the Garden’s outdoor labs to study their genetics and preserve their diversity in the Seed Bank.
Together, these plants represent the full genetic range of the species, their seeds providing the raw material for a diverse and resilient future. It’s a future made possible by re-imagining where recovery can take root.
“This species was considered extirpated from Illinois, and yet here it is thriving in what looks like a parking lot,” Snyder said. “It challenges your sense of how fragile these plants are, and makes you wonder what else might be possible, the places we could try to restore.”