Missing for 60 years, how a rare daisy was rediscovered on a Southern California island

Before this spring, the last time anyone had laid eyes on a small flower with lavender petals on Santa Cruz Island was nearly 60 years ago.

The plant is called Saints' Daisy.

"So it's in the sunflower family," said Sean Carson with the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden who helped find the rare flower again on the island. "The flower is beautiful."

The plant, Carson described, is about a foot tall, with longish hair sticking out of its stem and leaves. Saints' Daisy has two types of flowers: the ray flowers with its long, thin purple petals, and the yellow-orange disk flowers beaming in the middle.

The flower, though unassuming, is both rare and elusive. The plant was last seen in 1965 on Santa Cruz Island — one of the few places it's known to have existed in California.

"It's only been collected 77 times in its entire history," said John Knapp, an ecologist at the Nature Conservancy.

A patch of Saints' Daisies found earlier this year.

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Courtesy The Nature Conservancy

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Saints Daisy in the wild of Santa Cruz Island.

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Courtesy The Nature Conservancy

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That is until earlier this year, when a team of botanists and researchers, including Carson and Knapp, broke the drought.

A decade-long search

In 1978, the Nature Conservancy purchased a majority of the Santa Cruz Island — the largest of the Channel Islands about 25 miles off the coast of Southern California — with the aim of restoring the island's habitats.

"We inherited a bunch of threats that were on the island," said Knapp, including pigs and sheep that were brought on to the island for ranching but had become feral.

"Endemic island plants are often called 'ice cream plants,' meaning that they're so delicious, these introduced animals target them," Knapp added.

In the last decade, Knapp said teams of researchers and conservationists have been looking for some 22 species that are thought to be extirpated — or forever gone — from the preserve on Santa Cruz Island.

In the spring of 2024, the groups set out again on their search. This time, it included Carson, who works to conserve endangered flora in California and had studied a small colony of Saints' Daisy in Lompoc.

"I became pretty familiar with this plant at different life stages when it was in vegetative form and when it was in flower. When John asked me to come on this trip to Santa Cruz Island... I was like, 'OK, you know, I've got the mental image of this plant that I could find it in a needle in a haystack kind of thing,'" Carson said.

The rest of the team had studied photos of the flower and old herbarium records of when it was last seen on the island nearly 60 years ago.

"We all had a search image," Knapp said. "But again, I had never seen it before in person, but Sean had."

The hunt for a Saints' Daisy

Carson remembers vividly that morning when he rediscovered the Saints' Daisy.

It was April 8, 2024 — also the day of the solar eclipse.

The team of surveyors checking out the solar eclipse that happened on the same day when the rare Saint Daisy was re-discovered.

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Sean Carson

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"We got out of the truck and put our solar eclipse glasses on," Carson said. "I had this great photo of we're all watching the solar eclipse happen. And it kind of just set this great mood, like we are now ready to go survey for these plants. And, you know, we kind of left the truck with this kind of like high hopes."

Carson said they had a bit of a hike ahead of them, as they were wandering up the hill. On their minds was the general description of the location Knapp gave them of where the plant was previously seen.

"It's kind of this steep terrain where, you know, soil's falling," Caron remembered. "You've got some manzanita, but then there's a kind of a dense area of pines and it's create this kind of canopy."

Santa Barbara Botanical Garden's Sean Carson, posing next to the Saint Daisy he re-discovered on Santa Cruz Island.

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Courtesy The Nature Conservancy

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It all felt very familiar to Carson.

"The understory just had that feeling where you're like your hair sticks up on your neck. And I'm like, 'OK, this seems like Saints' Daisy habitat,'" Carson said. "I just had that gut feeling."

The Saint Daisy bud Sean Carson found on Santa Cruz Island -- nearly 60 years after the plant was last seen.

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Sean Carson

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Other members of the survey team were within earshot, but Carson couldn't see them in his vicinity. He went toward an opening that is almost totally shaded under trees.

There again was that uncanny feeling.

"And lo and behold, I see the kind of dark green lime leaves just sticking above the ground," he said.

He ran toward the patch the size of a ping-pong table, got on his hands and knees, and saw the hair on the leaves, stems and the buds — one of the plant's indicators.

"I knew right then and there that it was the species — there was the Saints' Daisy," he said. "I started laughing and I was yelling at John. I can hear him come crashing through these, these dead pines and everyone else was coming from the right and the left."

Selfies were taken. Photos were snapped. High-fives were exchanged. And the team was cautious not to damage the plants, knowing how precious the rediscovery was.

Surveyors from left to right: Dario Berrini and Greg Bluffin from the San Diego Zoo, and Sean Carson from the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden.

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Courtesy The Nature Conservancy

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What's next

The Saint Daisy found on Santa Cruz Island in spring 2024.

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Sean Carson

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"It was a decade of work and here we finally found one and the fight is not over because we're going to have to do some work to recover this plant on the island," said Knapp from the Nature Conservancy.

To that end, the next step is to try to propagate the Saints' Daisy — and to protect it on the island from other threats including those stemming from our changing climate, like fire and prolonged drought.

Conservationists hope that Saints' Daisy will follow in the footsteps of two other plant species on Santa Cruz Island that were delisted as endangered species because of recovery efforts.

"The fact that we actually did not lose this [plant] from the island, because we have lost so much," Knapp said. "The euphoria, you know, it felt like we struck a point for nature."