 They have unusual names like deltoid spurge and tiny polygala. They resemble weeds you would yank from a garden. But there is something extraordinary about these little plants - the only place they exist is in South Miami-Dade's suburbs.
The main threat to the dying breed is easy to see but difficult to overcome.
Much of the environment that nurtured them was bulldozed decades ago by construction developments (homeowners, builders, even a church!), and it has dwindled since to less than 2 percent of its original size. The forests literally disappear, lot by lot.
'Once you disturb the soil, it's essentially a lost cause,' said Keith Bradley, assistant director of the Institute for Regional Conservation, a nonprofit Homestead, firm that surveyed the rockland last year for Miami-Dade.
The pine forest blossomed from what geologists call the Miami rock ridge, a curving limestone plateau left when the sea receded thousands of years ago. It bends southwest from central Dade to below Homestead - almost 55 miles.
Carved by creeks flowing from the Everglades, portions of the ridge became small islands of evolution, where plants popped from craggy niches filled with thin beds of decaying pine needles and white sand. About 40 species live only in rockland or its fringe, and more and more are being endangered. We can only hope that these rare plants can survive the onslaught it has half endured already.
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