American Ginseng is native to most eastern Canadian provinces. It is considered Globally Vulnerable, Endangered in Canada, and Vulnerable in Ontario where it is probably the most abundant. It prefers full shade in deciduous hardwood forests.
It therefore occurs in places like Rondeau, but the locations are never advertised. The reason? Historically it was introduced to China, and the roots are highly favoured for supposedly medicinal purposes. While it is grown commercially to try and satisfy the Asian demand, it is believed that wild grown individuals are more medicinally effective. Therefore any naturally occurring population is at risk.
I have been watching for naturally growing populations at Rondeau for many years, and fortunately on occasion even after exploring Rondeau's forests for more than 50 years, I even discover another plant or two, sometimes even a small cluster, in my travels. However as mentioned earlier, I never disclose the locations, and while I do post some populations or individuals on iNaturalist, they are always obscured locations.
This is what a plant looks like in early flowering condition.
A closer look shows a few buds starting to open in June.
And a little later there may be a few more flower buds open, or at least a little farther along.
By mid-July, there are quite a few buds in full development. In a good year, most individual flowers will develop green buds, but that doesn't happen all the time.
By early August, some will show signs of ripening...
...and in mid-August, more will have developed. This is the same plant, and some of the green buds have disappeared. Maybe they ripened and fell off, perhaps even were eaten by birds.
The same plant by late August, has only one green bud left to ripen.
Another nearby plant still has two quite vivid berries to show.
This next one shows what a better growing season would result in: a nice tight cluster of red berries.
By late August, the ripe berries will be gone, and hopefully in a nearby place with good growing conditions. The berries will be eaten by birds or small mammals, and perhaps the undigested seeds will be eliminated in a good spot nearby.
By mid-September, the plant looks well past its prime with the dark green leaves continuing to fade.
A cluster shows them all at about the same stage, taken in late September. This following photo was taken of another cluster I have been keeping an eye on for several years and while the leaves show late season development, all the leaves are still present. The unfortunate thing was that on Sept 22 when I was out and checked on the individual plant that has been shown in the previous photos, it was gone! Someone had taken it! And when I checked on another, small group of about seven plants not too far away, they too were gone. It wasn't just that their leaves had fallen and the remaining stems were all that was left, the complete plants had been removed, presumably for the roots!
As mid-October approaches, many plants have lost their leaves. This next photo was a cluster of almost twenty plants, and the only plant with any sign of leaves is the tiny one at the very upper left of the photo, just above the light-coloured X.
This shows a close-up of that little one in the previous photo.
The point in all of this, is that I have been taking a close look at several populations that I have encountered over the years. And unfortunately two populations completely disappeared well before they should have done so naturally. One was a single individual, and was the one that I included several close-ups of the development near the beginning of this post. Another population of at least 7 plants disappeared far too early as well. They had been pulled out before the end of September.
The population of American Ginseng at Rondeau is not in its prime. In fact most plants are quite small, and the roots that are so appealing for supposed medical purposes are small as well. The size of the individual plants is likely due in part to the slow recovery of the forest under storey. As some readers will be well aware, Rondeau has had a deer over population for several decades, with the winter population approaching 600 individuals at one point. As a result in one cold winter near the peak of the winter population period, as many as 20 were known to have died of starvation. Hence the eventual re-occurrence of a deer control effort in the last 25 plus years, and now the winter population is somewhere around 150-175 animals. But the ongoing reduction of deer which are heavy browsers of plants like Ginseng, has only allowed the flora to recover quite slowly. A visit to either of the deer exclosures that were erected in the mid 1980s, and evaluating the flora inside vs outside is clearly a testament to the slow recovery of the natural flora in spite of the deer population reduction. Hence the Ginseng population as well as many other wildflower species is much more reduced than what it should be if the deer had been controlled all along.
So the survival of American Ginseng, through deer control, has been improved, but it will take time. In the meantime, some unethical individuals are on the lookout for this endangered plant, and removing some of the population for only marginal benefits to them, at best.
Further challenges for Ginseng, and many other plant species at Rondeau is the loss of the forest canopy due to the Emerald Ash Borer killing off the dominant Ash trees, and more recently the arrival of the Beech Leaf Disease causing a significant decline in American Beech. With Ash and Beech being two of the main dominant forest canopy species, the under storey has changed a lot, with so much more shrub growth and an impact on the wildflowers.
Managing such a nationally significant provincial park for so many reasons is not easy!
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