Gary Salathe's mission is to save the Louisiana iris. He's rescued 62,000 and counting. (2024)

On a crisp morning in February, Gary Salathe and a half-dozen volunteers tramped over a muddy plot of overgrown land in LaPlace, avoiding snakes and hunting irises.

Since Salathe founded the Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative in 2020, he has coordinated the rescue of more than 62,000 irises in an effort to preserve and perpetuate the five species ofirises native to south Louisiana wetlands.

The nonprofit relocates irises in danger of being destroyed to more safe locations, especially places where the public can enjoy the flowers. One by one, each flower is dug up and replanted.

The LaPlace property is zoned for commercial development and up for sale. However, the landowner has for years allowed LICI to harvest irises there.

“This site is so perfect for what we do,” Salathe said. “’No iris left behind’ is our motto.”

He secures permits to replant the irises along swamp boardwalks and nature trails and in parks and wildlife refuges throughout southeast Louisiana. Planting season generally runs from October to December, but last year’s drought delayed it.

On March 2, during LICI’s last large-scale event of the season, volunteers replanted more than 500 rescued irises in Assumption Parish at the future site of the Pierre Part/Belle River Museum and at a kayak launch in nearby Veterans Park.

The fruits of their labor are visible when irises bloom in late March and early April. The Louisiana Iris Conversation Initiative maintains an online Google map of the 20 best places to see Louisiana irises in their natural habitat. Theorganization’s Facebook page provides updates on the blooms.

“At one time, there were irises in every ditch in south Louisiana,” Salathe said. “Everybody looked forward to the bloom as part of the culture.”

Herbicides, hurricanes, saltwater intrusion and other factors have made the Louisiana state wildflower much harder to find.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Salathe said. “Our goal is to get the Louisiana iris back into the culture and consciousness of the New Orleans area.”

Long-term wetlands restoration

Now retired, Salathe co-owned a residential construction company for 21 years. But for a quarter-century, his main “hobby” was restoring a clear-cut parcel of long-leaf pine forest he owned in Tangipahoa Parish.

A decade ago, he shifted his flora focus to irises. In 2014, he joined the Greater New Orleans Iris Society, the Society for Louisiana Irises and the American Iris Society.

By 2020, he had launched the Louisiana Iris Conversation Initiative as a non-membership organization. He depends on volunteers to supply manpower. He also partners with the Louisiana Master Naturalists of Greater New Orleans and such community organizations as Limitless Vistas, the Louisiana Conservation Corps and Common Ground Relief.

“Everything we do is dependent on joining with other groups or getting volunteers from the public,” Salathe said.

He teamed with Common Ground Relief to remove invasive Chinese tallow trees from the Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans East and replace them with 4,000 native trees.

But irises are his main focus.

Over the past century, crossbreeding has produced hundreds of “cultivars,” the hybrid irises of many colors that populate most home gardens.

All cultivars descend from five native species of Louisiana irises. The rare reddish Iris nelsonii, known as the “Abbeville Red,” only grows in the wild on 1,200 acres of privately owned swampland in Vermillion Parish. The blue Iris giganticaerulea is more widespread.

The LICI’s big-picture goal is to build a reserve of irises for long-term wetlands restoration projects such as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

"It would take decades for native vegetation to rebuild itself in newly created wetlands, Salathe said. “Somebody needs to get out there with boots on the ground and put it in.”

Getting native Louisiana irises added to the USDA’s list of plants approved for purchase by marsh restoration companies would help.

“That’s the long game,” Salathe said.

For now, LICI is “parking” irises at various sites, including Sankofa Wetland Park & Nature Trail in the Lower Ninth Ward, Fontainebleau State Park on the north shore and in Thibodeaux at Nicholls State University's farms wetlands restoration project.

“These irises are going to double in number every year,” Salathe said. “So four or five years from now, when the restoration of the marshes and swamps really kicks in, we’ll have a base of plants that we’ll be able to add into the mix to try to reconstruct what used to be there.”

Getting their hands dirty

The February rescue in LaPlace started with Salathe giving volunteers a tutorial on swamp safety. He also explained how to dig up an iris perpendicular to its “fan” of shoots, so as to not damage the thick root that juts to the side.

David Duvic, whose property in St. Francisville is home to two plots of irises, was already familiar with the process. So was Connie Adams, another veteran volunteer, who drove in from Cut Off to spend hours picking weeds from iris root clusters.

Most of the day’s volunteers were fromLimitless Vistas, an AmeriCorps-affiliated nonprofit that introduces “disconnected young adults” to conservation and environmental-related workforce development.

“They’re helping me by getting our goals accomplished,” Salathe said. “We’re helping them by giving them a diverse experience that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s a win-win deal.”

Christopher “Cairo” Jackson, a Limitless Vistas grants coordinator, agreed.

By working with LICI, Jackson said, “people who have spent a majority of their life in the metropolitan New Orleans area are able to get out and see a different side of the place they call home.”

They quickly got their hands dirty filling black plastic sleds with uprooted I. giganticaerulea. Soupy soil made for easy extractions, but at one point Salathe dug in with a pointed hand shovel.

“People think it’s a Bowie knife,” he said. “No— I’m a shovel nerd.”

In three hours, they plucked 2,000 plants from the muck and deposited them on a flatbed trailer. Salathe planned to store the trailer in his garage, watering the irises twice daily until they were replanted at Nicholls State.

Elard Phillips, a Limitless Vistas board member on his first LICI rescue, admitted the work was “a little challenging."

“But years from now," he said, "it will be appreciated.”