Page 24 - Black Range Naturalist Vol. 4 No. 1

feeling that the bigleaf sedge is still present on Diamond Creek, but that its populations are probably few and quite small. I left the Aldo with a wonderful feeling of satisfaction having thoroughly enjoyed my brief exposure to the wilderness.
However, my story does not end here.
What prompted me to visit the Aldo in 2020 stemmed from my participation in the Southwest Carex Working Group. Our group consists of 4 botanists (William “Bill” Norris, affiliated with the Dale A. Zimmerman Herbarium at Western New Mexico University (WNMU) in Silver City, Max Licher and Glenn Rink, who are both affiliated with the Deaver Herbarium at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, AZ, and me – I’m affiliated with the University of New Mexico (UNM) herbarium in Albuquerque). Our group spent 6 years examining specimens of all species of genus Carex that were collected in NM, correcting misidentifications, writing keys and
The Native Plant Society of New Mexico provided some funding for this effort, see the write-up at the link. Please consider helping them help researchers. (ed. BRN)
descriptions, determining the distribution of collected specimens and culminating with our treatment of Carex (Licher et al. 2020) in the recently published Flora Neomexicana III: An Illustrated Identification Manual. 2nd ed. Part 1 (Allred, Jercinovic and Ivey 2020).
Both Max Licher and I were interested in taking photos of bigleaf sedge, but I knew that Max was a much better photographer than me. With a goal of finding and photographing the bigleaf sedge in the Gila, Max paid a visit to Bill Norris in Silver City a couple weeks later than my visit to the Aldo. Bill recalled an event 4-5 years earlier when Dale A. Zimmerman brought into the herbarium an “over-mature” sedge specimen that Bill tentatively identified as Carex amplifolia. Max’s impending visit stimulated Bill and Russ Kleinman, botanist and author of the Vascular Plants of the Gila Wilderness website, to find the site where Zimmerman had found the plant. The site location is on private property on the floodplain of the Mimbres River near Bear Canyon reservoir at an elevation of 6100 feet. With permission granted from the property owner Bill and Russ discovered several extensive colonies of bigleaf sedge in
One of the specimens collected by J. McGrath at Diamond Creek in 2004.
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