As state transportation officials grapple with how to preserve federally protected flowers near Long Grove, owners of the land, where the rare eastern prairie fringed orchids lie, have said they don’t want the state to intervene.
The Illinois Department of Transportation is looking into widening Illinois Route 22 through Long Grove, but that work will bring its machinery close to the bed of rare orchids — located on land owned by Richard and Darlene Prendergast.
The couple’s trepidation isn’t about how the state would handle the rare orchids, the Prendergasts recently told Long Grove village board members. They simply are worried that the state would not pay them what their land is worth, if IDOT officials move forward on the project and decide to try and purchase a portion of their land to widen Route 22.
Long Grove officials told the couple they don’t have any authority in the matter when they brought their case to the village board earlier this summer. The Prendergasts still reiterated how they would not want the state involved.
“You’re either supporting the residents or you’re supporting some flower,” Darlene Prendergast told the trustees.
The Prendergasts declined to comment to Pioneer Press, but they told Long Grove officials IDOT has not yet contacted them about purchasing their land, part of which is known as the Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid Nature Preserve.
In an email, IDOT spokeswoman Gianna Urgo said the agency wants a portion of the couple’s land.
“The Department is proposing to acquire the privately-owned Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid Nature Preserve,” Urgo wrote. “IDOT would fund short-term restoration and management of the property and then transfer the property to the Long Grove Park District for long-term maintenance.”
With a budget of $46 million, IDOT is in the second phase of its plan to widen Route 22 from Route 83 to Quentin Road, Urgo said. Construction could start in the early 2020s, she said.
Set back on the Prendergasts’ wooded property, a few dozen eastern prairie fringed orchids lie within a small patch of open space. The flowers, experts said, hardly bloom, and grow out of stalks that look like weeds. But the orchids are protected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Robert Parker Coffin, the first village president of Long Grove, dedicated land he owned that contained the orchids as a nature preserve in 1995, restricting certain uses designed to protect the flowers, according to state records. The Prendergasts owned a house next to Coffin, and they later bought Coffin’s property, including the nature preserve, in 2002.
Urgo said IDOT is working with other environmental groups to preserve the unique flowers, but the Prendergasts have said they mainly are concerned with how the state’s financial issues could affect land negotiations.
They told Long Grove officials they have never seen the orchids bloom. On the Prendergasts’ property, the flowers bloom for only a week or two in the early summer, if all the conditions are right, experts said.
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Cathy Pollack, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, inspects the open space routinely and saw 24 of them bloom this year.
“That’s a real high-quality environment for them to be growing in,” Pollack said. “To the average person, it looks like a bunch of weeds, but it’s a great location that fosters their health. We don’t have many places like it.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regard the eastern prairie fringed orchids as a threatened species. After being dedicated as a nature preserve, the orchids landed on the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission’s protected areas list as recently as this past December, according to commission records.
Steven Byers, the commissioner for Nature Preserve Area 2, said other patches of the orchid exist around northern Illinois, but he added how the flower is rare.
“We do controlled burning and elimination of invasive species in that area to protect what’s there,” Byers said.
At the Long Grove Park District, which eventually could be responsible for maintaining the orchids near Long Grove, board president Jane Wittig said preservation of the orchids is a priority even if the open space with the orchids isn’t in public view.
“These are so rare that we don’t advertise where they are,” she said. “We’re trying to keep them from going extinct.”
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