Just west of the Daniel Boone National Forest in Mount Victory, Kentucky, there’s a small wetland site that’s been researched for almost 20 years. In May 2025, it was in the path of a tornado that tore through the nearby communities of Somerset and London.
One year later, trees are still tipped over within the wetlands, with small pools of water forming under the root balls.
Amid the devastation, bright green shoots come up in the moss — the sprouts of the white fringeless orchid.
“We used to say that these were like the ghosts of Kentucky,” said Tara Littlefield, a senior botanist and ecologist with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. “They're like little white, floating plants that you can see looking out across the wetland.”
In July and August, the bright white flowers of the orchid will bloom, dotting the greenery of Appalachia’s Cumberland Plateau and emitting a strong fragrance.
But their presence here wasn’t always like this. The white fringeless orchid is federally threatened — making it rare even in its native habitat of the southeastern United States. They began proliferating again at this site as a result of the restoration project.
Littlefield said the team even produced a report about their success last year, but they were soon faced with a new challenge.
“Right when we got done with, ‘Hey, we restored this orchid, we've restored the wetland,’ it was reaching kind of a plateau in terms of recovery,” Littlefield said. “Then two weeks later, after we finished that and published that report, the tornado hit.”
Concerns about orchid population before tornado
Selective logging affected the site in the 1990s, prompting concerns about the declining white fringeless orchid population. Littlefield said when researchers first arrived, they could barely tell it was a wetland and there were only a handful of the orchids.
Chris Barton, who works on the restoration project, is a professor of watershed management and forest hydrology at the University of Kentucky. He’s also the founder and CEO of the environmental restoration nonprofit Green Forests Work.
Barton had previously contributed to wetlands restoration, and researchers in Mount Victory wanted his assistance in modifying the area’s hydrology — the movement and quality of its water.
His team proposed cutting some of the site’s young trees that sucked up lots of water, which limited resources for smaller plants like the orchid.
“Because (the orchids) were on the endangered species list, there was a lot of concern about us going in there and chopping trees down and potentially walking on the orchids and everything else,” Barton said. “But when it was looking very dire for the fate of this plant, they allowed us to go in and install these treatments on one of the wetlands.”
Within four years after those changes, flowering orchids increased by more than 1000%. The canopy trimming and hydrology modifications also caused other rare plants to show up in the area.
“This particular orchid species is like a keystone species to restore that community," Barton said. "If we can get this species to come back, then we think all the other associated species with it have an opportunity to come back as well.”
How the tornado impacted the restoration
Many of those trees that competed with the orchid are now downed, smothering the surrounding land. And because of that, the flowers are adjusting to different levels of sunlight, creating a new battle for resources.
“After the tornado, I took a small saw crew and we hiked through the tornado zone to try to cut up and pull some of the new trees that have fallen on the orchid populations,” Littlefield said.
While her team was able to clear smaller amounts of debris, Barton’s nonprofit coordinated the larger cleanup.
“This time last year, it was like despair,” he said. “It's like, ‘Oh, we did all this work for nothing.’ But now I think there's some hope, and there's some intrigue on what is going to happen to this system.”
By the end of April, researchers were able to fully access the site again and see the orchids coming up through the ground. The team hopes to push forward on their work and eventually replicate it elsewhere.
Though the tornado was devastating, Littlefield said it also presented her team with a new area of study.
“This is a really rare opportunity that we have to look at how these types of wetlands and the adjacent systems respond after these huge natural disasters, and how they're connected,” she said.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
