Shoals spider lilies on Chattahoochee again

Mother’s Day to Father’s Day is typical bloom time for one of Georgia’s most strikingly beautiful — but rarest — wildflowers, the shoals spider lily. Growing in dense colonies, the spider lily’s large, white flowers atop 3-foot stems are breathtaking.

Making the flowers even more stunning is the natural habitat in which they live — shallow, rocky shoals of clean, sunny, fast-flowing streams in the Piedmont and upper coastal plain regions. In the shoal areas, the flowers grow from bulbs rooted in crevices of shoal rocks.

Such habitats supporting large colonies of shoals spider lilies were widespread more than a century ago in rocky streams in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Over the decades, however, entire populations of the striking flower were wiped out by rising water from dams and by siltation from development. In Georgia, the plant’s presence was reduced to only a handful of streams. It is now legally protected.

The lower Chattahoochee River was one of the streams that lost its splendid spider lily populations because of a series of dams that impeded water flow.

Now, there’s good news on that front. Several groups are working hard to restore the shoals spider lily in the Chattahoochee. Prominent among them is the Columbus-based Chattahoochee River Conservancy. Since 2015, the organization and others have been laboring to transplant thousands of spider lilies in a 2.3mile stretch of the river at Columbus, where two dams — Eagle & Phenix Dam and City Mills Dam — once restricted water flow.

The dams were torn down in 2013, and the river was allowed to return to its natural flow. That’s when the groups saw their chance to restore the spider lilies. Their effort is ongoing; the work is tedious and laborious.

The plants first have to be raised from seeds for a year under strict conditions before they can be transplanted in the river.

But the process is working, and once again, shoals spider lilies will be blooming on Mother’s Day in the Chattahoochee River at Columbus, where the river once more flows swiftly and freely.

■ IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The moon will be first quarter on Wednesday. Mars and Mercury are in the east just before sunrise. Saturn is in the west just after dark. Jupiter and Venus can’t be seen easily right now.

CHARLES SEABROOK FOR THE AJC Shoals spider lilies bloom in May in Flat Shoals Creek in Harris County. The creek is a tributary of the Chattahoochee River. Several organizations are trying to restore the flowers in a section of the river itself in Columbus.