WHIDBEY ISLAND – The golden paintbrush has a lot of strikes against it.
The small yellow-flowered plant (Castilleja levisecta to scientists) likes dry, sunny coastal prairies, the same kind of oceanfront property popular with shrubs, trees and humans.
Now, some of the endangered plant’s human competitors are trying to help.
Seattle Pacific University signed a deal to sell 33 acres of prime paintbrush habitat to Whidbey Camano Land Trust, a Bayview-based environmental group.
The site is one of only 11 places left in the world where golden paintbrush is known to grow. Five of those are on Whidbey Island, said the land trust’s executive director, Pat Powell.
Environmentalists were alarmed more than a year ago when they heard the university was considering developing the site with large, upscale homes with great views across Puget Sound to the Olympic Mountains.
The 33 acres are at the northern end of 380 acres the university owns and manages, including the historic Camp Casey complex, where thousands of students, religious groups and summer campers have been learning about the outdoors since 1956, when SPU bought the surplus U.S. Army base.
The paintbrush deal would offer something for everybody, said Darrell Hines, an associate vice president at SPU. Nature lovers would keep the paintbrush safe and the university would get about $2 million of needed revenue for the future, he said.
“And for the average person, it maintains that lovely site in an undeveloped state” with trails, Hines said.
The deal has one large hurdle before the title changes hands – the land trust group will need to raise $750,000 in nine months. The challenge is large, but the trust has one recent success story for inspiration.
In 2003, the trust purchased 31 forested acres with one of Puget Sound’s largest great blue heron nesting colonies on Camano Island for $510,000. The group managed to raise half of that through matching grants and the other half through a six-month campaign for personal donations.
Powell admitted the fund-raising challenge is bigger this time.
Partnering with the state Department of Natural Resources and The Nature Conservancy, the trust secured a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But the trust must raise the rest of the money, $750,000, by mid-February.
With the herons, the group barely reached its $255,000 goal, and it had an elegant, popular bird to rally around. The new campaign will have to draw inspiration from a plant that is not well known.
“It’s not quite as sexy,” Powell admitted, but the area is a popular tourist attraction, so preserving it should be easy to market, she said.
Other deals might have been more lucrative for the university, but stewardship has its reward, too, Hines said.
“We like the idea that we can continue it in that preservation state.”
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
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