- The Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve is a 12-hectare (30-acre) estate on Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas, dedicated to conserving and educating people about the island-nation’s native plants.
- Since 2009, resident botanist Ethan Freid has led a local restoration effort prioritizing native plants of the Bahamas’ subtropical dry forest ecosystem.
- The Levy preserve also offers a summer internship for university students interested in environmental science and biology, which teaches them about native plant taxonomy — filling a generational knowledge gap.
- Though small in scale, the project provides a haven for the Bahamas’ native plants; has a herbarium of plant specimens for research; and manages an online digital database of Caribbean plant species.
ELEUTHERA, Bahamas — Tucked away beside the main road that runs along Eleuthera, a narrow island in the Bahamas, the Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve holds 12 hectares (30 acres) of dense subtropical dry forest.
Black witch moths (Ascalapha odorata), as large as bats, zigzag between the branches as fluorescent wasps hum along the path’s edge. Orchard spiders (Leucauge venusta) sit on sprawling webs between mangrove roots. Meter-high termite mounds surround the bases of tree trunks. Native Jamaican slider turtles (Trachemys terrapen) sunbathe in the artificial wetland. Tree lizards, frogs and nonvenomous snakes make the preserve their home, too.
Just two decades ago, the same plot of land belonged to a hotel, with stretches of abandoned farmland. After philanthropist Shelby White purchased the land, and after many years of restoring the property, it became an accredited botanical garden. Today, it’s known for its conservation, research and education on native Bahamian plants.
The Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve is funded and managed through a partnership between the Bahamas National Trust, which oversees the country’s national parks, and the philanthropic Leon Levy Foundation based in New York City. Now, it’s the island’s standout example of native plant diversity and a hub for Caribbean plant knowledge.
Regrowing the forest
The Bahamas’ subtropical dry forests are characterized by nutrient-poor soils, lots of limestone, shrubs, hardwood trees, and frequent salt spray from the coast. But centuries of slash-and-burn agriculture, clear-cutting for development, and nonnative crop cultivation left much of Eleuthera — and other Bahamian islands — bereft of much of its native diversity. Hardy trees such as cascarilla (Croton eluteria) and mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) were logged for export, and fires destroyed much of the remaining forest. The island became better known for its pineapple and dairy production.
So, resident botanist Ethan Freid brought in roughly 3,500 native trees and shrubs on seven 40-foot shipping containers to initiate the reforestation project at the Levy preserve. Gumbo limbo trees (Bursera simaruba) now frequent the property as one of the most common species, while threatened species find safety in the property’s shade house.
“Our goal was always: Anything that’s not a parking space, a road, a building [or] a display bed will be turned back into a natural area,” Freid said.
Acre by acre and year by year, the team planted a diverse mix of trees and shrubs to maximize diversity and mimic the density of a typical subtropical dry forest.
“If you want to redo a forest, and you look at forest systems in the Bahamas, we have about a tree per square meter. So, that’s what I did,” Freid said. “We didn’t do large-scale restoration, but we did lots of these small pieces.”
The restoration work started in 2009 by removing lots of invasive species. Even after planting began in late 2010, it took about six years for the trees to naturally build enough leaf litter to create the forest floor, Freid said, providing enough nutrients to foster plant growth. Meanwhile, shade from the canopy created the right conditions — humidity, temperature, sunlight and tree bark quality — to nurture naturally occurring orchids, bromeliads and other epiphytes (plants that grow on tree trunks).
“It can take decades to get to the point of having that climate that would allow those organisms to actually land in an appropriate area with all of those environmental factors,” Freid said. These species are slow to return after major disturbances, Freid said, so the ones he found on the property some 15 years ago signaled it had been left untouched for many years.
The preserve wasn’t just filled in with trees; it was intentionally managed by enhancing the existing environment. What used to be an informal dumping site became an artificial pond and waterfall. A boardwalk takes patrons through a natural mangrove forest. Roads were rerouted to better showcase the dry forest, while walking paths were purposely made to be narrow and winding, allowing for maximum forest density. And, Freid said, because “nature doesn’t really do straight lines.”
Almost immediately, local wildlife started to come back: Bahamian boas (Chilabothrus strigilatus), brown racers (Cubophis vudii picticeps), green anoles (Anolis carolinensis), blue-tailed ameiva lizards (Pholidoscelis maynardi) and 81 bird species, from warblers to great lizard-cuckoos (Coccyzus merlini) and migrating birds stopping over for the winter.
Below visitors’ feet, wood chips made from Australian pine (Casuarina equisetifolia), one of the most invasive plant species in the Bahamas, absorb moisture to mitigate mud and dust. Left standing, the Australian pines smother low-lying plants, erode the coastline and can even prevent sea turtles from nesting on beaches.
The Levy preserve does cultural conservation, too. Oral knowledge about native medicinal plants has faded over the generations, so one section displays these species for visitors to learn about. “The Bahamas was very much, until relatively recently, a subsistence agriculture and fishing society,” Freid said. “People didn’t have easy access to doctors or pharmacies, so you would go out and use what was around you.” There are at least 200 plant species in the Bahamas with known medicinal uses, he said, 60 of which are on display at the preserve.
Another section displays poisonous plants, from poisonwood (Metopium toxiferum) to the manchineel tree (Hippomane mancinella), whose toxic fruit is nicknamed the “little apple of death.” Meanwhile, an endemic species section displays plants found only in the Bahamas, such as several species of agave. And the “edible history” exhibit showcases Bahamian plants that the native Lucayans, colonists and modern-day Bahamians have eaten, from seagrape (Coccoloba uvifera) to cocoplum (Chrysobalanus icaco) and governor’s plum (Flacourtia indica), bearing their fruit for visitors to see and taste.
Botanical conservation
Displays are great for educating visitors. But “that’s not conservation,” Freid said. “Conservation happens in your horticulture area.”
Fifty of the Bahamas’ 89 endemic plant species are unique to just one or two islands. “Those are our greatest conservation concern,” Freid said, because their populations are so restricted. The critically endangered Bootle Bay sedge (Cyperus correllii), for instance, is found only on a mile-long stretch of dune on Grand Bahama Island and is likely to go extinct within a few years due to invasive species and housing developments.
Freid and his team collected the sedge’s seeds and now house a population in the Levy preserve’s shade houses, along with about a dozen other threatened plants. By using wild-harvested seeds, the staff can cultivate genetically diverse populations of rare and threatened species for conservation, Freid said. If populations collapse in the wild, these assisted populations could help restore them. There’s also a for-sale nursery of native species, where homeowners can purchase plants to enhance the diversity of their own yards.
The preserve and the Bahamas National Trust combined are filling 12 of the 16 targets under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, a framework created by the Convention on Biological Diversity. One of those targets is to create a digital online flora, a database of local native and nonnative species. Freid has since documented 814 of them for the Bahamas.
“I use it quite a lot for plant identification,” said Sara Bárrios, a botanist and conservation partnership coordinator at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K. “He’s not just doing education at the local level; he’s also creating resources that we are using at a regional level.”
In the herbarium, meanwhile, file cabinets house roughly 1,400 physical plant specimens, including their scientific name and location coordinates. “If I’m tracking down a rare and endangered species, I can go to our herbaria, find where collections [of specimens] were done, and then target those locations,” Freid said.
Combined, these collections help develop listings for the IUCN Red List, an international database of threatened species. They’re also helpful for singling out the Bahamas’ endangered species, allowing conservationists to grow and store them in a controlled setting. “But you’ve got to know where to find them,” Freid said.
It’s also useful for commercial developers. Companies in the Bahamas are required to conduct environmental impact assessments to determine whether any of the 89 endemic plants exist on the land they want to develop.
‘Sowing the seeds’
A list of plants alone isn’t helpful for industry folks who aren’t trained to identify plants on sight. That’s why Freid started a paid, eight-week plant taxonomy internship to train Bahamian students on local flora.
It’s only in the last decade, Freid said, that Bahamian environmental consulting firms have existed to properly assess land for development. Before that, consultants were typically brought in from Florida or other southern U.S. states, none of whom had in-depth local expertise.
“How do you know if that’s a forest worth saving if you don’t have someone that can go and identify it?” Freid said.
He started the botany internship in 2014 with this in mind. Now, environmental consulting isn’t just more accurate — it’s also led by people from the Bahamas. It’s helped bring Bahamians back to the Bahamas, avoiding “brain drain,” even if the interns are enrolled at foreign universities.
It’s important to “share what you learned and contribute to our society that way,” former intern and native Bahamian Khori Stubbs told Mongabay.
Growing up, Stubbs and her classmates didn’t learn much about local plants. So, in her third year of university in Canada, she spent the summer learning botany with Freid, who quizzed her daily. “My head was just full of plants,” she said.
Stubbs is now an environmental consultant in New Providence, the most populous island in the Bahamas, where she helps conduct land-based surveys of plants and wildlife before companies start construction. “Literally all of my knowledge came from that internship,” she said.
So far, Freid has helped train more than 30 young botanists. Botany, he added, “isn’t big and sexy” compared to fields like marine biology, herpetology or ornithology, so it’s a notable accomplishment.
“[Freid] sows the seeds in young people to maybe study plants,” said Bárrios, the Kew botanist, who specializes in Caribbean flora and has collaborated with Freid in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
There’s a bigger consequence: Universities have increasingly favored molecular biology over pure species identification, and that’s hindering conservation. Over time, taxonomic knowledge has faded away. Botanists recently called out this global problem in a Trends in Plant Science paper. The world is losing plant species faster than humans can identify them, with a staggering two in five known plants threatened with extinction, Kew reports.
“We do not even know what we are losing, and we don’t even know the full benefits [of those plants] for the ecosystem,” Bárrios said. “There’s not [enough] capacity within the world of botany to describe all these species as fast as they need.”
That’s why Freid’s training program, online flora database and herbarium are so important, she said — so that researchers can not only identify species, but also know where to find them. Environmental managers can then better conserve those habitats.
Botanic gardens, especially smaller ones like the Levy preserve, are important for educating people about the importance of plants in a world where we face the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, Bárrios said. They also “should place themselves as playing this key role for reforestation,” she added. That’s the difference, she said, between a “botanic” garden and a “beautiful” garden.
“These small-scale projects [are] actually the way that we can overcome plant blindness,” Bárrios said.
Plant blindness is a term that describes the tendency to ignore and overlook plants as part of the ecosystem in favor of the more charismatic animal fauna — even though plants feed animals (and humans), produce oxygen and create habitats, Bárrios said. Combatting this through local communities, she added, is the best way to help people connect with their environment.
She cited the example of mangroves: It’s only in the face or aftermath of a hurricane that people seem to remember their importance in shielding shorelines, she said.
“It’s almost like people only remember the plants when they need them,” Bárrios said, “instead of trying to protect them before they disappear.”
Banner image: The orchids at Levy Preserve are naturally occurring and indicate that this land hadn’t been disturbed for many years. Image by Marlowe Starling for Mongabay.
Field reporting for this story was supported by Mongabay and the Safina Center.
Citations:
Simões, A. R. G., Leliaert, F., Bramley, G. L. C., Clark, R. P., Smith, R. J., Luján, M., … Antonelli, A. (2025). Equipping the next generation of plant taxonomists: Insights and recommendations. Trends in Plant Science. doi:10.1016/j.tplants.2025.08.019
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