This spring amateur botanists were thrilled to discover the low-lying, trumpet-shaped flower (Mimulus tricolor) growing in a former rye grass field on the outskirts of Corvallis, Oregon. The flower once speckled Oregon's Willamette Valley with showy splashes of color, until plowing and stream engineering put it out of business.

The seeds may have survived because they come in hard, nutlike capsules, says Steve Northway, a chemist and amateur botanist. The seeds, he says, must have been revived when a flood last winter stripped away the grass and left muddy puddles, the kind of habitat in which monkey flowers once thrived.

This year's flowers may just be a flash in the pan--the channels are temporary, unlike the vernal pools that used to form every spring when the water table peaked. To save the flower, Northway and co-workers are collecting seeds and seeking ways to emulate the flood's effects. One possibility, he says, is to use heavy equipment to break up patches of surface soil, encouraging puddle formation.

Ecologist Peter Chesson of the University of California, Davis, notes that the serendipitous return of the monkey flower demonstrates that plants don't always need to be reintroduced where people are trying to restore an ecosystem: "The seed bank [in the soil] can be quite rich." So, he says, it can often be more efficient to create conditions favorable to the germination of old seeds lying dormant.