The Plant That Almost Never Flowers: Inside Cherokee's $100,000 Bet on River Cane

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 29, 2026

The plant at the center of a new $100,000 grant is one of only three bamboos native to North America, and it almost never flowers. That single biological quirk is a large part of why river cane has become so hard to find in Western North Carolina, and why the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is building a greenhouse specifically to grow it.

The grant comes from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and will fund a propagation greenhouse at the tribe's Thomas Valley property, EBCI deeded land on Thomas Valley Road in Whittier. The build includes one greenhouse, a shed, and a couple of hoop houses, with EBCI Cooperative Extension sharing the site. Construction was underway as of the Timber Committee meeting on July 20, and the target is to have both greenhouses functional by spring.

"We got $100,000 funding from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy to fund another greenhouse, specifically this time to propagate river cane," said Josh Parris, EBCI Natural Resources forestry manager. "That's a big deal."

A Facility That Had to Move to Grow

This is not the tribe's first horticultural operation. EBCI Natural Resources ran a functional facility at Kituwah, the Mother Town of the Cherokee, for close to five years before pausing it. The reason was space. Kituwah carries deep cultural significance and a lot of competing demands on its acreage, and a production nursery needs room to sprawl in ways that site could not accommodate.

Thomas Valley solves that. It is deeded property rather than trust land, which changes the administrative picture, and it gives the operation the footprint it needs to actually scale. Pairing with Cooperative Extension on the same site puts the horticulture people and the agriculture people within walking distance of each other, which matters more than it sounds like it should when you are trying to figure out why a tray of rhizomes is failing.

"We had a bit of funding to re-establish those greenhouses," Parris said. "So, we have started that process and that's what's happening right now."

He described the restart in similar terms elsewhere, framing it as building a greenhouse and shed to re-up the site and get back into production. That is the honest shape of this story. It is less a brand new initiative than a program that had proven itself, ran out of room, and is moving somewhere with room to work.

For anyone who follows tribal projects around Cherokee and Whittier, that pattern will feel familiar. The 2014 Native Plant Nursery opening, led at the time by Forrest Parker and project manager Patrick Breedlove, was part of the same long effort by the tribe to build its own plant production capacity instead of buying stock from somewhere else.

Ten Million Acres, Almost All Gone

To understand why a greenhouse for one plant counts as news, you need the history. Arundinaria gigantea once formed canebrakes that covered an estimated ten million acres across southern lowlands and floodplains. These were not scattered patches. They were dense, monotypic thickets that early European travelers described as nearly impassable, running for miles along river bottoms.

Cane typically grows four to eight feet tall in this region, though under the right conditions it can reach roughly twenty five feet. It spreads by rhizome, sending underground runners sideways to build a colony that is functionally one organism. Those root mats are why cane is so good at holding a streambank together during high water.

Then came the plow. Canebrake soil was rich floodplain ground, exactly what farmers wanted, and cattle grazed young shoots to nothing. Across the South, farmers converted the canebrakes to fields and pasture over the course of a couple of centuries. What survives today is a small fraction of the original range, mostly in fragments along creeks and rivers.

For the Cherokee, that loss was not abstract. River cane is the raw material for the basketry tradition Cherokee craft has been built on for generations, and the supply problem is old enough that weavers have been driving farther and farther to find harvestable stands for decades. Rowena Bradley, who died in 2003 and remains the best known name in EBCI rivercane weaving, worked through much of that decline. Weavers working today, including enrolled artisans like Mary Thompson, are working with what is left of it.

Helene Made a Slow Problem Urgent

Hurricane Helene did what floods do to river corridors, and it did it across the entire region at once. Streambanks failed, channels moved, and the vegetation holding those banks in place went downstream. The recovery work that followed created immediate, large-scale demand for native riparian plant material.

River cane suits that work about as well as anything can. It is native, it grows well in exactly the flood-prone ground that needs stabilizing, and its rhizome network is a natural erosion control system. Restoration planners across Western North Carolina figured that out quickly.

The problem is that wanting river cane and getting river cane are different things. "It's coming at a good time because of the need for river cane due to Hurricane Helene, and multiple different agencies looking for river cane," Parris said. "Nobody is really producing river cane in any big capacity. So, if we can show that we can produce river cane, then that will coincide well with their need for river cane and our new facility."

That is the strategic read on this grant. There is a market with real, funded demand and effectively no supply. If EBCI Natural Resources can demonstrate reliable production, it steps into a gap nobody else in the region has filled.

The propagation itself is the hard part. Because cane flowers so rarely and so unpredictably, growing from seed is not a workable plan. Everything runs through rhizome division, which means starting with material from existing stands. Warren Wilson College graduate students in applied climate studies, including Tim Comstock, Hazel Pardington, and Fiona McColley, have been specifically chasing propagation methods that do not require harvesting from wild stands, because taking rhizomes from the few healthy canebrakes left is a self-defeating way to solve a shortage.

The Baskets Are the Reason

Strip away the grant language and the restoration contracts and there is a woman at a table splitting cane with a knife. That is the demand this all serves.

A river cane basket starts with a harvest, then splitting the stalk into strips thin enough to weave, then dyeing with bloodroot for orange-red, butternut for brown, black walnut for near black. Double-weave baskets, where the weaver builds an inner and outer wall in one continuous piece, can take weeks. The material has to be right or none of it works.

Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual in Cherokee, the artisan cooperative managed by Vicki Cruz, is where a lot of that work reaches buyers. The co-op has been the main outlet for Cherokee craft for decades, and it sits directly downstream of the cane shortage. When weavers cannot get material, the shelves reflect it.

Adam Griffith has spent years in the middle of this work, first as RTCAR director with the Cherokee Preservation Foundation and NC State Extension and now as a Cooperative Extension agent with the EBCI. He framed it this way at a 2021 restoration planting: the project may reduce erosion and allow harvesting by EBCI artisans down the road, but most importantly, it brings rivercane back to an area where it historically thrived.

That is the difference between a conservation project and a cultural one. Both are happening here at the same time.

Four Funding Sources, One Site

The headline number is $100,000, but that alone would not build what is going up at Thomas Valley. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy grant sits on top of $50,000 from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, EPA General Assistance Program funds, and tribal dollars.

Stacking is how projects like this actually get built. Each source has its own eligible costs, its own reporting requirements, and its own timeline, and somebody in the department has to make all of them line up on one construction schedule. Reporters rarely cover that work, but it is the reason the greenhouse exists.

The site will also produce squash, beans, corn, and tomatoes for distribution to the EBCI community. The first three are the Three Sisters, the companion planting method Cherokee farmers have used for centuries, where corn gives beans a pole, beans fix nitrogen, and squash shades out weeds. Growing them here connects the greenhouse to the food sovereignty push EBCI Extension has been building, work that Jessica Mrugala and Chumper Walker have driven to more than $11 million in federal and regional funding, including a tribal meat processing facility.

Jeff Gibby, lead horticulture technician for EBCI Natural Resources, wants to run community classes on plant propagation out of the facility. That turns a production site into a teaching site, which is how the knowledge outlasts any single grant cycle.

The Rest of the Department's Plate

The greenhouse is one item on a long list. EBCI Natural Resources, under director Michael LaVoie, is also administering a $5 million EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grant it received in 2025. That funds a solar microgrid supporting 21 electric school buses, solar installations at the Cherokee Council House, the TOP Building, and the KPEP building, and twenty EV charging stations.

On the forestry side, Parris presented management plans for Lickstone Ridge and Jenkins Creek at the same committee meeting, both involving thinning to encourage oak regeneration alongside prescribed fire. "Fire is recommended in both of these plans, quite significantly," he said. "We have conducted fire on Lickstone."

Then there is water. Cherise Maples, EBCI environmental resources manager, does not undersell what the tribe is protecting. "In general, we have some of the cleanest waters in the state, if not the cleanest waters in the state," she said. The department runs a public E. coli dashboard, and Rainee Tetreault supervises a monitoring program that has been running since 2020 and earned an award from N.C. DHHS.

Put those together and the greenhouse stops looking like a standalone project. Clean water, restored streambanks, healthy forests, and cane growing where it belongs are the same job approached from four directions.

What Spring Looks Like on Thomas Valley Road

By spring, the plan is for both greenhouses to be running. Trays of rhizomes under glass in Whittier, hoop houses beside them, vegetables going in the ground for community distribution, and Extension staff working the same site.

If it holds, the payoff runs in several directions at once. Restoration crews across Western North Carolina get a source for a plant they currently cannot buy. Weavers in Cherokee get a supply chain that does not depend on driving creek to creek hoping for a stand somebody has not already cut. And a species that lost most of its range in North America gets a production pipeline behind it for the first time in a long while.

The answer to a modern disaster recovery problem turned out to be a plant Cherokee people have been managing for a thousand years. Kituwah itself came back into tribal hands through the same kind of patience, purchased under Principal Chief Joyce Dugan in 1996 and placed into trust under Principal Chief Richard G. Sneed in 2021. Things here move on a long clock.

Drive Thomas Valley Road this fall and you will see a greenhouse frame where there was not one before, which is a small thing that will take a few years to become a large one. That mix of long history and quiet, steady building is a lot of what draws people to this corner of the mountains in the first place, and when someone decides they want to plant themselves here too, I am always happy to talk through what that looks like.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is river cane and why is it important to the Cherokee?

River cane, or Arundinaria gigantea, is one of only three bamboo species native to North America and the primary material in traditional Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians basketry. Weavers split the stalks into thin strips, dye them with bloodroot, butternut, and black walnut, and work them into double-weave baskets that can take weeks to complete. Cane also anchors streambanks, filters runoff before it reaches the water, and shelters wildlife. Historically it grew in dense canebrakes across southern floodplains, but agriculture, grazing, and development wiped out the overwhelming majority of that range, leaving weavers competing for a shrinking supply.

Where is the new EBCI river cane greenhouse located?

The greenhouse is going up at the Thomas Valley property on Thomas Valley Road in Whittier, N.C., in Jackson County. The site is EBCI deeded land rather than trust land, which gives the tribe more flexibility in how it develops and uses the property. The build includes one greenhouse, a shed, and multiple hoop houses, and EBCI Natural Resources is sharing the site with EBCI Cooperative Extension. The greenhouse and shed were under construction as of the Timber Committee meeting on July 20, 2026, with a stated goal of having both greenhouses functional by spring 2027.

Why is river cane in short supply in Western North Carolina?

Two reasons stack on top of each other. The long-term reason is habitat loss: canebrakes once covered an estimated ten million acres across southern lowlands and floodplains, and almost all of that was cleared for farming and pasture generations ago. The short-term reason is Hurricane Helene, which tore through creek and river corridors across the region and destroyed cane stands while simultaneously creating enormous demand for streambank restoration material. Multiple agencies are now hunting for river cane at once. As EBCI forestry manager Josh Parris put it, nobody is producing it in any significant capacity.

How do you propagate river cane if it rarely produces seed?

Growers work from rhizomes, the underground stems that cane uses to spread laterally through a stand. River cane flowers on an unpredictable cycle that can run decades, and when it does flower the resulting seed is unreliable, so seed-based propagation is not a practical production strategy. Rhizome division means cutting sections of living root mass, potting them, and nursing them until they establish enough root and shoot growth to survive outplanting. The catch is that rhizomes come from existing wild stands, so researchers, including graduate students at Warren Wilson College, have focused on methods that minimize pressure on the stands still standing.

What else will the Whittier facility grow?

Alongside river cane, the operation will produce squash, beans, corn, and tomatoes for distribution to the EBCI community. The first three are the Three Sisters, the companion planting system Cherokee farmers have used for centuries, and the vegetable production ties the site into the broader food sovereignty work EBCI Cooperative Extension has been building out. Jeff Gibby, lead horticulture technician for EBCI Natural Resources, has also said he wants to run community classes on plant propagation out of the new facility, which would turn it into a teaching site rather than only a production site.