On the northeast side of the Dog River Bridge along Dauphin Island Parkway, phragmites (frag-mite-us) once grew more than 14 feet tall inside a small estuary that curves toward the bridge from the bay at Helen Wood Park.

Through a kind of twisted, biological adaptation of its own, the "phrag," officials say, emits toxins in the water that kill off all other, more benign plants.

"Nothing else survives in it," said Mobile Bay National Estuary Program project manager Tom Herder.

But in a multi-year project conducted by the local NEP — and adapting the volunteer services of various high school environmental science programs and their students and teachers — the "phrag" is being cleared.

This 3.5-acre marsh that is underwater at high tide and a mud flat in low, will have plants whose names roll out softer on the senses — Southern wild rice, bulrush, pickeral weed, duck potato, black needle rush.

On Friday, students from Baker High School braved the muck and mud to place this colorful vegetation, but not without consequences.

Hunter McDaniel, a 17-year-

old senior, was, he said, "decommissioned" early in the day, thanks to a small cut on his foot.

He observed from solid ground barefooted, in shorts, with dry gray mud clinging to the lower third of his tall frame as though he were wearing a pair of hideous knee socks.

Wrangling the pack of 30 mud-splattered teenagers was their environmental science and botany instructor, Jennifer Stevens, a Mobile County Teacher of the Year who earned the honor last year, but certainly not for being timid.

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