The Excitement of Discovering an Endangered Species

…right there in the yard for all to see!

I visited the daughter of a dear friend of mine last summer. It was her 12th birthday party, which I wouldn’t have missed for the world - I’ve known and loved this young lady since before she was born. The party was held on a stretch of flat lawn below the house, which is a ~70-year old timber frame atop a tall knob in Asheville, North Carolina.

There’s a path with timber-crossed bark-backfilled steps winding down the hillside from the house to the lawn. At one point along the path there’s a little grove of tall hemlocks, blue spruce and Frasier firs with a rhododendron mid-story boundary that’s cool even in the heat of summer. An old rope swing that doesn’t look strong enough to hold anyone anymore dangles from a lone oak’s limb, a little shady clearing off the main path. There, blending unobtrusively amongst the firs and hemlocks was a different kind of tree - different enough to catch my attention sharply that day. So I collected a needled twig hoping to identify it when I got home.

It was as tall as the hemlocks, not as tall as the firs. Maybe 45 feet, conically shaped just like its coniferous neighbors, but with the oddest needle and twig pattern I’d seen in all my days. The needles paired off the twig opposite each other like hemlocks do, but each needle was an inch long. Hemlock needles are tiny in comparison, and fir needles grow at all angles. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, reminded me a little of some fern-like throwback (but this was definitely a conifer tree). When I asked my friend she told me she didn’t know its name, but did know it’s very rare.

I’d forgotten to look it up when I got home, found that saved twig and now dry needle-leaves folded in a page of newspaper just the other day when cleaning out the shelves near my computer (shows how often I clean them out!). Decided it’s about time I went looking to identify this strange tree that looks like it belongs here, but which I’ve never seen anywhere else in all my hikes in these mountains. Of course I went surfing…

I went to a dozen different conifer identification sites. Federal government, state government, academic departmental, professionally scientific. Nothing quite like it except yew, and those are rare out east as well as having needles much shorter than my sample.

I added the adjective “rare” to my search, and suddenly three or four sites came up with something that looked an awful lot like what I had. Sure enough, it turned out to be Torreya Taxifolia. a confer so rare they say its only mature specimens are in botanical gardens under highly controlled conditions. It’s also called Florida Torreya because the only known wild members of the species grow in a tiny range along the Apalachicola River in 3 counties in the Florida panhandle. It’s closely related to the Florida Yew (Taxus floridana), the only yew in Florida.

My friend’s tree is a member of a species that got “left behind” after the last ice age, when its fellow northern climate trees repatriated themselves northward as the ice melted. The Torreya didn’t, and the only wild stands that remain are mostly shoots from old stumps. No mature trees at all in its only known wild habitat.

So how, I wondered, did my friend happen to have a healthy, beautiful, nearly 50-foot Torreya in her yard? …Looking as if it belongs there?

The answer to my question came from Rewilding Torreya taxifolia. Seems there’s an effort to re-naturalize Torreya in its original habitats, and to do that they’re following an old lead. The only grove of mature “wild” Torreya happens to be located at the Biltmore Gardens in Asheville. It originated in 1939 when a dozen specimens were transplanted from the Apalachicola stand. All the original specimens are still alive and still producing strong seed after more than 65 years. Clones are being raised elsewhere in controlled environments.

The Rewilding website has a great story tracing the details, and about how squirrels have been spreading the seeds over the last half-century plus from Biltmore’s grove. My friend’s tree is not distant at all from Biltmore’s managed forests and gardens (as the crow flies maybe two or three miles). It’s probably one of the natural, squirrel-abetted ‘escapees’ from the first viable seeds those original transplants produced.

It’s a striking-looking tree, graceful and well-shaped. It caught my attention directly (in a small grove of mixed conifers set as part of the landscaping, not a focal piece) when I wasn’t looking for anything unusual. I told my friend to save me cones or berries or seeds or whatever the tree produced in the way of seed (turns out it is seeds and not cones, none evident when I met it), as I would love to have a nice standing row of these along the property line and would take good care of them. I have old American Chestnut stumps here that still grow shoots. They live to about 5 (not long enough to fruit), then die of the blight that wiped their parents out in the 1930s. I’m trying to save those too…

I beg to differ with Nearctica’s information that “the only mature individuals of the species remaining are in cultivation.” The Biltmore transpants have been producing offspring for as long as they’ve been producing seeds, and some of their offspring are gorgeous. This is a tree that obviously belongs here. But because it’s as rare as my chestnuts, don’t tell anybody I know one personally. I’m gonna have to press harder to get some seeds from my friend, see if I can’t have two or three growing here in my yard. A repatriated ice age conifer might find an open niche here, you never know.

Links:

Torreya taxifolia Arn

Rewilding Torreya taxifolia

Florida Torreya

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Filed under Conservation, Endangered Species, Homestead, Landscaping, Rare Plants, Yard |