GROUNDSWELL l
1
in Hand
While scientists debate how to help save species from a warming
climate, others aren’t willing to wait
Torreya State Park perches on the
steep, sandy banks of the Apalachicola,
where the river twists slowly through the
Florida Panhandle toward the Gulf of
Mexico. This is one of the most isolated
spots in Florida, rich only in plant life and prisons, stupefyingly hot
in summer and eerily quiet nearly all year round. Most park visitors
are on their way somewhere else, and when Connie Barlow stopped
here on a winter day in 1999, she was no exception.
Barlow, trim and now in her >fties, is a writer and naturalist
with cropped hair and a childlike air of enthusiasm. She’s given
to wandering, and back then she shuttled between a trailer in
southern New Mexico and an apartment in New York City. That
winter, during a detour to Florida, she paused at the park for a
look at its raison d’être—an ancient tree species called Torreya
taxifolia, familiarly known as the Florida torreya or, less romantically, stinking cedar. The park lies at the heart of the tree’s tiny
range, which stretches little more than twenty miles from the
Georgia state line toward the mouth of the Apalachicola. But
even at Torreya State Park, Barlow discovered, the Florida torreya
is hard to >nd.
Torreya taxifolia was once a common sight along the
Apalachicola, plentiful enough to be cut for Christmas trees, its
rot-resistant wood perfect for fence posts. But at some point in
the middle of the last century—no one is quite sure when—the
trees began to die. Beset by a mysterious disease, overabundant
deer, feral hogs, drought, and perhaps a stressful climate, the
adult trees were reduced to a handful of mossy trunks, rotting in
riverside ravines.
The species persists in Florida as less than a thousand gangly
survivors, most only a few feet tall, their trunks no thicker than a
child’s wrist, none known to reproduce. Much like the American
chestnut, these trees are frozen in preadolescence, knocked back
by disease or other adversaries before they grow large enough to
set seed. To see their grape-sized seeds, Barlow had to visit the state
park o;ces, where two sit preserved in a jam jar.
