Orion Magazine - May-June 2008

ing corn for white lightning in the 1930s, Johnston is cultivating a half-dozen Torreya taxifolia seedlings he bought, legally, from a nursery in South Carolina. Each is about two feet high, >ve years old, and healthy.

Johnston, whose isolated property is full of other rare plants (“I’m moving all sorts of things north,” he jokes) is pleased by the apparent ?exibility of his charges, and nonchalant about the implications of assisted migration. “People have been moving

largest stands on a farm in northeastern North Carolina, surrounded by rusting farm equipment.

Alexander, who traces his family back to some of the >rst European settlers in the Biltmore area, is no ecosaboteur, but he likes the democratic, do-it-yourself approach of the Torreya Guardians, and he wants to see the species survive, no matter its longitude and latitude. He says he’ll happily supply seeds to the group as long as the Biltmore trees continue to produce.

What if assisted migration is used to justify new habitat destruction? Who decides which
species are moved, and who moves them?

plants around for a long time,” he says. “This idea that we should be territorial about our plants, well, that’s just kind of a provincial attitude.”

The next day, during a long-awaited rainstorm in western North Carolina, Lee Barnes, the de facto lieutenant of the Torreya Guardians, is eager to talk Torreya. “I’m a horticulturist,” he says. “I’m a professional tinkerer.” Barnes, who is no stranger to T. taxifolia—he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the cultivation of the Florida torreya and two other endangered Florida species in the 1980s—has so far collected and distributed about 120 seeds to about a dozen people and gardens north of Georgia, including amateur gardeners in Ohio, New York, England, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Some recipients have reported their successes and failures; some have not.

Barnes’s seed supply comes from a single grove of Torreya taxifolia, which grows not in Florida but about thirty miles from his home in North Carolina. In the 1930s and 1940s, on the grounds of George Vanderbilt’s grand Biltmore Estate, an enterprising head gardener planted seeds he and his botanical accomplices (known as the Azalea Hunters) collected from throughout the Southeast. Today, lines of tourists snake through the vast gardens, but few notice the unassuming, thin-limbed conifers that stand, unmarked, among magnolias, pines, oaks, and redwoods.

Bill Alexander, forest historian for the estate, has lived on these grounds for twenty years, and he walks along the curving path through this cultivated forest, pointing out each Florida torreya in turn. These trees, all apparently free of the disease that scourges the Panhandle populations, were likely planted in the 1930s or 1940s—though perhaps as early as the 1890s— and some graze >fty feet, a height now unimaginable in Florida. Despite freezes and hurricanes, the Florida torreya has done itself proud in North Carolina: one of the trees at Biltmore, Alexander believes, is the second-largest of the species. The

And if the resulting seedlings establish themselves outside gardens and the manicured grounds of the Biltmore estate? Alexander looks pleased. “Well,” he says, “then I’ll think, ‘By God, we’ve been successful.’”

In 2007, ecologist Mark Schwartz and two colleagues, Jessica Hellmann and Jason McLachlan, published a paper that modestly proposes a “framework for debate” on assisted migration. While they criticized “maverick, unsupervised translocation e=orts,” such as the Torreya Guardians’, for their potential to undermine conservation work and create con?ict, they directed their harshest criticism at “the far more ubiquitous ‘business as usual’ scenario that is the current de facto policy.” The three scientists take di=erent stands on the notion of assisted migration. All are cautious, but McLachlan is usually the most skeptical, and Hellmann, a University of Notre Dame ecologist who studies butter?ies on the northern end of their range in British Columbia, is the most open to the concept. “It’s incredibly exciting to think that we could come up with a strategy that might help mitigate the impacts of climate change,” she says.

Last fall, to initiate a broader discussion, the three scientists organized a meeting in Davis, California, with other researchers, land managers, environmental groups, and even an environmental ethicist. The Florida torreya isn’t the only species that might bene>t from immediate assisted migration. The Quino checkerspot butter?y has blinked out on the southern end of its range, in the Mexican state of Baja California, while the northern end of its range, in Southern California, has been transformed by development. In South Africa and Namibia, rising temperatures on the northern edge of the range of the quiver tree are killing the succulent plants before the species has a chance to shift south.