• November 2022/ Connie Barlow / New VIDEO summarizes history of TORREYA GUARDIANS
EPISODE 35: Torreya Guardians - Reflections by Connie Barlow
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While cleaning and sorting torreya seeds freshly harvested from a private home in Clinton, NC, Connie extemporaneously delivers the history of significant beginnings, achievements, and frustrating institutional obstacles that she and other volunteers encountered during nearly two decades of action and advocacy in behalf of this endangered subcanopy tree.
The final 5 minutes is where she explains the new governmental proposal to authorize "assisted migration" for climate threatened species, such as this glacial relict.
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Length: 43 minutes, with timecoded table of topics in the youtube caption. Access the full list of TG videos.
• November 2022/ Eric Hongisto / Photo of large CALIFORNIA TORREYA north of San Francisco
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ERIC HONGISTO writes:
"This torreya is one of the largest in the three known groves at Fort Ross State Historic Park.
This grove has 15 trees connected over 1/4 acre. It is directly on the San Andreas Fault, east of the creek.
You can see the tree being pulled slowly, and adjusting.
On both sides of the fault are old growth redwoods."
NOTE BY EDITOR, Connie Barlow: Beginning about two years ago, several Californians have been sending me photos and ideas about Florida Torreya's California cousin. Although there is no doubt that the species could do well in the subcanopy of Pacific Northwest forests, the rugged topography of this Coast Range section of California affords the trees shady north slopes and deep canyons for healthy living today. I have been adding these new photos, with captions, to the California Torreya webpages I maintain on this website.
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• November 2022/ Fred Bess / Report of torreya seed harvest, Cleveland OHIO
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November 3:
"After the squirrels got a fair number from the two front females, the count is +/- 230 seeds."
Update November 6:
"As I was mowing the lawn I found an additional 15 seeds under the Torreyas that had apparently dropped off mostly from the big female in the front yard."
Access Fred's torreya webpage: Cleveland, Ohio.
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• October 2022/ Connie Barlow / Two new articles show our pioneering of "assisted migration" is becoming mainstream
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In the OCTOBER 2022 section of the lengthy "Assisted Migration Scholarly Links" webpage on this website, I posted links and excerpts for two really important articles:
• "Last Resort: Moving Endangered Species in Order to Save Them" by Zach St. George, in Yale Environment 360. This is the first substantive news report of a historic proposal in June 2022 by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to amend its regulations in order to expressly authorize "assisted migration" as a tool for not just "protecting" relict species in place but to enable full-out "recovery" by moving them to habitats where they can thrive. (See the August and June entries below on this page, where I excerpted the regulatory proposal.) In this new article, the work of Torreya Guardians is mentioned: "A group of private citizens planted the endangered Florida Torreya, an evergreen in the yew family that is native to riparian areas in Florida and Georgia, far to the north, throughout the eastern United States."
• "Potential for Assisted Migration of Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) to Vancouver Island", by Richard S. Winder et al., was published by Natural Resources Canada. I point to it here because, if we are considered too radical, then what about this professional proposal to move California redwoods to Canada?! (Also, I am referenced in the article for my video documentation of thriving horticultural plantings in the Seattle area.)
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• October 2022/ Mike Heim / After two winters and summers, two torreya seedlings have appeared
Mike Heim took photos of two new seedlings that emerged from seeds planted directly into his forest (within a fenced deer exclosure). He wrote: "It's taken 2 winters for them to germinate. Probably more on the way next year." More information on Mike's Hayward, Wisconsin Torreya page.
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• October 2022/ Connie Barlow / Info on a wild forest in China containing 2,800 Torreya
A 2022 news report, China: Wild, ancient Torreya Forest in Hunan, China:
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EXCERPTS (of English translation): ... It is the city tree of Ningxiang City.... Yueshan Village occupies more than 68% of the forest land, and more than 2,800 wild Torreya trees are hidden in the depths of the forest. They were discovered by the forestry department for the first time around 1990.... A thousand-year-old Torreya tree came into view. The diameter of the trunk was so thick that it took six adults to hold hands to surround it. In the passage of time, it has stood quietly here for more than a thousand years.... The torreya tree likes a humid, low-light and cool climate, and the mountainside with less direct sunlight is the best habitat. The wild ancient torreya community is located in the mountain forest at an altitude of 200 to 500 meters in Yueshan Village, and the villagers living in the surrounding area are not familiar with it.
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• September 2022/ Bob Miller / Joyful discovery of a torreya (from seed planted May 2015) by a log while removing invasives
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Email from BOB MILLER (Torreya planter near Cincinnati Ohio) to Connie Barlow:
"An upside of removing invasive plants from our woods is that I find interesting things. This Torreya is on the south-facing hillside across from the front of our house and is the first I've found there. Looks very happy!"
Editor's Note: We have long postulated that the poor success rate of the May 2015 free-planting into wild forest may owe to shallow seed-planting that led to rodents detecting seeds, large local numbers of deer nipping off newly emerged seedlings, or the simple fact that seedlings are difficult to spot amidst fallen leaves. Did this seed (or seedling) benefit from a treefall that kept it hidden?
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• September 2022/ Fred Bess / Torreyas at Ohio State University's arboretum doing well.
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FRED BESS writes:
"I visited Secrest Arboretum Friday and walked around with the new curator Jason Veil.
He took me to see the two Torreya taxifolia trees they have planted out (photos left.)
Jason is thrilled with the opportunity to get more seeds, either from me or from other sources. I will be sharing a fair number of my tree's seeds with them." |
Editor's note: Fred Bess donated 20 seeds to Secrest Arboretum in 2011. (Visit the Secrest Arboretum Torreya page.) Fred is one of our most successful Torreya planters and the first to have his plantings produce seeds as far north as Ohio. Visit his photo-rich Torreya page: Cleveland, Ohio, Torreya.
• September 2022/ Clint Bancroft / Proof that a basal sprout will form on the rooted cutting of the apical tip of a basal stem cut from another torreya
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Email from CLINT BANCROFT (Torreya planter in Ocoee watershed of Tennessee) to Connie Barlow:
"We have wondered if a rooted apical basal sprout will eventually form its own basal sprouts. This PHOTO shows a basal sprout which has formed on a rooted apical cutting from one the Highlands, NC trees. My tag says it is from a cutting I took there in October 2017."
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Finally, we have confirmation that not only will a rooted cutting of the apical tip of a basal stem grow into a tree-like (rather than shrubby) form. Now we know that it will also grow basals of its own! This assures us that, as with its wild cousin California Torreya, Florida Torreya grown from apical basal cuttings will indeed be capable of manifesting the tree form again and again no matter what injury may kill the main stem itself. Nobody has tried to guess whether the rootstock itself may endure for perhaps millennia because annual growth rings do not form below the soil. (Even the well-studied Coast Redwood has not had this mystery answered.)
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• August 2022/ Connie Barlow / I filed a comment on the proposed federal regulation to eliminate "historical range" as the sole locus for endangered species recovery
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Comment time for this proposed regulation ended August 8, with a total of 553 comments including the COMMENT I POSTED, drawing upon my experience with Torreya Guardians.
I attached a 5-page pdf that, after voicing a YES to the proposal, offered RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPLEMENTATION:
1. Create implementation frameworks and policies that are distinct for plants.
2. Encourage nongovernmental entities to use the ESA "exception" for plants.
3. Follow the lead of the USDA Forest Service [in their own "assisted migration" terminology and actions.
4. Facilitate respectful dialogue and understandings of worldview differences.
• Barlow Comment, 5-page PDF here or here
• Barlow summary of key institutional comments (10 pages PDF)
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• August 2022/ Connie Barlow / I spent three weeks improving the wikipedia page on Torreya taxifolia
This revised wikipedia page was a massive undertaking. Over the years, the page had languished into centering on arcane taxonomy and descriptive morphology, while containing factual errors (mostly on noncontroversial topics), and avoiding altogether mention of the central role this species has served in nurturing professional discussion about the merits and risks of assisted migration for climate-stressed plants, especially for "glacial relicts."
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I had earned my wikipedia stripes by creating the topical flow with many scholarly references for the (new in 2021) page, "Assisted migration of forests in North America.
But I also learned that it is very difficult to create an objective wikipedia page on aspects of a topic when one carries a strong viewpoint. Established wikipedia editors along the way very much helped me with those learnings.
Because images are so important in our learnings, you will see that I added many of my own photos and charts into the anonymous media commons for posting on wikipedia.
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My greatest difficulty was that, while I (as webmaster) ensure that everything is documented on our website, the actions and assertions of the botanical gardens officially in charge of this endangered species are only loosely documented online or are missing altogether. And if one can't point to an online reference, one cannot include the topic in a citable way in a wikipedia page. While one can present the documented actions by one side of a controversy (notably, our documentation of historic groves, our northward plantings, and what we have learned about best planting practices), value statements and arguments must present both sides or not be included at all. Because of the degree of controversy, I usually selected actual quotes rather than attempting to objectively summarize an argument. Finally, a huge benefit of posting information on a wikipedia page (as is also the case on our own Torreya Guardians pages) is that it is ever-after correctable and updatable. Scientific papers published in journals are not.
• August 2022/ Mike Heim / List of S. Appalachian plants growing on my land in WISCONSIN
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Florida Torreya is one of many plant species in North America whose historical native range is south (sometimes, far south) of Wisconsin.
Mike Heim's page on the Torreya Guardians website where he reports on his plantings of FLORIDA TORREYA and FLORIDA YEW is here.
We post another photo-rich page, as well, on Mike's experiments with planting species native to the Southern Appalachians and his "Tertiary Rewilding" project (Ginkgo and Metasequoia) here.
IMAGE LEFT: We just posted this tabular list of the species Mike plants for his "Southern and Eastern Assisted Migration of Tree Species" experimentation in Wisconsin. (Larger versions of this image are on both of the webpages linked above.)
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• July 2022/ Clint Bancroft / Visits torreya seedling he donated to Reflection Riding Arboretum & Nature Center, Chattanooga TN
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CLINT WRITES: "I went to Reflection Riding Arboretum in Chattanooga today and was able to get someone to show me where they planted the Torreyas I gave them 2 years ago.
There were 6 trees donated, and they already had one which was still in a one-gallon pot.
They were only able to locate two of them today, but promise they will locate the remaining trees.
Both the ones I got to see looked sweetly content. One had a new vertical and also had 2 basal sprouts which were not there when I donated the trees. The second had 4 new lateral branches with no vertical growth so far."
PHOTO of Clint alongside one of the picture-perfect torreys at the arboretum. Visit his extensive torreya page at his forested home and land east of Chattanooga.
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Reflection Riding Arboretum & Nature Center is near downtown Chattanooga, TN.
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• July 2022/ Peter Bane and Julia Chambers / Torreyas survive winter and browsing on the east shore of Lake Michigan