The Torreya Tree

The Florida torreya is one of the rarest conifers on Earth, an evergreen that grows wild only on the bluffs and in the steep ravines along the east bank of the Apalachicola River in Florida, with a sliver of range across the Georgia line. Torreya State Park, named for the tree, protects some of the last of them on bluffs that rise about 150 feet above the river. Crushed, the needles give off a sharp smell, which earned it the old name stinking cedar. Beginning in the 1950s a disease swept through the wild population and killed nearly every mature tree. Almost all that survive are stump sprouts, shoots that rise from old root systems and die back before they grow large enough to bear seed. Botanists have since identified a fungus as a major cause, and the species is listed as endangered. The ravines are part of why it lasted this long. Spring-fed steephead valleys stay cool and damp, and during the Ice Ages they sheltered plants pushed south from the Appalachians. Some of those northern species still grow here, far from the rest of their range. In the 1950s a Bristol lawyer named E. E. Callaway argued that the Garden of Eden had been on the Apalachicola, pointing out that the torreya was the gopher wood Noah used to build the ark and that it grows nowhere else. The Nature Conservancy's Garden of Eden Trail near Bristol carries the name. In 2008 a volunteer group planted torreya seedlings in North Carolina, one of the first deliberate attempts to move an endangered plant north ahead of a changing climate.