The Backwoods Resurgence: Canby's Mountain-Lover

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Canby's Mountain-Lover

Canby's Mountain Lover (Paxistima canbyi), Scott County, Virginia.

Some plants are absolutely amazing. Canby’s Mountain-Lover (Paxistima canbyi) is one of those plants. Mountain-lovers hang from the high, dolomitic cliffs of western Appalachia, a now-rare plant often known as cliffgreen or rat-stripper. They grow over gorges where ricocheting winds push humidity and cooler temperatures from the creeks or rivers below to their dry, sunbaked home above. Glaciers pushed the species to these southern rock outcrops, and right now, they’re not doing so well. This lonely plant is one of the last representatives of Virginia’s S2 (less than 20 occurrences) population, quite literally dangling from a four-hundred-foot precipice. Luckily, few poachers can reach it without severely threatening their own lives (or without being caught).

Canby's Mountain Lover (Paxistima canbyi), Scott County, Virginia.

An evergreen groundcover in the Celastraceae family, closely related to many tropical, ornamental shrubs, this plant has extreme potential for combining aesthetic and the preservation of local biodiversity in native landscaping. Unfortunately, rising temperatures have forced mountain-lovers even closer to the edge. I’ve had some enriching discussions with horticulturalists like Mike Heim up in Wisconsin, who have legitimate hopes to return Paxistima to their once-indigenous range to the northern U.S. where the climate is now mild enough for them to return.

Canby's Mountain Lover (Paxistima canbyi), Scott County, Virginia

If we fulfill our roles as fellow members and stewards of the ecosystem, maybe we can help the northern U.S. provide the same refuge for their long-lost plants and animals that the mountains of Appalachia did for northern wildlife during our last Ice Age.

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Quotes

"Humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do." - Wendell Berry, for The Dying of the Trees, 1997

"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by the singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place." - Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." -Crowfoot, 1890 dying speech to the Blackfoot Nation after the wholesale slaughter of buffalo by the Canadian government.

"Civilization is not, as they often assume, the enslavement of a stable and constant earth. It is a state of mutual and interdependent cooperation between human animals, other animals, plants, and soils, which may be disrupted at any movement by the failure of any of them." - Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 1949

"The human world is so bleak, simple-minded and tragic compared to that of the living biosphere. Learning about the rest of life on Earth is like having the blinds pulled up on a window that you previously just thought faced a bleak brick wall, only to look out the window and see mountains, forests, beaches and a verdant landscape stretching for miles." - Joey Santore, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, 2o20

"We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things." - Charlotte Mason, Out-of-Door Life for the Children, 1904

"Instead of mountain men we are cursed with a plague of diggers, drillers, borers, grubbers; of asphalt-spreaders, dam-builders, overgrazers, clear-cutters, and strip-miners whose object seems to be to make our mountains match our men -- making molehills out of mountains for a race of rodents -- for the rat race.

Oh well, revenge is on the way. We see it in those high thin clouds far on the northern sky. We feel it in those rumbles of discontent deep in the cupboards of the earth: tectonic crockery trembling on the continental shelves. We hear it down the slipface of the dunes, a blue wind moaning out of nowhere. We smell it on the air: the smell of danger. Death before dishonor? That's right. What else? Liberty or death? Naturally." -Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

"There is a way of living which is liberating, which does not make us feel trapped and isolated. We could call it "the wilderness mind". It doesn’t matter whether one lives in the city or in the country, whether one works in a factory or a university. The secret to this "wilderness mind" is keeping the power of wonder of the universe alive. If we keep this sense of awe, we will remain young forever. If we lose it, we wither inside." - Enviroscapes, 1995