• December 2019: Seeds stolen by rodent pop up as seedlings 200 feet away
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PHOTOS: Left is Oct 12; Middle is Dec 29.
CLINT BANCROFT of southeastern Tennessee received 200 donated seeds from the Fall 2016 seed crop of a pair of 30-year-old Florida Torreyas in Medford, Oregon. Clint put the seeds in soil in a large outdoor pot within his fenced plant propagation area. But something dislodged the wire mesh cover over that pot and stole all but one of the seeds (which later germinated in that pot).
Nearly 3 years later, Clint stumbled upon 2 seedlings that were a dozen feet from one another, but some 200 feet distant from the pilfered propagation zone.
FULL REPORT
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• August 2019: Apical cutting of basal clone recovers from herbivory
CLINT BANCROFT of southeastern Tennessee June 2019 report:
"I had an apical cutting of a basal from Highlands NC, about 6 inches tall, that had rooted. This year it put up a 6 inch vertical (no lateral growth, and looked beautiful. [SEE PHOTOS APRIL 2019 ENTRY BELOW.] I left it sitting on top of my cage, 4 feet off the ground, and damned if something did not eat ALL of the new vertical, and also about 2 inches of the original cutting. I suspect it will survive but I have lost a whole year's growth. It will be interesting to see if a chopped off, rooted, apical cutting will establish a new leader."
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Clint Bancroft July 2019 update:
"Regarding my accidental experiment in which a rooted apical cutting had put up a new 6 inch vertical and then all but a few inches of the whole plant was eaten.
"In just 2 months or so, the eaten-down stump is putting up what appears to be a new vertical leader."
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Note by Connie Barlow, August 2019:
"I am reading about Coast Redwood lignotubers and basal growth and propagation now. Genus Sequoia and Torreya, ancient members of Cupressaceae Family, have probably survived this long thanks to their ability to produce new stems from basal growth if the original stem fails (or is logged). The term for what we see in the above photo is an axillary bud doing what it evolved to do produce a new vertical leader. Apparently all single leaves produced on the vertical main stem each carry on their upper side a suppressed axillary bud. For redwoods, each of those buds can become either a vertical leader or a root, depending on whether it senses air or soil when hormones direct it to wake up. Apparently Torreya can do the same, so we can actually obtain more than one vertical clone from each basal sprout we cut from.
"One final note: More recently evolved members of the Cupressaceae Family maintain this ability (Juniperus), but members of the younger Pinaceae Family (pines, spruce, hemlock) have lost this ability to sprout basals and thereby reestablish vertical growth."
• July 2019: No leaf damage from -15F multi-day freeze, but severe damage from translocation sudden exposure to full sun
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LEFT: Paul Camire in Capac, Michigan monitored this seedling as -15F temperature ramped into -45 windchill. Snow was too minimal (below the left-most branch) to offer any wind protection. The dark green leaves made it through unharmed, and the light green new growth indicates that even the vegetative buds were unharmed.
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BELOW LEFT: In contrast, even a single day exposure to full sunlight bleached and killed all upper leaves, sparing a few on the lower branches. Nevertheless, this potted seedling is recovering. It is producing abundant little green buds along the main stem.
BELOW RIGHT: This seedling was in perfect condition until the deciduous canopy overhead suddenly opened to full sunlight, owing to the fall of a beetle-killed Ash tree. Notice the bleached tips of leaves on the middle layer branches, and the bare branches at the upper level, where bleached leaves have fallen away. Nonetheless, there is strong recovery: light green new growth at branch tips and 3 fresh lateral branches radiating from the leader.
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• April 2019: California fires show Torreya californica resprouting basals after fire kills main stem and all the nearby pines
ZACH ST. GEORGE sent 4 photos of multi-age California Torreyas he saw during a hike in Stevenson State Park (northwest mountains of Napa Valley, north of San Francisco, Coast Range). He wrote:
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"We walked through a large area that had burned recently, I'm thinking last fall.
It was a crown fire, and all of the mature trees (mostly pine) were dead. A few oaks / tanoaks survived. But I noticed a bunch of torreyas coppicing around some dead trunks. They were far bigger than the seedling pines that surrounded them, although I suspect the pines will catch up quickly."
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Notice the yellow color of the Torreya standing trunks, after its bark had burnt and fallen fallen off. Torreya's remarkable survival capacities (the genus originated in the Jurassic) owe in part to its ability to prolifically sprout new stems from its root crown after the main stem is injured or killed. Notice how these basals are already achieving a lot of photosynthesis which is crucial in order for the individual to keep its roots alive. Eventually, one or two of the basals will begin to rapidly grow tall, while the remaining basals continue to photosynthesize, so long as sunlight penetrates to their spot near the ground.
In 2005 I got a chance to visit and photograph California Torreya in
the wild (see the California Torreya section of this website). Viewing this sister torreya species in the wild made a huge difference in how I have scouted for ideal landscapes for planting Florida Torreya seeds and seedlings in the eastern USA. Now with this post-fire photo, we have a significant new learning. And it means that Paul Martin's 2004 indigenous fire hypothesis as the cause of Florida Torreya's inability to return northward during the Holocene is conclusively wrong. Instead, my own favored hypothesis is that while the Chattahoochee River provided swift passage from the Appalachian Mountains southward to the Apalachicola of Florida during glacial cooling, Torreya's seed was unable to tap into river flow in order to return to favorable climates as the Holocene warmed. Learn more about how my own visit to the Chattahoochee River in 2015 generated my river-flow hypothesis.
• April 2019: Proof that cutting of basal leader tip yields tree-form Torreya
April 24 email from Clint Bancroft (Torreya planter in Ocoee watershed of Tennessee) to Connie Barlow:
"Look at the new growth on this cutting from Harbison House (Highlands, NC)! The cutting is the apical tip from a basal of one of the mature trees."
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LEFT: by Clint Bancroft, is April 2019 of a rooted cutting (collected October 2017) that displays superb vertical growth.
RIGHT: by Connie Barlow 2006, during a Torreya Guardians site visit to the near-century old Harbison House Torreya grove, near Highlands NC. Notice the prolific basal sprouting, of various ages.
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LEARNING: The original cuttings of wild specimens in the Florida panhandle (some of which now entail orchards in the two official ex-situ plantings in northern Georgia) were collected three decades ago from branches that necessarily assume shrubby growth forms. Wild stock was so weak that cutting of basal terminals would not have been appropriate. However, when collecting vegetative growth from healthy horticultural plantings in northward states, we now know that apical growth of basals are essential for ultimately producing tree forms.
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MARCH 2020 UPDATE:
PHOTO LEFT shows how the 4 lateral buds visible in the April 2019 photo above expanded in the growing season of 2019 and then flourished through the winter. Clint Bancroft took this new photo after he slipped the young plant out of its pot for planting into his wild regrowth forest, amidst many other torreyas already thriving there.
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