Diapensia Lapponica

June 1st, 1732 

Elevation 5,344 ft 

Winter has reluctantly loosened its grip on the mountains, and patches of snow still linger in shadows. The alpine casts shades of olive and brown over the summits, highlighted by curious afterthoughts of green. Wind rips across the open tundra, creating a scene that would easily be mistaken for the far northern reaches of Canada or Europe. The alpine zone in the Adirondacks seems impervious to time.

4,000 miles away in Lapland, a well-educated Swedish man bends down to examine a compact cluster of deep green. The same green that punctuates the highest Adirondack summits. He extracts a leather-bound journal and proceeds to draw a careful sketch, taking special care to depict the oddly clustered leaves, and cushion-like growth form. 

The man is Carl Linnaeus, founder of present day binomial nomenclature – the naming system which denotes an organism by its genus and species. It is he who gives the plant its name: Diapensia Lapponica. 

1732 was the same year George Washington was born, and Benjamin Franklin published his first column in Poor Richard’s Almanac. The United States was nothing more than a cluster of colonies, and the Adirondacks an interruption of elevation in an ocean of wilderness.

It was an important year for one patch of green in particular. Perched on a harshly exposed northern slope on the highest point in New York, a young Diapensia prepared to flower for the first time.

Diapensia plants usually produce their first set of flowers at 18 years of age. The buds are set in August, and they survive the harsh winter tucked away among a compact quilt of waxy leaves. In October, cooling temperatures trigger the plant to undergo a rapid cold-acclimation process. Chemical compounds within the plant change to guard against freezing. Even the plasma membranes of the cells become more flexible so the water-filled units don’t burst with a frost. In this winter-acclimized state, Diapensia has been documented surviving temperatures up to – 80 °F, and submersion in liquid nitrogen. 

Come April, the cold-acclimation process begins to reverse, and by June the plant reaches its lowest point of cold-tolerance. June is also the time of year when Diapensia sends up it’s flowers. The moment the snow is gone from it’s evergreen leaves, no time is wasted and chloroplasts are hard at work producing sugars that will fuel the opening of the patient buds.

There is a good reason for Diapensia to be so efficient. Summer is fleeting in the alpine zone, and each plant must produce flowers, attract pollinators, and go to seed in about 60 days. In years when the snow lingers into June, the plant will either save its buds for the following spring or delay it’s blooming time by as much as three weeks – a risky gamble to make with such a short time left to produce fruit.

The little Diapensia opens its first flower, nervous that a hard frost will come and ruin a season’s worth of energy. Mountain weather is hard to predict, and sudden snow storms could quickly kill the delicate blossoms. 

No hard frost comes that June, and the white flowers hold five pollen-coated stamen and a single pistol with approximately 150 ovules. The flowers are visited by members of Hymenoptera (bees) and Diptera (flies). Although a small amount of self-pollination has been recorded, Diapensia relies largely on these insects to successfully reproduce. 

By July the soft petals are replaced by a tightly enclosed green fruit, which continues to ripen into August. The capsules will remain tightly closed throughout the winter, and won’t be released until spring – just before the snow begins to melt. In August, Diapensia is also hard at work getting buds ready for the following June. 

It is a lot to accomplish in a short window of sunlight and warmth, but aside from a few cold-damaged flowers and aborted seeds the little Diapensia is successful. 

The days continue to pass. Some years the winters linger far into June, and come again in late August. It is hard to produce fruit in time. In the summer the wind gusts carry sand, ripping leaves off the plant like sandpaper. Early frosts kill sections of the plant, and some years it can only send out a few meagur blossoms. The waxy leaves remain on the plant year-round, and each one needs to be replaced after two to three years. The dead leaves linger a few seasons longer before falling to the ground and slowly breaking down to join the layer of soil below. 

The little Diapensia was there when Ebenezer Emmons summited the 5,344 ft peak in 1837 and named it Mt Marcy. It continued to flower when logging cleared vast tracts of Adirondack land, and it produced fruit even as the cry of wolves disappeared from the rugged valleys. It replaced it’s worn-out leaves as railroads penetrated the park, and even remained unphased by the 600,000 acre fire that swept across the high peaks and destroyed Henry Van Hoevenburg’s Adirondack Loj. 

Hundreds of boots passed by the low-profile plant. Boots belonging to Bob Marshall, Orson Phelps, Teddy Roosevelt, and countless other unknown woodsmen and woodswomen. 

As more and more boots began to pass, many of the plants surrounding the Diapensia began to fade away. Never before had such heavy mammals been tramping on the delicate leaves and shallow soil. The boots loosened the plants from the ground with every step, and often there was no recovery. Gradually the sea of lush alpine was transformed to bare dirt and exposed gravel. 

The Diapensia was lucky, it grew just to the side of where most of the foot traffic occurred, and escaped the footfalls unharmed. After a pair of boots came up belonging to a man named Ed Ketchledge, the situation improved. 

Ketch helped draw attention to the fragility and uniqueness of the alpine landscape, and among others helped lay the groundwork for the Summit Steward program. 

More and more boots stayed on the rock.

June 1st, 2019. 

Elevation 5,344 ft

388 years after our little Diapensia sent up it’s first set of flowers, it still blooms each spring and goes to fruit in the fall. It is now nearly four handprints across, and like anyone who has spent some time alive it has scars and healed wounds to show for it. Hikers now pause to admire its curious growth form, and comment in disbelief when the summit steward mentions that this plant is probably over 200 years old. 

There is comfort in things which remain the same, a deep sense of wonder that a living organism has survived so many winters and seen so many springs. In a pandemonium of life we cling to constants, and nature is a constant for many of us. I wish I could say that this compact little plant will likely continue to flower and go to seed for another hundred years, but the truth is murkier than that.

The climate is changing, and the effects on Diapensia are other alpine species are not fully understood. A study in Swedish Lapland in 1996 found that there was little to no recruitment in  Diapensia (meaning the germination of new seeds), and observed a decrease in the number of flowers per-plant over a three year period. The cause was a warming climate, and that was 24 years ago. 

We don’t know what will happen to the18 year-old Diapensia waiting to send out its first set of blooms this year. No one can say with certainty if in 388 years a Summit Steward will point to the plant and say that it was alive when the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the nation. 

But what we can say, is that this plant is close to the heart of many people who have hiked or worked in an alpine zone. I know it is close to mine. When people ask me about climate change, they often wonder why we work so hard to protect something with such an uncertain future.

I always respond that as long as alpine vegetation continues to exist on the Adirondack Summits, we will continue to protect it. That’s just what you do for something you love.

As Dr. Seuss once said, and an inspiring wilderness-advocate often quotes:

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Dr Seuss, quoted often by Tyler Socash

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Diapensia lapponica l. , or pincushion plant, is a species of alpine plant that is at the Southernmost extent of it’s range in the Adirondacks, New Hampshire, and Vermont. It thrives on the most wind-swept and exposed slopes, and can often be found growing alongside bilberry, lapland rosebay, and alpine azalea.

It’s secret to surviving the harsh conditions is to huddle low to the ground, forming a compact pillow-shaped mat to fend off the wind. It’s dense, domed shape doubles as a mechanism to trap heat, and the inside of the plant can be as much as 15 degrees warmer than the surrounding air temperature. An incredibly slow grower, it is estimated to grow just ¼ inch in diameter every 100 years. The plant radiates from a thick, central tap root, and forms almost spherical structures.

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