As the summer heat ramps up, my thoughts turn to water and seeing how many times I can jump in the cold mountain water to cool off. Lakes, rivers, creeks, swimming holes and especially waterfalls call out to me through the shared water of the sweat dripping down my skin. It is a call that I often answer.
Around waterfalls and rock seepages you will find an area known as a Southern Appalachian spray-cliff plant community. These are plants that have an affinity for water and living in the constant cool mist coming off the rock. Spray-cliff communities are made up of many types of plants including multiple species of mosses and liverworts, a.k.a. bryophytes, as well as herbaceous plants like coral bells (Heuchera spp.), bluets (Houstonia serpyllifolia), jewelflower (Impatiens capensis) and many types of grasses and sedges in the mix.
One of my favorite things about myself is that I am a big ol’ giant of a human who loves little, tiny flowers. The smaller, the better. There are many beautiful wildflowers with stunning colors and patterns that many people do not see, for they don’t know to take the time to look close at the small blooms. Along the rocks at a spray-cliff or seepage plant community, among my favorite tiny flowers are those of Michaux’s saxifrage (Micranthes petiolaris), also called cliff saxifrage.
This plant loves to grow in the thinnest of soils on bare rock where water is present, either seeping along the rock or in the constant spray that comes off of waterfalls. They will find the slightest opening in a crack or crevasse on an outcrop and thrive in the full sun of exposed rock faces. Their predilection for growing in the cracks of rock led some of the earliest botanical explorers to suggest that it was the plants themselves that were creating the very fissures where they grow. This led to the common name of saxifrage and former genus name Saxifragus, which translates from French into “stone breaker.”
Of course, we now understand that it is water and the expansive and contractive freeze/thaw cycles it undergoes that lead to cracks and breaks where these saxifrages tend to grow. Michaux’s saxifrage is named in honor of André Michaux, a famous French botanist and explorer who first described this plant long ago in the 1700s.
Michaux’s saxifrage is a beautiful plant to describe. Emerging at the base of the plant, seemingly out of bare rock, are the main leaves of this plant, which grow in a form called a basal rosette, layered groupings of leaves at the ground level. These leaves are widest toward the tip and have saw-tooth serrations along their edges, or margins. The leaves are quite hairy and often have a variety of colors expressed in them, from green to red to a deep maroon. Their fall leaf colors are also red and maroon.
Emerging from this base of leaves comes a long stalk with a cluster of many small flowers that, at first glance, appear to be white. This is where some of the magical beauty of tiny flowers comes in, for what appears to be five small white petals turns out to be two lower petals of solid white and then three upper white petals that have a small splotch of yellow at the base. These petals are surrounding the central pistil that is ringed with 10 stamens on white filaments topped with a lovely red anther where the pollen is produced.
This interplay of colors and patterns is not only appealing to an artistic eye, as they stand out in stark contrast to each other in close up photos, but it also helps bees, flies and other pollinating insects to see the petals from a distance and know where to fly in to get a sweet treat.
(The Joyful Botanist leads weekly wildflower walks most Fridays and offers consultations and private group tours through Bigelow’s Botanical Excursions. bigelownc@gmail.com.)