A survivor's story

Up on Acadia’s summits bare granite bedrock only grudgingly gives up its grains of feldspar and quartz to form small crumbling patches of hardscrabble soil. The summer sun bakes the ground into a dusty gray amalgam which crunches underfoot, sending puffs of dust racing away on the ever-present wind.

Little grows here: desperate patches of blueberries, withered tufts of grass, a stunted birch and the bonsai-like skeletons of spruce and fir, kin to their more lofty cousins the krummholz of Mount Washington and Katahdin. Compared to the lush forests just a few hundred feet below, this is a primitive place, the domain of lichen and moss, where only the occasional mountain hiker savors the sweet song of the white-throated sparrow or bears witness to a hawk gliding silently overhead. 

Among the hardy survivors here blooms an extraordinary plant. Although not considered endangered or even rare, it is nonetheless uncommon. Overflowing in semicircular depressions in the rock which hold precious moisture for a day or two longer than the surrounding terrain, Mountain Sandwort colonies form tiny islands of uptown lushness in the scattering of hard-bitten, industrial-zone vegetation. 

Dancing on the breeze, clusters of tiny five-petaled white blooms barely the diameter of a pencil stand proud on delicate yet sturdy green shafts — themselves not more than an inch or two high. Slender leaves paired on the stalks seem too small to support themselves and resist the elements, much less convert enough sunlight into life-giving energy with which to grow.

Yet despite its diminutive blooms, this plant can divert attention from all that surrounds it, luring eyes away from spectacular distant horizons to focus much closer at the miniature world close at hand.

Mountain Sandwort exists in Acadia at the southern fringe of its habitat. The northern edge of this herbaceous alpine plant’s range extends to Greenland. Flowering throughout the season it bides its time, repeatedly blooming when conditions are just right. It prefers thin soils disturbed by frost action or erosion as the perfect spot to first send down roots.

In a place where many tiny plants can die from the slightest disturbance, Mountain Sandwort thrives on upheavals on a microgeological scale. From sedimentary chaos bursts forth a miracle of exquisite miniature organization.

It is a Darwinian dichotomy born in the knowledge that to survive on a mountaintop, anything — plant or animal or bird — must be resilient. Yet that resilience comes at a price. These organisms live almost constantly at the edge of tolerable limits. Even the slightest push can upset the balance. Too long without rain, a little too much wind, a few careless footsteps and even the most stalwart survivors become casualties.

The poignancy of a tiny flower’s ageless struggle to bloom against the odds lends an ephemeral air of hope to an otherwise unforgiving place: high on a mountain in Acadia, where the fragile beauty of Mountain Sandwort or the lilting song of a white-throated sparrow will too soon fade with the memories of high summer.