Rockbreaker, Home

The Virginia Rockbreaker, an extra hardy wildflower that grows with the local mosses and lichens on a roadside rock face, is beginning to bloom, with its cluster of small, white flowers seeming to rise unbidden out of solid stone. This, of course, is a pretty illusion, but it's easy to see where the notion came from. The member of the Saxifrage family—the plant's other common name is Early Saxifrage, and that moniker, particularly in 2016, is completely accurate—is one of the first April flowers brought on by those proverbial showers, but its habitat is neither granite nor gneiss. Rather, it finds a home in rock cracks that frost and instability have opened. Over time, these have filled with soil, perhaps made by pioneer lichens and mosses, perhaps washing down from higher up the cliff. By chance, a Rockbreaker seed washed into one of these mini-garden plots, and the eventual result is a blossom worth seeking out: by any name, fanciful or true, yet another signature sign of spring.