Virginia Rockbreaker

For the past month, I've had my eye on a harbinger plant called the Virginia Rockbreaker that hugs a neighborhood rock face I walk by almost daily. The cliff is a biodiversity joy for any botanist, with a splendid collection of mosses, lichens, and wildflowers, and while I still can't identify all of the players, Micranthes virginiensis is a species I know well. The Rockbreaker is also known as "Early Saxifrage"—saxifrage in Latin translates approximately to "rock breaker"—and it comes by the designation honestly, if incorrectly: early botanists thought that the plant might have the magical ability to splinter the stone on which it often grows. It doesn't, of course, and instead take hold in soil pockets that fill in weathering cracks in the granite. You can see the plants throughout the winter, and come April, this year's flower buds start moving out of the protective basal rosettes of leathery leaves. They're soon bound for glory, and today, they made it to the promised floral land. Now, if only the chill would disappear and make life easy for pollinators. And their documentarians.