species of yew, genus Taxus, which is a close relative. Stems will lean in very shady conditions, in quest of patches of sunlight. Extremely leaning stems within a shady subcanopy gather moss as they age. An old leaning stem that fails to access sunlight will perish, but not before the long-lived root crown has given rise to one or more younger stems searching for sunlight in different directions. Basal sprouting new stems from the root crown is thus another vital adaptation for long-term persistence in a subcanopy ecological niche. Basal sprouting will occur if young seedlings are browsed by herbivores. It also occurs in saplings when a multi-stemmed growth form enables a wider quest for patches of sunlight. But even in healthy, mature trees, new basal growth is present as a hedge against damage to the main stem. (References in the image caption.) Distribution Wild population Torreya taxifolia is restricted to limestone bluffs and ravines along the east bank of the Apalachicola River in the central part of the northern Florida Panhandle and immediately adjacent southernmost Georgia. There used to be one small colony west of the Apalachicola at Dog Pond in Jackson County, but it no longer exists. This endemic tree grows along the Apalachicola River just south of the confluence of the Chattahoochee River and the Flint River, which drain the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains. It occurs only in the Florida counties of Gadsden and Liberty and extends one mile into Decatur County, Georgia. The area in which it naturally occurs is , stretching along the Apalachicola River. Alvan Wentworth Chapman, a leading botanist of his time in the southeastern states, wrote in 1885 that "Florida torreya" was found only in "widely separated clumps or groves" and appeared to be "exclusively confined" to the cliffs along the east shore of the river and to "the precipitous sides of the ravines" that dissected those cliffs. "It is never seen in the low ground along the river, nor on the elevated plateau east of it, nor, indeed, on level ground anywhere." Prehistoric distribution Torreya taxifolia is a member of an ancient genus at least 160 million years old. Fossil evidence indicates genus Torreya was widely distributed across the Northern Hemisphere beginning in the Jurassic period and as recently as the Pliocene. Like other globally disjunct genera of the Arcto-Tertiary Geoflora, Torreya was forced southward