Torrey Pines: The Last Stand

The Torrey pine is the rarest pine tree in North America. Fewer than nine thousand grow in the wild anywhere on earth, and roughly half of them are here, clinging to these sandstone cliffs above the Pacific. They grow nowhere else in the world except a small stand on Santa Rosa Island, off the coast near Santa Barbara.

Botanist Charles Parry identified them as a distinct species in eighteen fifty and named the tree for his mentor John Torrey. By eighteen eighty-five, local officials were so alarmed by the tree's vulnerability that they placed a one-hundred-dollar bounty on anyone caught vandalizing one. San Diego set aside about three hundred and sixty-four acres as a public park in eighteen ninety-nine. The philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps later bought surrounding land earmarked for subdivision and donated it to the city, pushing the reserve toward its current two thousand acres. Scientists believe these trees are a relict population, the last remnant of a forest that once spread widely along the coast during the wetter climate of the Pleistocene.