A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
chasmophyte
A chasmophyte is a plant that lives in a rock crevice, rooted in the crack rather than in soil. Ferns, saxifrages, bellflowers, houseleeks, and a great many rare local specialties are chasmophytes. A crevice is a refuge: nothing grazes there, fire does not carry, competition is nearly absent, and the crack itself collects what little water and organic matter there is.
Etymology
The word is built from the Greek for a gaping crack, the same word behind English chasm, plus the Greek for plant. That second half unlocks a whole shelf of vocabulary. A halophyte lives in salt, a xerophyte in dryness, a lithophyte on bare rock, a hydrophyte in water, and an epiphyte on another plant. Saxifrage, the classic crevice plant, is Latin for stone-breaker.
Notes
Because crevice habitats are cut off from one another, they produce local species at a high rate, and a single cliff face can hold a plant that grows nowhere else on earth. Some of the oldest woody plants known are cedars growing out of limestone cliffs above the Great Lakes, several of them over a thousand years old and none more than a few feet tall.