In the high, thin air of the Colorado Rockies, where the growing season is measured in weeks and the wildflowers cling to life in shattered granite, one plant stands apart. It is not the tallest, nor the most fragrant. But to those who know its story, the Schnurr Columbine is a living legend—a botanical anomaly that might have vanished if not for the dedication of a single family.
Charles Schnurr found it once. The Fennimore family found it again. And today, thanks to careful stewardship, this pale, spiky jewel continues to bloom in the cold wind, reminding us that sometimes the rarest things are hiding right where we’ve already looked—if only we look closer. "In the end, it wasn't a grant or an institution that saved it," Margaret Fennimore-Torres says. "It was a family who loved a mystery more than a vacation." Have you seen an unusual high-altitude columbine? Contact the Colorado Native Plant Society at [email protected]. schnurr columbine
By the 1960s, the Schnurr Columbine was unofficially considered extinct. This is not the end of the story. Enter the Fennimore family of Colorado Springs. David Fennimore, a high school biology teacher, had read Schnurr’s original 1931 paper as a graduate student. He became obsessed. Every summer, he dragged his reluctant wife, Eleanor, and their two teenage children up treacherous slopes with a tattered copy of Schnurr’s hand-drawn map. In the high, thin air of the Colorado
By J. Peterson
"I didn't scream," Eleanor recalled in a 1995 interview. "I just whispered, 'David, come look at this.' He crawled on his hands and knees for ten minutes before he spoke. Then he cried." Charles Schnurr found it once
But in —the same month Apollo 11 landed on the moon—the Fennimores made their own small discovery. High on the northwest flank of Mount Rosa , Eleanor sat down to rest on a boulder. Looking down between her boots, she saw it: a cluster of six pale yellow blooms, each with impossibly long, straight spurs.
In the summer of 1928, Schnurr was on a collecting expedition near and the Windy Point area. He wasn't looking for a new species; he was cataloging high-altitude flora for the Carnegie Institution. But as he scrambled over a particularly unstable scree field, he spotted a columbine that didn't match any drawing in his field guide.