LEFT: Video-documenting 10 years of Florida Torreya growth at the Lake Junaluska site,
near Waynesville, North Carolina (2018). (Photo captured from a Torreya Guardians video.)
RIGHT: Barlow planting a torreya seedling in western North Carolina that had germinated from seed (2018).
ABOVE: Barlow sorting Alligator Juniper berries for assisted migration in northern New Mexico, 2016.
The portrait is a screen capture of her video at right.
LEFT: Barlow in 2016 standing in front of a redwood planted at Seabeck Conference Center (Kitsap Peninsula, northwest of Seattle WA) that is now just a few years older than she is. (Stills from Connie's video.)
RIGHT: Three years later (autumn 2019) Barlow inventories the younger plantings of redwoods — and their offspring — that are flourishing in the native regrowth Douglas-fir forest onsite (toward which Barlow is pointing in the 2016 photo).
LEFT: Barlow with a Coast Redwood in a wealthy section of Capitol Hill Seattle, fall of 2019. She was dismayed to discover that, while the redwood benefitted from a watered lawn, there were no cones on or under the tree — likely owing to lack of pollen drift as there were no other redwoods nearby.
RIGHT: Barlow loving-up a Giant Sequoia in an old neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, in 2016. Notice how distinct the leaves are of this inland California (west slope of Sierras) close cousin of the Coast Redwood that Connie works directly with. (Both stills were captured from the same video.)
LEFT: Connie Barlow casting seeds of Coast Redwood into native sword ferns, with Bigleaf maple nearby, on Whidbey Island (northwest of Seattle, WA) February 2020. Stills drawn from a video video.
RIGHT: For the seed-casting ceremony, Connie made facepaint from the dark red tannin crystals that spill out with the seeds when redwood cones are shook.
LEFT: Connie in front of a young redwood trunk near Eureka CA, surrounded by Swordferns, which are native all the way up the coast into British Columbia. Swordfern is a member of her favorite fern genus, Polystichum. Because redwoods and ferns associate with the same kind of mycorrhizal fungi, they are partnered below ground; in California, they are almost always together.
RIGHT: Polystichum fern genus is also represented in the eastern USA, where species Christmas Fern is often the only evergreen fern in sight during the winter months. Here it shrouds a young Florida Torreya December 2018, which was freeplanted from seed by Connie into the southern Appalachians. Because snow rarely covers the ground, the evergreen fern fronds help Torreya escape notice by hungry deer.
ABOVE: Photos of Connie ca. 1999, re her 2001 book, The Ghosts of Evolution.
Left is bowl of anachronistic fruit. Right is with Paul S. Martin (who was Connie's mentor
and who wrote the book's foreword).
ABOVE LEFT: Connie with husband Michael Dowd in April 2002.
ABOVE RIGHT: Connie and Michael with Thomas Berry in 2002. Berry was the inspiration for the couple to launch their "evolutionary epic" itinerant ministry. They are standing along their first van. "Ecozoic" on the license plate is a term Berry coined in hopes of an ecological future for humans within the Earth community of life.
