Stone Mountain Park

This guide to Stone Mountain Park in Atlanta looks at the shallow rock pools scattered across the bare granite summit, hollows no deeper than a shoe that fill with rain and dry to dust within weeks. It follows pool sprite, a strange plant growing two kinds of leaves at once, which once had a genus all to itself before genetic testing in 2008 folded it into a related one. The guide also reaches back to 1849, when a Harvard botanist examined a small yellow-flowered plant collected here by a Pennsylvania minister. Stand at the edge of one of these pools to see how little the plants around you need to survive.