Torrey Pines Golf Course

This guide to Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego opens in the early 1850s, when a government botanist named Charles Parry knelt beside a wind-bent tree on this bluff while surveying the new Mexican border and realized he had never seen anything like it. It follows the pine's naming after his mentor John Torrey, who never once saw the tree growing wild, and its slow retreat to just two wild groves on Earth as grazing and fire thinned it down. Look closely at any pine near you: its ragged, lopsided crown is the tree's own record of that fight to survive.