Life is hard on these slopes.

An hour from Provo in Spanish Fork Canyon, midway up a hillside so steep a rope is required to climb it, are a handful of some of the rarest plants in the world, called clay phacelia. Entirely composed of flaking Green River shale, the barren landscape is the only place the plants are known to grow.

Only 40 plants have been found in surveys this year.

That could soon change, thanks to the work of botanists at the Rocky Mountain Research Station Provo Shrub Lab on the Brigham Young University campus. Using part of an estimated $25,000 federal grant, Susan Meyer of the U.S. Forest Service has managed to raise 54 clay phacelia from 600 seeds.

In the canyon, an eight-foot fence, erected by The Nature Conservancy on 70 acres the group purchased to protect the plants, keeps out humans, and deer and elk, which are known to enjoy munching the phacelia.

In a crevice here, amid a cascade of broken shale creeping ever downward, are the bright purple phacelia flowers. Little else lives here -- a few bushes and a spiky green weed.

On a recent visit, Denise Van Keuren, ecologist with Uinta National Forest, discovered two things: one large phacelia she photographed two weeks ago had somehow been smashed, perhaps by a sliding rock. And a new plant, the size of a quarter, had emerged from the talus, cause for celebration.

"This one is new, that wasn't here before," Van Keuren says, beaming.

Getting the seed needed to expand the population from Meyer's laboratory plants has been a challenge. The plants grew faster than anticipated and threatened to flower before insects were available to pollinate them naturally.

"I managed to keep the plants cool enough to delay flowering until I could put them outside to get natural pollination," Meyer wrote in an e-mail to Van Keuren recently.

To the surprise of Meyer, regular honey bees ignored the plants. As it happened, Meyer cultivates a bee species at her home called blue orchard bees.

"We decided to put (the plants) inside the enclosure with our blue orchard bee nest boxes," Meyer wrote. "It's working great. ... The blue bees are all over the phacelia all the time."

Thanks to the bees, Meyer's plants have produced 1,000 seeds so far this year,

"I'm estimating that we'll get somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000 seeds out of this," she wrote.

If that estimate pans out, botanists will sow some of that seed directly onto the shale slopes this fall, hoping they sprout next spring, Van Keuren said. Laboratory seedlings could be planted next year.

Clay phacelia was discovered by a man named Marcus E. Jones in Wasatch County in 1883 at Pleasant Valley Junction. Plants have never been found again in this location, but Jones did find a second group in Spanish Fork Canyon in 1894, Van Keuren said.

The plant was forgotten for more than seven decades until it was rediscovered by BYU botanist N. Duane Atwood in 1971. Two years later Atwood realized the plant was a new species and on Sept. 28, 1978, the plant received protection under the Endangered Species Act because so few exist.

Perhaps because they are biennials, populations of the plant fluctuate drastically and unpredictably, Van Keuren said.

"In 2004 it was a very good year and we saw about 200 plants, 100 blooming and 100 seedlings," she said. "None of the seedlings made it through the winter."

Compared to 200, 40 plants this year may sound dangerously small, but "there have been some years they have searched the entire plot and only come up with 10 plants," she said.

The effort to save the plant "goes down to biological diversity and the value of retaining our natural heritage of species," Van Keuren said. "If we keep losing species, we simplify our natural ecosystem and make the ecosystem more susceptible to some kind of catastrophe. Granted, clay phacelia may seem a small part of the whole thing but if you start unraveling the ecosystem, you can lose it over time."

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.