Uses
Purple Saxifrage (S. oppositifolia) is a popular floral emblem. It is the territorial flower of Nunavut (Canada) and the county flower of County Londonderry in the UK. Known as rødsildre ("red saxifrage") in Norway, it also is the county flower of Nordland. Tsukuba in Japan has as its city flower hoshizaki-yukinoshita (Katakana: ホシザキユキノシタ), the aptera form of Creeping Saxifrage (S. stolonifera). The leaves of the Japanese variety "yukinoshita" (literally "Under the snow") can also been eaten, and is consumed at least within the large southern island of Kyushu. It is prepared by frying the younger succulent leaves in tempura batter.
Charles Darwin – erroneously believing Saxifraga to be allied to the sundew family (Droseraceae) – suspected the sticky-leaved Round-leaved saxifrage (S. rotundifolia), Rue-leaved saxifrage (S. tridactylites) and Pyrenean saxifrage (S. umbrosa) to be protocarnivorous plants, and conducted some experiments whose results supported his observations, but the matter has apparently not been studied since his time.
In literature, saxifrages do not figure prominently – that is, outside the literary short story by Walter Wangerin, called Saxifrage, the Break-Rock, or scientific writing such as the studies of Adolf Engler or the landmark The Structure and Biology of Arctic Flowering Plants. White Mountain saxifrage (S. paniculata) is discussed in Nicholas Culpeper's 1652 herbal The English Physitian. Well-known references to saxifrages in literature are:
- In William Carlos Williams' poem "A Sort of a Song", Williams refers to his idea of perception (to see through the metaphorical rock, see into the essence of the object, "no ideas but in things") when he writes Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
- In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the character Sax Russell – a physicist sent to Mars as part of Earth's first colony attempt on that planet – is named after this plant. There are several references to the saxifrage genus, and Robinson uses the plant's common name "stonebreaker" and descriptions of the flower to describe aspects of Russell's personality.
- In The Song of Bernadette, Franz Werfel described Saint Bernadette Soubirous as eating saxifrage in response to a request from Our Lady of Lourdes to "eat of the plants" near where she was about to dig for the Lourdes Spring. The real Saint Bernadette did eat plants and said "the lady" had asked her to. Several devotional writers identified the plants as saxifrage, and the location of the Lourdes Grotto, in a huge outcropping in the Pyrenees, makes it plausible.
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