Across the Blue Ridge Parkway

Sometimes walk out the front door, smile up at the cheery sunshine, and take a stroll down the shady little residential street where I make my home. The birds sing in the trees chirp-chirp-tooweet. All is happy and right with the world.

                Other days its not like that at all. On those days I’ve grown frustrated with research, not knowing what to call what. Sometimes it’s just a plant I can’t identify. But when I don’t know what to call a new relationship, when I don’t know how to lay off the bottle so I can get some writing done, when I’m waiting on a job to materialize after many promises while the bank account dwindles and the words “We should hear something next week,” are repeated week after week as an answer to my queries, that’s when I need something more than a pleasant walk down the street. During times of angst and frustration, when I’m tired of the fight to create order in my world, I turn to flight. I load a seabag full of camping gear, pack a cooler with some ice, check that the battery on my camera is fully charged. My dog watches in eager anticipation, pacing about anxiously smiling, waiting for me to say the word. After a quick double check in my head I finally say what she’s been waiting to hear: “Come on Mazy, let’s go!” That’s when we jump in the truck, turn on some bluegrass music or Dylan, turn off the cell phone, and stretch the legs of my well traveled little Ford Ranger.

                Down the residential streets of historic Murfreesboro, take a right onto Broad, head north, Interstate 840 is in sight…then…of shit!...really? The story of my month. He squats by the side of the road pointing the clunky unconstitutional contraption my way then steps right to the white line and authoritatively swings his arm indicating that he would like me to turn onto the little side street in front of the Harley-Davidson dealership.

                “Sir, I need your license and registration.” I hand them over, looking forward, irritated.

                “I clocked you doing fifty-eight in a forty-five.”

                “But I was going the same speed as everybody else…”

                “I can’t catch everybody.” He stepped back and ran my tags. After a few minutes he walked back up. “I’m just gonna issue you a warning. That’ll save you $116. But I need you to sign this citation for not having a current insurance card.”

                “Can’t you just call in my policy number and find out that it’s up to date?” (which it was.)

                “It’s not an admission of guilt. You just to take your current card to this address and show them.”

                “Okay.”

                “Have a nice day.”

                I drive off. I wonder why so many people say, “Thank you” at the end of a traffic stop? Oh well, this one was fairly painless. And I’m sure if my house was being broken into I’d be happy to see Murfreesboro’s finest show up at my front door. But there is a tyranny to traffic stops. Haphazard law enforcement is worse than no enforcement at all. A lot of good people get drug into an expensive, time-consuming machine for no good reason.

                I turn onto the interstate and accelerate…forty, sixty, seventy (the speed limit) is hell and gone before I settle in at a steady eighty-two m.p.h. I smoke a cigarette and just like the pale grey smoke from its fiery cherry the thoughts of this last unpleasantness go swirling out the window, dispersed into the karmic atmosphere of all that I am driving away from…black can not catch the rider whose pace is fast enough.

                I travel east through the central basin, climb up onto the highland rim at Buffalo Mountain, ascend higher onto the Cumberland plateau at Monterey, dip across the ridge and valley landscape at Harriman, then up into the mountains just past Knoxville. Driving, listening to music, roots rock now, Cracker, Credence Clearwater Revival. At Clyde I turn off the interstate and drive down to access the Blue Ridge Parkway. Up and up. Onto a ridge. The air is much cooler now. Not much traffic out here. A few motorcycles, a Volkswagen van with Saskatchewan plates driven by a bearded old man with a poodle riding shotgun. Is it John Steinbeck in Charley living out their version of heaven?

                We’ve been driving for four hours now. It’s time for a break, a chance to stretch my legs and let Mazy run off some energy. We are high up, XXX Bald…6,053 feet above sea level, the highest point along the parkway. Motorcycleists pose next to the sign, archiving the fact that they had past this way. The old man with the poodle takes a couple of pictures with a high dollar camera then scribbles something in a notebook. What is his story? What Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him to be standing here on this late day in May, accompanied by his dog, living out of a van with Sasketchiwan plates?

                The crisp air of high altitude refreshes me as I step outside the truck. Mazy protests at the leash, wanting to run free. There will be time for that later. I walk over to the stone walled viewing platform and look out across steep mountains rolling to the distance. The view is dominated by red spruce and dead Frasier firs, old snags jutting into the air, offering up to the imaginative mind a reminder of what was before the fir woolly adelgid arrived in these mountains in the 1970’s. In the coming days I would see an even more dramatic display of the utter devastation of a species brought about by a similar pin-head sized insect. Behind me scrubby laurel hangs on, gnarled, beautifully twisted and windblown on the crest of the ridge.

                I drive farther down the parkway and come to an arresting view: a steep slope of forest ascends above the ridge line then falls away as a hundred yards of exposed granite juts up and out toward the valley below. This is Devil’s Courthouse. As I walk across the parking lot the now familiar VW bus pulls into the little parking area. But here I want to do more than stand in a parking lot looking out on a pretty sight. I walk down a short trail that follows the highway then turn off into the trees. Mazy runs ahead, navigating by a nose that sees more perfectly than human eyes. As the trail winds up I photograph painted trillium, beautiful with its three dark leaves and three white petals with a red ring around the center. Rhododendron is just beginning to bloom along the trail. After a half mile I walk out onto the naked rock. It feels as though I am walking into the sky as the sheltering vegetation is left behind and the mountain is stripped to its barest essential. Exposed rock. Clear views. A couple with a pit bull sits at the edge. We quietly nod toward one another but don’t speak. Not yet. On rocky points like this the wind has no leaves to rustle. It blows cleanly by the ear in a clean, soothing white noise. Far, far below little communities are clearly visible, dotting the valleys. This isn’t the back country wilderness of the Olympics or Smokies.  Down below people are living their daily lives in a landscape where others like myself have come to escape for awhile. It bears the mark of man while elevating the seeker closer to God.

After awhile Mazy and the pit bull run around until, in response to some offense the dogs tangle a bit. I call Mazy off then walk over to pet the smitten pit bull.

                “He’s deaf,” says the young man who sitting near the edge.

                “Oh. He’s a sweet dog.” I pet the dog on the head. “Is there anywhere to camp around here?”

                “There’s a campground down at Pisgah. Its just a few miles farther down.”

                Mazy and I walk back down the trail. We drive to Pisgah and circle through the campground loop. I think I find a spot but where I think there may be access to a creek. I walk over but find only a small stream with some sanitation lines from the dump station running through it. This won’t do. I consult a map and see there is a Forests Service Campground just outside Ashville. It’s getting on in the evening now though there still seems to be plenty of light.

                I drive on toward Ashville. It have some business there tomorrow anyway. I stay at the Lake Powahtan campground, pleased that it is nearly deserted on a Monday night. I build a small fire. Firecraft is one of the most rewarding of easy accomplishments for modern man. I eat a Ranch beans for supper with some cheese and crackers. Tomorrow will be a full day. I finish reading Jack London’s short story “Diable – a Dog” and drift off to sleep.

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove

Dead Hemlocks, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

Mid-morning now. I walk peaceful and relaxed on a gentle stroll through the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove. The sun is rising but the tall trees this preserve was created to protect still reach to the sky and snag a little of it with leafy boughs, scattering the rays so that the sun casts rays of cathedral light onto the forest floor. A fitting memorial for the man who wrote “Trees”:
I think that I shall never see…
Joyce Kilmer was a thirty-two year old intelligence officer in the U.S. Army when he dided in France in July 1918 from a single bullet to the head. In his brief career as a published writer he managed to write one of the most recognized poems in American literature. I dare say only Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” or “The Road Less Travelled” even come close. A Veteran’s of Foreign Wars Chapter from New York wanted to memorialize Kilmer and petitioned the U.S. Forest Service to find a fitting stand of trees. After considering several sites they chose 3,000 acres in western North Carolina. This stand of hemlock and tulip poplar is one of the last stands of virgin forests in the East. The trees here are so impressive that even the logging companies who had owned the land had waited to cut these big trees last. But cut them they would have. The logging equipment was already on site when the money finally came through for the Forest Service to purchase the land in 1934.
Now the forest is preserved for the ages, allowing people to walk through a cove of giant poplar trees, 400-years-old, over 100-feet tall, 6-feet or more in diameter. You say not very big by Weat Coast standards where the redwoods soar 350-feet into the sky and the giant sequoia are large enough to build a two-room house in a hollowed out trunk? Maybe so, but these poplars are the biggest thing around and are the representative giants of the forests in which they stand. Remember, life is best contemplated on the local scale. By doing so one can find inspiration that crosses geographic boundaries. Consider each thing and consider them in their place.
The real story for me however wasn’t walking through the poplars. It had only been maybe ten months since my last visit and I had already experienced their beauty and heaviness of life and abundance.
The hemlock are the real story here. Every hemlock in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove is dead, killed off by a pin-head sized insect called the hemlock wooly adelgid. The story is the same throughout western North Carolina and the pest is spreading into eastern Tennessee. The insects suck the moisture out of the needle of the tree and the tree starves. Forest managers have attempted to save the trees by applying a chemical cocktail known as a deep root treatment but this is expensive and there are many, many hemlock trees on the slopes of rich, streamside woods in the southern highlands. Biological agents, i.e., little beetles, have been released as well but as yet the effectiveness of these have been difficult to assess.
And in western North Carolina the damage has already been done. The lower trail in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove looks like what Joyce Kilmer must have seen in the war ravaged forests of World War I France. Forest Service personnel have used explosives to bring down most of the hemlocks along the trail. This leaves behind an irregular, highly splintered stump which resembles a tree brought down by high winds. The stumps do look more natural than if they had been taken down with the smooth cut of a chain saw. But still, the whole area looks ravaged. All by the one little insect barely visible with the naked eye.
Back at the truck I eat some cheese and crackers and consult my map. It’s time to head back to the reality of the city. While sitting on the tailgate I notice a family, a dad, a mom, a son, and two daughters, walking around wearing shirts with the word BIGFOOT and the silhouette of a large hominid on it. Curious, I ask what it is all about. “We’re looking for signs of sasquatch in North Carolina and northern Georgia,” says the father, taking a last drag off his cigarette before their stroll through the woods. “We were part of a documentary that’s going air on Animal Planet in June.” I told him I’d be looking for it and wished them happy hunting.
We all look for what we believe is out there, what we haven’t found but hope to find. There is a large creature in our dreams that comes out when we are silent and alone. The monster is addiction. It is the strain of troubled relationships. It is the lack of fulfillment that creeps into our day-to-day lives. Maybe it is a large hominid. Whatever our monster we want to look for it, show the world we have power over it. To show the world we can cure it with a chemical cocktail. Or to relinquish responsibility for our lives to a God who goes by many names. It is in the pursuit of that which we hope to be real, that elusive but enlightening moment as yet not experienced, that we take to the highway across state lines, that we turn onto meandering back country roads, that we lay on the ground at night and stare up at the stars.

Academic Botany

A different day now, a week later. The false summer heat, the strange anomaly that it was, has gone. The heat has been replaced by another anomaly – freakish cold that has sat in over the whole eastern United States, subduing afternoon highs at fifteen, even twenty degrees below normal. Imagine the middle of May in Tennessee when the temperature doesn’t get above fifty-five degrees on the Farenheit scale. Cold. Yesterday was damp as well with what seemed a mist blown in from the Northwest turning central Tennessee into a depressive little Puget Sound without the water or the ferries. At least we have Starbucks.

                The little garden I have planted in the backyard maintains, no tropical plant of the Solanaceae can thrive in such depressing weather. Grey skies and November temperatures turn Spring into a hell of existence, destroying any celebration of life, at least for the moment. But this too shall pass – this stretch of chill gloom. And when it does the cell divisions will amplify, making up for lost time. The tomatoes and chilies, okra and cucumbers will stretch their stunted legs and leap toward the life giving sun. In a few weeks there will be blooms and a couple of weeks later the fresh fruit of summer when the perfect supper will be small cucumbers, fresh and cool, tomatoes that drip with an aspic flavorfulness that is more complex than the most prized wine hidden deep in any of the world’s best cellars and the peppers, cayenne, that are simply put, the living heat of life on the planet captured in a slender fruiting body. Add a good chunk of cheese and some crackers to the mix. I’ll take this repast over the entire menu of the finest restaurants of Manhattan.

                I believe in eating a simple diet. Not that I always do but I do believe that is how we should eat. In the mornings I have a hard boiled egg from the extras a certain sweet girl brings me from the farm where she works. For sweetness I eat an apple – Gala is my favorite. Last summer while working for the Park Service my lunch usually consisted of a turkey wrap complete with lettuce, onions, and hot peppers from my garden…and potato chips, for the element of salt which I so dearly love. In the winter I enjoy a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and for lunch black-eyed peas or pinto beans from a can with plenty of hot sauce splashed into it. Don’t read this thinking I don’t eat meat. Roasted chicken and an occasional steak are hard to beat. T everyone’s chagrin I occasionally break out a can of anchovies, each wrapped around a caper. And of course there is the pub food. The little dive bar down the street makes the best hamburgers in town. That’s saying a lot since the population of Murfreesboro has now swelled to 100,000 people. All of them wanting new houses, crackerbox shacks built for profit more than posterity. Or little starter-castles to use a term from Bill McKibben.

                All these new houses are the American way of living the American dream. I say keep the house and the quarter acre lot the developer allotted to it. Give me a tent and five acres on scrubby land. I’ll clear what I need and eventually get around to building a “permanent” structure of some sort. Or maybe that isn’t necessary. I’ll take the land as somewhere to go when I get tired of people. I’ll live in one of the hundreds of little houses in the old neighborhood where I currently rent my two bedroom apartment. These aren’t some commercial units built three or four stories high with all electric conveniences included. I live in a house built in 1948 (and it’s the news one on the block) with hardwood floors and big windows. The kitchen has old metal cabinets and a metal sink. The place has character and plenty of space. No carpet to trap allergens, no tightly sealed efficiency windows to trap in cigarette smoke, bad breath, and other poison gasses. Within four blocks of me in all directions are old historic houses, many with crumbling brick. At least four that come to mind were used as hospitals following the Battle of Stones River. Judy Garland’s father grew up in one of these. It was built by President James K. Polk’s brother-in-law. (If you don’t remember who James K. Polk was from your history books he was the president who started our war with Mexico in 1848 when we decided that Texas and the southwest, all the way to California, should be part of the United States. After sacking Mexico City and taking what we wanted the government offered up a pittance of $ 5 million as compensation.) Two blocks away is a mass grave with over two thousand Confederate soldiers buried in a big ring.

                These houses around downtown Murfreesboro all sit on land that used to part of the Oaklands plantation. The ground underneath is a rich dark brown which makes growing a garden easy. The land where these new little subdivisions pop up is not rich ground. Often they are set on top of old pastures and often cedar glades. The new owners move in with not very much to work with as far as arable land. But if they are lucky they will get a pleasant wildflowers garden of showy evening primrose, glade larkspur, and glade cress – that is unless the developer hauled in too many loads of topsoil. Then all they get is a yard full of Bermuda grass and landscaped shrubs.

                I finished up my glade monitoring last week, judging it a success. I don’t have to do that again until October. I still need to create spreadsheets capturing all the data I collected. Then I will sit down with my major professor and we’ll figure up some way of statistaclly analyzing the data to make a coherent statement about the work. Ecology is inseperable from statistics. The nature of life on Earth cannot be presented in a rational scientific manner without numbers to prove it exists. The beauty of ecological statistics is that they are easily scewable so that a story can be told in a away it will be accepted.

                I could write a thesis where I speak of the burst of color provided by the seasonal succession of wildflowers. I could write of the buzzing, heavy flight of the bee as it wanders from one flower to the next collecting nectar in exchange for spreading pollen. But academic journals wouldn’t touch such a paper, no graduate committee would accept these valid truths as legitimate research. And perhaps they are correct not to do so. The world is full of too many poets. What constitutes good research are graphs showing linear regression and correlation between species and their environment and nimble little spreadsheets  presenting lists of all soil depths and soil moisture content of all plots, accompanied by some analysis of the variances encountered. There should be lists of plants encountered and these lists should be broken down by the conditions where each was found growing. My job is to offer an interpretation of fact and to guide the reader through the charts and graphs to see how they all fit together. Eureka! Now I see what you have gleaned from months of walking the fields, looking at the ground. It is my job as a researcher to do this. Perhaps my findings will be published in a small, second or third tier academic journal. I will have a readership of two hundred people which will be twice as many readers as have bought (or been given) my first book, Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls. What would they do if I included a poem in my thesis:

I love the goddess

As she calls to me from the tumbling waters that are cold in January or the bathtub waters of August.

I examine the little blessings she leaves along my path:

Mushrooms, trillium, bloodroot, hickory trees

I think that there is something special in the salamander that crawls under the decaying leaves of the forest floor;

The bracket fungi that spring from the rotting logs that are returning the gift they had once been given.

I try to appreciate all the life, all the energy around me -

The constant recycling of nutrients -

Everything in the forest is being sustained and intellectually I take it all in,

Knowing the processes, having studied them.

But sometimes the sun weaves through the trees a certain brilliant light, seen through tears, humbling me with its beauty.

And that’s when I go deeper, to a place I have a hard time reaching:

Going from head to heart where the mind lets go and a new force of nature opens eyes that so often stay closed.

And somewhere the biological activity comes together in a way I can only describe as “whole”.

Throwing all my field guides and training aside

The only thing I can identify is love.

                I hope there is a purpose to this academic botany I have undertaken. I hope someone can build on my work and present a greater truth about the nature of cedar glades based in part on this trail I am currently chopping out of an esoteric idea. I hope my work will cause at least one person to take pause before throwing down a beer can or dumping some old tires in these unique habitats. If so my work will have been a success. Whether or not my work does get noticed likely doesn’t matter. In late February the Leavenworthia will still sprout in the muddy ground to bloom into sweet scented white flowers in March, the poke up its purple blossom toward the sky.  Sunnybells will dance yellow and green in their last stronghold under a golden sun in the gentle breezes of late April and the Tennessee coneflower will turn its purple rays toward a sustaining sun as the Earth warms and the ground dries and cracks in mid summer. A landscape will persist as something more than memory, to awaken the interest of a young mind who may pick up the cause to preserve these special places for the generation that comes after them.

Field Botany

Field Botany, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

This Missouri primrose along my transect helps me remember why I enjoy botany

Naked Botany

The second week of May turned out to be hot. Not the sweet heat of May with its heady scent of flowers on a soft breeze. During the second week of May the temperature soared up to ninety degrees with a heavy humidity in the air. It felt more like late July than May. In short, the second week of May offered a glimpse of my favorite kind of weather.

                On Monday I pulled my truck around to the garage and loaded up my new lawn mower and old but trusty string trimmer and blower. I drove two blocks over to College Street where I had just picked up my first yard to mow. Twenty-five dollars for what I expected to be forty-five minutes of work. It was a little yard behind a great gothic Victorian mansion, complete with lightening rods disguised as weather vanes and turrets. I unloaded my gear, pushed it through the century old iron gate, then walked the yard picking up sticks. There were several. Then I mowed. The whole affair took about an hour, not a bad exchange rate of my time for the money. In most any other venture I sell off my time for much less and often its for labor that isn’t half so fulfilling and worthwhile (in a city setting anyway) of giving someone’s lawn a manicured appearance. I find most work to be tolerable so long as I can see the effects of my efforts and so long as I feel the trade off of time for compensation was worth it.

                I’ve had jobs before where I didn’t really see what was happening though I knew I was performing designated tasks. When I was in the Navy I was a professional administrator for the most part, filling out reports, reviewing requisition form turned in by those I supervised. I wish I could say lead, isn’t the job of a military officer to be a leader? I did lead, especially at sea or anytime I was assigned to a ship. Young sailors need guidance, just as a butter bar such as my self had needed some gentle prodding and pointers from the Chiefs’ Mess. There is a way a Navy Chief, who has been on sea duty for fifteen or twenty years, has of saying “Sir” that let’s a newly pinned officer know his place in the overall scheme of things. That lasts for a couple of years. It’s a long period of training. But, ideally, young officers are being taught by the technical experts. A man or woman is born with the ability to lead if they are going to have any aptitude for it. But its impossible to do, even for someone who has the ability, if those under you don’t think you know what you’re talking about. That is one flaw I see in the system of military rank, the overnight transformation from cadet or midshipman to officer without having to put in the years of work required to really know the job. But the military addresses this issue by having senior enlisted personnel take new officers under their wing to train them. I became an efficient administrator, and a decent leader in my opinion. But I still had rather cut grass than fill out paperwork. That said, I do miss the sea.

                I miss going topside to smoke a cigar, watching the day slowly dissolve into night on a slate blue sea of gentle swells. I miss the strange creatures that lurk in the depths, occasionally breaching the surface to reveal themselves to the astonished eyes of a Tennessee landlubber. The most impressive animal I have ever seen was a whale shark, thirty feet long, the largest fish on the planet. We had run over it somewhere off the coast of Ecuador near the Galapagos Islands, the bow having cut deeply into the animal’s side. Down in my little office I had felt the bump, then the jarring vibrations as we reversed engines to back off of the large, slow moving and harmless creature. I ran topside to see what was happening. Looking down from the starboard gunwale I watched the big whale shark sloshing languidly but no doubt painfully from side to side. I watched the broad strokes of its massive tail. The whale shark was brown with white spots. After a few minutes it slowly rolled over revealing a whitish belly. A sense of finality hung in the air, a feeling that some irretrievable wrong had yielded an uncorrectable result. Slowly, heavily the large fish sank into the clear glassy water, never to know the wonder of the sun’s light again. People say what they will, the death of a large creature carries an impact that no one can deny. What the creature lacked in humanity it made up for in size. There is an emptiness in the death of all things when they die due to human actions that no amount of evolutionary selection could have prepared them for. Even the squirrel that runs under the tires of my truck puts a little kink in my day. Call me a softy but you’ve felt it too. Why else would we swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic to avoid running over a squirrel or turtle crossing the road? As for the big whale shark, I suppose his death wasn’t a total loss. Even as his big dead carcass drifted down beneath the swells a pod of pilot whales approached across the waters in response to some sort of distress signal, be it vibrations or chemical, the shark had released into the water.  Once again death sustains life.

                Alas, such is the ease with which one can get sidetracked when writing a rhapsodical piece loosely based on the nature of cedar glades. I was talking about cutting grass (which isn’t really what I meant to be writing about either) and wound up describing the death throws of a whale shark off the coast of South America. How ‘bout that for some arm chair travel?

                After I finished with the yard I drove back to my house and unloaded my lawn care equipment. In its place I loaded a one meter long by half meter wide PVC rectangle, a soil moisture probe, and a backpack with a fieldbook, a couple screwdrivers, a ruler, a wildflower guide, and a couple of water bottles stuffed inside. I called my dog who bound into my truck without hesitation, always ready to go for a ride.

                I drove out Hall’s Hill Pike with Flatt & Scruggs blaring from my radio. I love the banjo wizardry of Earl Scruggs, even more so since he invented the way people play bluegrass banjo today. My favorites are “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (of course) and “Shuckin’ the Corn”, both fast driving little numbers played by musicians so good you can almost feel the smug arrogance in their performance…the kind of confidence I like in good music.

                I pulled into the parking lot and sat in the truck for another minute to hear the last bit of a song play. Then I took a big pull from one of the water bottles, shoulder the pack and hung the PVC rectangle (henceforth to be called a sampling plot) and moisture probe around my neck and began the long trek back to my transects.

                The trail wended its way up a wet weather creekbed then over a stubbly field of prickly brambles that had been bushhogged the previous fall. The sun was scorching hot as I left the shade of the woods. All along the way I looked for new wildflowers to photograph for the field guide. Over the course of the Spring I had made many trips out to Flat Rock and I believe there is not a species of plant that had not caught my eye if it was in flower.

                This would be an opportune time to offer an overview of the lay of the land and the vegetation I walked through.

                As I said previously in this essay central Tennessee is a land of steep but relatively small hills cut with generally narrow hollows (hollers). The very middle of central Tennessee is a land of gently rolling hills much like the bluegrass country of Kentucky, perfect pastureland, most of it clay but much of it with deep, rich black soil. It this landscape cedar glades stick out like a scraps of barren wasteland sprinkled amid an oasis. They are hot and dry, covered with thin soil at best, often with none at all. Borken limestone flagstone lays scattered decaying all over the ground. Low spots are muddy holes of fetid soil in Spring and Winter, becoming hard and cracked in Summer and Fall. At Flat Rock the glades are surrounded, but never encroached upon, by post oak and blackjack oak, red cedar, and glade privet. Within the glade the casual observer will find a host of herbaceous plants producing the wildflowers that are currently the focus of my life along with prickly pear cactus, glade moss, reindeer lichen, a green alga called Nostoc, and a biotic crust of tiny brown lichens as yet unstudied as far as I know. Beneath this landscape the Earth is hollowed out and dissected by an elaborate system of caves and water ways which occasionally undermine the surface rock, causing large sink holes to collapse into the earth.

                My first transects of the day were located just over a mile back. One ran through a glade streamside meadow where a spring sends cold, cold water through a series of rock fissures to eventually issue forth through a boggy glade of grass and sunnybells. From there it joins another tributary of bare rock before entering the woods briefly to fall into a sink hole. From there only the copepods and cave crickets knows where it goes…and anyone who may have performed a dye test.

                A word of explanation is necessary to help the reader understand how my study is set up: I am studying the relationship between soil depth and soil moisture to species richness. Species richness is a term for identifying ever species of plant in a given area. To this end I have set up five pairs of parallel transect, each fifteen meters long. One of the transects runs through the wettest area of the glade while the other runs through a dry area. Along each of these transects I lay down the sampling plot five times at predetermined intervals. I measure the moisture within each plot with a high dollar moisture probe on loan from the U.S. Geologic Survey, I measure the soil depth with a screw driver and a ruler, and I visually observe all the different plants that are growing within the plot. This sounds pretty easy and I don’t try to make it seem like more than it is but often plants are very frustrating to identify when all you have to work with is the leaves, especially when the sprouts are just beginning to poke up out of the ground. Each transect takes an hour sometimes more, sometimes less, to complete. Such is the nature of botanical surveying.

                And to what end am I performing this study? Mostly to show that I know how to set up an experiment. Is that not the nature of Master’s level graduate work? Ideally I will be able to establish a predictive model what will grow where and in what concentration, become a sought after expert in helping developers and road builders figure out where to build a house or an interstate highway while doing the least damage possible to a fragile landscape. Only time will tell.

                The first two transects went well enough, took just over two hours. The heat was making me lightheaded. I sat on a flat slab of limes tone and drank some water and enjoyed an all natural, slow burning cigarette. This slab of rock is my favorite spot at Flat Rock. It sits at the edge of the woods under a scraggly by striving winged elm. It was here a couple of months before that some friends and I had sat into darkness one night when we had come out to walk our dogs. While I was off checking one of my transects, making sure no raccoon or coyote had pulled my nails out of the ground (it has happened) one of them had built a little fire of dead cedar branches. When I walked back up I was surprised and suspected that building fires in a nature preserve was probably forbidden but there wasn’t a sign (at least not here) and the fire was so nice as the chill of night came on. I asked for a pull from the wine bottle.  So nice. In the dryness of the spicy smoke of the cedar and the little glow of the crackling fire I felt totally at peace. After awhile the fire died out and we hiked back in the dark. Two weeks later I returned and found a sign hanging on the little winged elm outlining forbidden activity within the confines of the nature preserve:

                No fires

                No alcohol

                No dogs offleash

Come one Department of Environment and Conservation…let a guy have a little fun while he does his research. At least I saw the sign before I broke yet another rule: No camping.

                Refreshed but still sweating like a stuck hog I walked farther back into the large glade and found the nails that marked my third transect. Sampling is tedious, if not terribly physically demanding work. Especially on a hot day with the sun beating down from above. The heat had turned the sky to a high hazy grey. I decided to break up the monotony of sampling I’d take off my t-shirt and shorts. Hell, boxers too. Why not? Getting naked is a constructive step toward alleving boredom. I sampled the next two plots au natural and in the process got a pretty good sunburn. But know this: as the day wears on sampling can get sloppy. The sampler may loose sight of the importance of taking notice of each blade of grass. He or she must be vigilant to maintain focus and make sure the sense of focus is not lost. So getting naked is a necessary indulgence at times when the day has worn on, the sun has beat down, and the thought of laying down a sampling plot to see what’s there seems like an enormous task.

Plant Invaders

            Grey clouds hang off the sky like a wet overcoat dripping more water onto the already saturated world, the drip-drop drip-drop of beads of rainwater forming and falling off the deep oxygenated green of the mosses, grasses, herbaceous shrubs and trees; the every magnificently green hills and hollers of central Tennessee.

Greenest state in the land of the free…

                Nature is more than a visionary experience. It fills all the senses, from the cold jolt of a raindrop on ones head to the shades of green contrasting with the grey of the sky massaging the rods and cones of the eyeball to the heady scent of the privet in bloom, vicious invasive plant that it is, the nose can hardly face reason, that this plant should be eradicated from the landscape, when it offers such a seductive appeal to the olfactory senses. Who are we humans to be the judge of what should live or die when the process of natural selection, fitness in biological terms, has already asserted that this privet (Ligustrum sinensis) is a survivor, a thriver, a builder of empires in any temperate landscape it invades?

                Or do we have a right, a responsibility to destroy all that is invasive, alien, not of this place? Is some fanatical racism at hand telling us that this illegal immigrant of a plant, brought over solely for the utilitarian purpose of landscaping the unnatural assault on nature that we call a lawn, has gotten out of hand when it left the manicured artificial habitat of city lots, escaping into the countryside and surrounding woods to compete and destroy any chance of life for our native population of similar shrubs and small trees?

                I have spent summers employed by the Federal gov’ment walking through woods with loppers, machete, and brush blade cutting this privet then applying a lethal dose of Garlon, a vile smelling poison, the vapors of which burn as if they would eat away the lining of the nasal cavity, all in an effort to ensure that particular plant would never more raise a leafy green arm toward the sky. Usually the application worked, nut often it didn’t. Weeks later little sprouts would spring up from the base of the plant I had meant to kill but in actuality had only severely pruned.

                What does it mean when a plant or an animal creeping in from some other local, or a race of people moves in and outcompetes native populations? In a not so veiled metaphor, what would it mean if the privet moved in and outcompeted the bush honeysuckle, itself an invasive shrub, to the point that the bush honeysuckle disappeared under the assault of the new invader?

                There is a philosophy to be found in botany, a philosophy of what grows where and why it is there. There are questions to answer regarding what plants should be fought for and preserved and which ones should be left to the forces of fate to slip quietly into extinction, having left a dead end in the evolutionary line, not through any lack of adaption to the landscape but through an inherent weakness in the DNA that Nature so specifically chose for that plant to pass on through hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of generations.

                All these musings lead me to an observation at once perfectly sensible and utterly contradictory. In Nature that which is too highly specialized is often the most susceptible to extinction. To give an example, there is the star orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) in the Amazon whose corolla tube is so long that when the plant was first discovered Charles Darwin predicted that a moth would eventually be discovered with a proboscis of sufficient length to pollinate the plant. It would likely be the only creature on Earth that could perform this service. Several years later a moth was discovered that fit this description, and was fittingly named Darwin’s hawk moth (Xanthopan morgani praedicta). Study found that this moth with the twenty-five centimeter proboscis was the only pollinator for the star orchid and the plant was the only nourishment sought out by the moth. For millennia the co-evolutionary arrangement has worked. But if for some unforeseen the reason, be it a peculiar disease or loss of habitat, the moth or the orchid should become extinct the other would soon follow.

                Now for an example of specialization keeping a plant from fading into the oblivion of the millions of species that have come before but are no more. The cedar glades of central Tennessee are harsh landscapes where standing water can be present from December through March or April, followed by a few weeks of pleasant dampness. During this period of April and May the cedar glades burst with color as prairie larkspur, glade mustard, Nashville breadroot, Sunnybells, glade sandwort, and Pyne’s groundplum, push forth an explosion of color in the age old story of growth, flowering, seed production, then decay. By the middle of June the sun had dried up all water and the glades are dry as a bone, the mud between the limestone hardened like a brick. The flowering plants of a few weeks ago have withered and blown away leaving only a hopeful seedbank as a as yet unfulfilled promise of continuation next year. In their place are poverty grass and little bluestem grass, thinly leaved angiosperms such as Gattinger’s prairie clover and the thorny prickly pear cactus.

                Hardly any exotics encroach onto this landscape. The promise that the glade will continue indefinitely into the future seems assured as long as no developer comes along and pours an asphalt parking lot on top of it. Since the glades have been recognized as unique habitats and gained some protection from state and federal governments the only serious threat of utter annihilation has come from the flooding of the Percy Priest Dam in the late 1960’s when the waters of the Stones River backed up over thousands of square acres of pristine habitat in the heart of glade country. But for the efforts of a few botanists the Tennessee coneflower (Echinacea tennesseensis) would have likely been lost in the name of civic water supply and recreational opportunities for boaters.

                Is saving one rare, endemic wildflower worth scraping plans for a dam that will benefit many more people than would ever care to walk out in the hot landscape to look at a rather scraggly plant? The answer to that is above my paygrade. But in defense of saving plants and their habitats, an array of medicinal benefits have been garnered from members of the genus Echinacea.

                As for the privet, it stops dead in it’s tracks at the edge of the glades, as if unable to take that one step each year, that, when multiplied by increments each year, would allow it to colonize the glades. The privet can’t quite master the landscape enough to enter it, much less work incrementally toward colonizing it. Instead it stands on the unmoving fringe, competing with the native privet (Forysteria lugustrina) and the redcedars and the winged elm. But they too have mastered this environment at the edge of adversity. And in doing so they have stopped the invader in its tracks. Adversity leads to diversity.  

Plants of Central Tennessee

Iris cristata, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

     Landscapes are the canvas on which we lead our lives. A life spent along the rocky coasts of the specific must certainly see the world through a different lens than someone who has grown up in the spruce and fir woods of the Rocky Mountains as they arch their jagged spines toward the Colarado sky. Simirlarly one who has spent his or her existence in the Red Rock country of the Four Corners area will see the world in a different hue than then cold-loving soul who has lived out their days amid the boreal forests and lakes of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Like most people I have walked the ground of many varied landscapes but I know that I am a product of the deep green hills and hollers of Central Tennessee. My mountains are rolling hills to many, my rivers not half so wild and furious as western torrents dropping thousands of feet through boulder strewn channels. But each landscape, whether dramatic or sublime shapes those who live there, filling each of us with our sense of place. On the rarest of days, when the sun hits our eyes just right and there is the sweet hint of a particular flower on the breeze we can feel at home, in a way that can only come from being in the landscape where our earliest memories were formed, where someone we loved pointed out a particular tree or hill or creek and called it by a name that we shall never forget.
     That is why this book is focused on the plants of Central Tennessee. Most of these plants are not special because they grow nowhere else (though for many that is the case), the majority can be found from Missouri to the Carolinas, Massachusetts to Alabama. What makes these plants special is that they have surrounded me throughout my life, having been tread under my boot on an explorative hike or examined up close with a hand lens during my more studious moments as a botanist. They have created my view of what I expect to find when the cold snow and drizzle of winter subsides and Springs trips up from the South and finally adorns Tennessee with its leafy green blanket of color and warmth.