Limestone Cliff Community: Pocket of Old Forest
Tapping Sugar Maples
leaves little evidence behind, and the forest along the Cliff Trail now
seems to be virtually untouched by human hands. I am always
stunned when I stumble across patches of old growth (or near old
growth) forest --- the term scientists give to mature forests that
appear to be relatively unaffected by human activity. In the
eastern United States, old growth can only be found in small pockets,
usually in areas like the eastern side of Sugar Hill where steep slopes
or treacherous boulderfields scared former owners away from logging or
even grazing their animals. There, little patches of forest serve
as a reservoir for plants and animals that are unable to live in the
younger forests surrounding them.
I still
remember the first patch of old growth forest I saw as a
teenager. The few acre section on the Holston Mountain was off
the beaten trail, tucked into a dip near the top of a precipitous
ridge. A naturalist friend had given me a map and detailed
directions to the spot --- along with an admonition to keep the
location a strict secret. I huffed and puffed up the slope, then
paused in awe. I had not realized that the forests I was so
accustomed to were like a pencil sketch of the real, full color
forest. Old trees, young trees, middle-aged trees; standing snags
full of woodpecker holes; rotting logs on the forest floor. I
rolled one log over and found an indented network of shrew tunnels in
the dense duff underneath. A salamander slithered for cover at my
feet and above my head a Hooded Warbler sang its tale of the untouched
forest.
I had to walk
carefully to keep my footing on the uneven forest floor. Here and
there a massive tree had died and pulled up a big ball of roots and
dirt as it thundered toward the ground. Tucked under an overhang
in the side of one root mass, I found a little bird nest, probably home
to a family of phoebes. Flowers were already colonizing the top
of the root mass, taking advantage of the disturbed ground to sprout
without competition from neighbors.
The Cliff Trail
is about as close to old growth as you will find on the beaten trail in
our region. In addition to trees of many ages and plentiful logs,
dense stands of trilliums
are a sign of the forest’s age. Trilliums spread very slowly into
new areas, partly because their seeds are dispersed by ants and do not
travel far from the parent plant, and partly because trilliums take a
long time to grow old enough to reproduce. When a Big White
Trillium seed germinates, the plant spends the entire first year of its
life growing roots with nothing visible above the soil surface.
In the second year, the seedling finally unfolds its seed leaves, and
in the third year it puts up one true leaf, though even this leaf does
not look like the traditional three-parted trillium leaf. Plants
that reach four years old often manage to make an adult, three-parted
leaf, but it takes them at least another dozen years to store up enough
energy to bloom. Small wonder that drifts of trilliums like the
ones you see along the Cliff Trail are only found in mature forests.
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