I've had multiple people email to ask if they could use my Japanese Knotweed drawing in various non-profit ways.  I'm always glad for anyone to use the images on this site as long as they're not making money off them and include a URL like the one shown here to credit the source.

In fact, I went so far as to scan the image again to make a high quality version, which you can download here.  Apparently, kids will be coloring printouts at the Sudbury Weed Education and Eradication Team's Halloween fair this month.  I can see how Japanese Knotweed would put a shiver of fear down any botanist's spine.

The title of this post is a bit misleading.  Yes, the Spring Beauties did start blooming a week ago, and the woods is currently alive with hepatica, rue anemone, buttercup, sedge, and trout-lily flowers.  But when I went out with the camera this morning, I was drawn away from the blossoms and toward the other signs of spring.  The photo above is a Dryad Saddle poking out of a stump in our garden.

Our buckeye trees are just starting to leaf out.  I'm glad we're located on the north side of a hill because that shade slowed our trees down just enough that they didn't get nipped by the hard freeze earlier this week.

Looks like a squirrel was hanging out in this hollow tree all winter.

My eyes are always peeled for the first spring flowers, but this year, I seem to be more interested in the insects on those flowers.  Perhaps it's because I'm obsessed with chicken foraging, and chickens love bugs, or maybe I'm just starting to get a real inkling for how important insects are in the landscape.

Except for our honeybees, I hadn't seen a single insect until about two weeks ago when the Commas/Question Marks (I never look closely enough to tell the difference) and the Mourning Cloaks started flying.  Within days, the Spring Azures had joined them, and this week I even saw big, showy Tiger and Zebra Swallowtails visiting my manure pile.

Butterflies are the prettiest early spring insects, but they aren't alone out there. When the hepaticas started blooming a week and a half ago, tiny little beetles were busy collecting pollen, and this week I started seeing Greater Bee Flies hovering around flowers.

I love how in sync the natural world is.  Bee flies show up one day; the next day, our first nectarine flowers open.  I get bit by a mosquito one day; the next evening a bat is swooping through the air gathering dinner.  It's all a reminder that the beautiful spring flowers we love so much didn't evolve for human enjoyment.  Flowers are here for the bees, so we need to protect our pollinators if we want the show to go on.

Even though we chose to reuse metal from the old house that used to stand on our property when we constructed the East Wing, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for thatching.  Wouldn't it be great to grow your own roof and then add the biomass to the compost pile once it's passed through its natural life span rather than ending up with a lot of toxic material to send to the dump?  Although thatched roofs do require more upkeep than metal, some sources suggest that a well-thatched roof could last as long as shingles do.

Given my obsession with thatching, you shouldn't be surprised to discover that around 5% of our cruise photos consisted of shots of various thatched structures.  Since we couldn't take you all along on the cruise, I figured I'd show you the cream of the crop of Mexican thatched roofs.

The first four photos are from the mainland of the Yucatan peninsula, where palm fronds are the primary thatch material.  Notice in the top, right-hand picture (which is a view of the thatched roof from below), that the palm fronds slide over wooden supports, making construction simple.  In case you're wondering what the picture above is doing here, that's proto-thatch, aka a palm.

Starting with the photos below, we've moved to the island of Cozumel, still in Mexico.  The roof I got to spend time with on Cozumel was made of some sort of grass or reed tied into bundles.  We saw a truckload of these bundles between Tulum and Calica on the mainland of the Yucatan too, so clearly this alternative thatch material isn't just for islands.

Thatching with reeds/grass looks like it would be a lot more time consuming than thatching with palm.  It looks like you first tie the individual leaves into bundles, then you tie the bundles onto the wooden supports.  From the bottom-up photo, it also looks like this particular roof is going to leak at least here and there where light shines through.  It's still a beautiful structure, though.

Outside the small manicured zone where steam lodge guests generally hang out, the area around Cozumel's steam lodge was clearly old farmland turning back into young forest.  I could tell that the earth needed a little love --- the further I wandered, the more it felt like abandoned city lots, full of debris, where dirt feels dirty instead of succulent with life.

Just like similar scrubby areas in the U.S., there are inhabitants who enjoy the early successional zone in the Cozumel forest.  The Magnolia Warbler on the right was flitting around looking for insects amid a morning-glory-choked tree while the hummingbird above kept catching my eye throughout the day as it visited cultivated flowers.  I didn't really get a good enough shot to be sure, but I think the hummingbird might be a species found only on Cozumel --- the Cozumel Fork-tailed Emerald --- which would make a visit to the steam lodge very much worthwhile for serious birders looking to add a notch to their life list.

The real natural beauties near the steam lodge, though, were the butterflies, and they were too quick for my camera.  While Petrus and Jose Luis filled the lodge with hot rocks, I saw a big blue butterfly (perhaps a Morpho), fly directly toward the entrance before veering away at the last instant.  Later, when we emerged, two long-winged black butterflies with a red and yellow spot on each pair of wings fluttered around us in air that suddenly seemed full of light.  Clearly, Petrus's care of the young earth was paying off and Cozumel's natural inhabitants were rebounding.

Find the time to do what you love with Microbusiness Independence.

One of the most enchanting aspects of Hidden Valley is its flora. The verdant forests are primarily deciduous oak, maple, beech, cherry, magnolia, and yellow birch interspersed with hemlock and at higher elevations, red spruce. Rhododendron and Mountain Laurel thickets dominate the understory. Dozens of fern species and innumerable wildflowers, including trillium, wild orchids, and violets flourish here.

The discharge below the dam of Hidden Valley Lake is Brumley Creek. In the early 1900s a small gauge railroad used for logging operations followed the creek for several miles, crossing it several times on trestles. Remnants from this railroad can be seen amidst dense Rhododendron and Mountain Laurel thickets if you hike downstream from the dam. About two miles or so downstream from the dam in a rugged steep gorge is the container AEP brought in to house water monitoring equipment in 1978. Roughly three miles downstream is the confluence with Little Brumley Creek and a fifteen foot waterfall. Three or so miles further the creek flows through Brumley Creek Baptist Camp. Brumley Creek still has native trout and in spring Pink Ladies’ Slippers and other wildflowers adorn its banks.

Low Gap

Low Gap is an area at the top of Hidden Valley Road where the road transitions from pavement to gravel with a small parking area on the left. Two trails can be accessed from the parking area: a trail that leads to the base of some cliffs referred to here as the Cliff Trail and the western terminus of the Clinch Mountain Trail.


Cliff Trail

Facing north, access to the cliff trail is just to the left of the mound and a small patch of weeds. The trail meanders westerly a few hundred yards through a heavily shaded deciduous forest where Indian Cucumber, Large-Flowered Trillium, Southern Harebell and the like can be found. As a few sandstone rocks are ascended the trail trends northwesterly then northerly along the base of tall sandstone cliffs. The trail is approximately 3⁄4 of a mile in total length, flat, and makes for   nice walk. Above is a photo of the Cliffs.


Clinch Mountain Trail
Clinch Mountain Trail, accessed from the northern side of the parking area, averages 3,800 feet in elevation as it follows the ridge of Clinch Mountain approximately nine and a half miles along the Washington and Russell County lines east to US Route 80 in Hayter’s Gap. Four land owning parties are involved: Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (DGIF) that maintains the Hidden Valley Wildlife Management Area, Virginia Department of Forestry (DOF) and Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) Natural Heritage Division who jointly manage the Channels State Forest, and Brumley Cove Baptist Camp.

Open only to foot traffic, hikers transit southern Appalachian and northern hardwood forests, high elevation cove forest, and calcareous cliff plant communities, and are afforded high elevation vistas into Russell Co. Near its eastern extremity the trail provides access to the Channels. A spur trail descends to Brumley Cove Baptist Camp that allows users access to the camp and trout fee fishing.

The first time I found a gentian flower, I kept checking on it day after day, hoping the flower would open up enough for me to identify it.  Little did I know that the bud-like flowers are the easiest way to identify gentians.

Gentian flowers have evolved to be pollinated by one of our most important native pollinators --- bumblebees.  These hefty insects are able to push their way into gentian flowers, and I assume that the exclusion of other pollinators makes gentian pollination more efficient.

I found this lovely bloom along the Chimney Rock Trail on High Knob a few weeks ago.  Although I got too excited to take photos once I got to the top, I highly recommend this half mile trail because of the large sandstone cave at the peak of the hill.  To get there, park at the Bark Camp Lake day use area and walk a short way down the road toward the boat ramp.  Before you reach the boat ramp, you'll see the trail branching off on your left.  Since the trail is a loop, you'll see the trail branching off again a few yards further down the road.  The trail is well built, with lots of switchbacks that make the climb feel insignificant.

For the first time Saturday, I could smell the rich autumnal odor of newly fallen leaves as I walked Lucy.  I barely managed to force myself into finishing my chores before I set out into the woods.

My goal, as always, was to head up the hillside to the older woods, but I had to pass through grown up pasture to get there.  Half a century into its childhood, the young woods on the lower parts of our property still has Japanese Honeysuckle being stifled in the understory.  But the brilliant Purple-gilled Laccaria caught my eye with its nearly pornographic shape and color.  By the time I'd finished photographing one old specimen and her more demure younger siblings, I nearly believed that there was a fertile, earth goddess present, repairing human havoc.

Lucy bounded ahead of me, making more noise than one dog possibly should while leading me to richer woodlands.  Soon I stumbled across three ferns growing so close together I could fit them into one camera frame --- now that's diversity.

Up here, the entire cove was blanketed with White Snakeroot in full bloom.  This woodland relative of Boneset and Joe Pye Weed is poisonous, and its poisons can pass from grazing animals to humans through their milk.  "Milk sickness" killed many European settlers to our region, along with their horses, goats and cows.  On my protected hillside, though, its beauty is all that matters.

No walk in the woods is complete without finding something I can't identify off the top of my head.  This lemon-balm-scented flower is Northern Horse-Balm (Collinsonia canadensis), which I've seen before but never in bloom.

I followed a couple of different deer trails until I ended up near the top of my property, where a line oak had attained a diameter of perhaps four feet.  Lucy barked at snakes while I unpacked my library book and two cucumbers snagged from the garden on my way out the door and settled in for a beautiful morning.

Despite my snack, I felt an urgent compulsion to return home at precisely 11:50, so I wandered down the hill past this Hearts-a-Bursting (Euonymus americanus), and back to my lunch.  Even without a watch, my stomach knows its schedule.

If you live in the Miami area --- or are going to be passing through before Halloween --- Nellie Appleby's show at Dimensions Variable is a must-see.  Nellie is a buddy of ours, but even if she wasn't, I'd be intrigued by her art.  She has spent the last year living in Key West and photographing the intersection of nature and humanity, with a strong focus on plants.

Nellie dropped by the farm a couple of weeks ago before heading back south to start sprouting her installations.  Yes, you read that right.  Nellie has found a way to sprout seeds on man-made objects like towels, resulting in intriguing, but fleeting, images.

If you can't make the trip to her opening (September 11, from 7 to 11 pm), you can subscribe to her blog and see bits and pieces of her art as it unfolds.  That's where I got the photos in this post --- they're not the polished, finished pieces you'll see in Miami.  I'm hopeful that if enough of us subscribe to her blog, Nellie will post more photos and I won't have so long to wait with baited breath for another update on her photographic life.

This shy garter snake was perched three feet in the air amid a mass of wingstems.  I often see black rat snakes on a tree limb, but hadn't realized that other snakes in our area like to climb.  It always amazes me that a leg-less snake is able to ascend several feet off the ground.

I wish I'd gotten a better shot, but the fact that I got any photo at all is a tribute to our new Canon camera.  I zoomed all the way in for this introductory image, then stepped closer for a second shot.  With barely a rustle, the snake had disappeared into the weeds.

Mark and I splurged on a Canon Power Shot SX20 IS last week, and ever since I've been a photo-taking spree.  Here are a couple of my favorite shots from the week --- sure signs that fall is on its way.

I've been using a Fujifilm Finepix S1000fd for the last couple of years, and am still enchanted by its vivid colors and intense magnification of macro subjects.  But I've literally worn the front of the camera off with two years of hard use, so I figured it was worthwhile to experiment with the next grade up.  Photos from the Canon appear to be at least as vivid, and the documentation promises that our new camera will focus even closer than our old one.  So far, I'm quite pleased with the upgrade.

The epiphyte flowers Maggie was constantly collecting from the trail all seemed to be cast from a similar mold.  Most of the blooms had long tubes and were either pink, orange, or red --- clear signs of hummingbird pollination.

Scientists estimate that about a sixth of Monteverde's plants are pollinated by these tiny birds, and whole families seem to have placed their reproductive potential into the beaks of hummers.  Ericaceae, Gesneriaceae, Bromeliaceae, and --- on the forest floor --- Heliconiaceae are all hummingbird pollinated.

As you ascend the mountain above Monteverde, hummingbird-pollinated flowers become more and more numerous.  Cooler temperatures at high elevations make it tough for insects to fly, so hummingbirds are the best pollinator around (although bats and hawkmoths are also common pollinators.)  So it's no wonder Monteverde's cloud forest floor is littered with pink and orange tubes, leftover from yesterday's hummingbird feasts.


3-26-01
Today we got our housing contract made --- quite an ordeal, but we did it.  The contract even explains that I have one surname since I'm from the US --- apparently everyone here has two.  The lawyer was very unfair to us, and I had to make him go back and change part of the contract, but after 2.5 hours, it was done.

Anna:

After spending some time in Monteverde's cloud forest, I returned to the lower elevation of the town with new questions on my mind.  For example --- why were thorny trunks prevalent on trees lower down, but not up in the cloud forest?

Although epiphytes can benefit the host tree, too many epiphytes put the host in real danger of splitting or falling under the added weight.  A cloud forest tree has to perform a constant juggling act --- a few epiphytes are a nice addition to its canopy ecosystem, but the tree doesn't want to make its surface too conducive to epiphyte growth.  And the latter is precisely what thorns would do.  Just imagine how easy it would be for falling leaves to be snagged by thorns and rot into dirt, providing the perfect niche for epiphyte seeds to germinate.  Cloud forest trees just can't risk thorny trunks.

At lower elevations, though, ecosystem variables shift in favor of thorns.  The extended dry season makes it difficult for epiphytes to survive, but also means that trees have more to lose if they are munched by hungry predators.  As a result, many trees in the seasonal forest grow thorns, while those in the cloud forest do not.


Maggie:

3-22-01
We set off to the library with our empty bookbags 5 minutes away walking. We picked up an old version of the Fanny Farmer cookbook, told our news about the house, and departed for the supercoop. We had piled several potatoes and some fruit in my hat before realizing that there are baskets. With thorough price comparisons, we took the basics of the kitchen for only 26 bucks.

When we got home we merrily put away the groceries. Then I started supper while Anna assembled a bookshelf in her room. Supper was served: spaghetti with vegetables and our $1 pineapple for desert. Which brings me here to the living room where the sun is just almost disappared from view. Only with time, the warm orange ball will rise again.

Anna:

5-10-01
Clambering around on a fallen tree laden with epiphytes, I realized that tropical rainforests aren't as devoid of small herbs as they seem to be --- the herbs are just all up in the trees.  Epiphytes live in a very different land where competition for light is rather irrelevant and the problems are finding water and nutrients and clinging to the branch for dear life.  Because while some larger epiphytes can survive for up to two years if knocked from their perch, a tiny Peperomia would be quickly lost in the shuffle.

Epiphytes are the most striking feature of the cloud forest.  The phrase literally means "upon plant" and refers to species of all shapes and sizes that perch on the trunks or branches of trees.  Here in temperate U.S.A., epiphytes are limited to crusts of lichen and mosses, but in tropical areas with a nearly constant rainy season or daily heavy fogs, epiphytes can tear down branches with their weight.  A little lower down the mountain, the Pacific slope seasonal forest has a pronounced dry season, so epiphytic plants tend to dry up and are much less diverse around the elevation of the town.  You have to travel to the peak to see the real epiphyte circus.

You might think that trees would do their best to shed epiphytes, but it turns out that epiphytes do their part to keep their hosts healthy.  The pockets of dirt held in place by epiphytes stimulate the tree to grow crown roots out of their trunks and branches, allowing the trees to suck up some of the nitrogen and water captured by the epiphytes from the surrounding fogs.  In return, the crown roots keep the little clumps of soil from sliding off the side of the tree, which provides a better habitat for epiphyte seed germination.

Although the diversity of Monteverde epiphytes is staggering, once you break them down to the family level, there are just a few main contenders.  Orchids and Piperaceae enjoy living on the outer branches of trees where their succulent leaves help these epiphytes put up with water stress.  In the sheltered center of the canopy, bromeliads and members of Ericaceae colonize the larger branches that can sustain these generally heftier plants' weight.  Finally, the upper trunks of trees are often populated with aroids and members of Gesneriaceae, epiphytes whose fruits are dispersed by birds and mammals perched on the first branches.

Of course, no post on epiphytes would be complete without a quick mention of hemiepiphyes.  Strangler figs are the classic example of this category of plants that begin life as epiphytes, then send down roots and finish their career as terrestrial trees.  In the Monteverde area, Clusia was another extremely common hemiepiphyte, its unique leaves resulting in Quaker children giving it the nickname "Mickey Mouse plant."

(Please note that most but not all of the plants included in this post are epiphytes.  I've thrown in a few species that are members of common epiphytic families, but which grow on the ground.)

Maggie:
3-22-01
I am writing by the light of the setting sun through our large windows in our newly rented house. Yesterday, Anna drew a graph of our emotional ups and downs. She probably should have waited for today.







Anna:
I nearly didn't survive this day.  I tried to call Silvia [our new landlady] in the morning, but couldn't get through and didn't want to ask repeatedly to use the hotel phone.  So we took a chance --- packed up and checked out and set off down the road.  Surprisingly, I had the same joyous feeling of being a vagrant that I always feel when moving to a new place.  Even though the Mammoth was packed to the brim with library books, I still had a spring in my step.





Maggie:
Last night the phone line was cut off when Anna was going to ask Sylvia if we could move in today. So after our breakfast, we packed up and began our journey to the Supercoop [grocery store]. The walk was mostly painless despite the heavy bags. When we arrived at the Supercoop, we attempted to call Sylvia, but failing, we walked on to our beautiful yellow home.








Anna:
The house sits on a hill, down which we can look at neighbors, conifers, eucalypts (!), and a row of windswept, native giants.  On the south side of the house lies a woods with trails, which may be quite extensive.  As I write this, I'm stiting on my thermarest in the living room, looking downhill --- west --- at the sun setting behind the trees.  But then I wasn't so peaceful.  I was worried about getting the house, and I jittered around a bit.






Maggie:
We lay in the sunny yard until Sylvia and Tino (the worker who greeted us with a machete on our first arrival) came walking up the road. Another "Anna" came with them, also to look at the house.











Anna:
At 11:50 am, Silvia arrived and gave us the tour and didn't seem to find it too odd that we had all our stuff here and wanted to move right in.  But she put us in a state by going back to wanting us to pay utilities, which is, quite simply, over my budget.









Maggie:
My Anna repeatedly asked if Sylvia would pay the utilities, only to receive avoidant answers or no answer at all. "I have friends who are renting smaller houses for $500."

I can barely see the page in this dim light but the beat of a neighbor's drum is guiding me along the page. Mostly the house is quiet. It is blessed with its very own woods. Also there is a shed where Sylvia's husband used to make instruments such as violins.

Anna:
After Silvia left us, Maggie pounded granola against the wall and I was generally angry.  We didn't unpack, but sat, playing cards, while waiting for her to return with sheets and blankets and kitchen stuff she'd promised us.

When Silvia returned, my game plan was in place.  I asked her a hundred questions, including things like --- what are those cracks in the ceiling?  Will the roof leak?  What's with the piece of wood which blew off the roof?  Then came the ultimatum --- we can't take the house if we have to pay utilities.

The answer wasn't perfect.  For the first month, we won't pay utilities, then Silvia will look at the electricity and water bills and we'll renegotiate.





Maggie:
Anna even made it clear that we would not pay for utilities the first month. Only after we pointed out every flaw in the house. Luckily a piece of roof fell off just before she arrived. Reluctantly, she agreed on our rental offer.

Soon after she left, we exploded with joy. I attempted to cartwheel in the hall. The bare house grew in our minds, acquiring a tremendous beauty.

Anna:

While in Costa Rica, I became obsessed with old plants, specifically Podocarpus.  I spent days hunting through the cloud forest for a Podocarpus tree that my botanist friends promised me was present along a specific trail, but I never found so much as a needle.  To understand why the tree was so intriguing, we'll have to step back in time about 250 million years.

I've written before about plants that date back to Pangaea, when all of the present continents were lumped together into one land mass.  These ancient connections result in genera with widespread distributions, often found throughout tropical parts of the world (pantropical).  But I was just as interested in the next stage in earth's geologic history, when Pangaea split in half.

The northern half of Pangaea was known as Laurasia, a supercontinent that later broke further into North America, Europe and Asia.  Since these three continents remained stuck together for some time after Pangaea splintered, their plants and animals show striking similarities.  That's why when I reached England at the beginning of my year of travel, I was shocked to see nearly familiar oaks and maples around me.

Similarly, all of the continents currently in the southern hemisphere --- South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica --- were part of the southern supercontinent, Gondwana.  I had already explored one Gondwana continent in great depth, but Australia has been separated from the other continents for so long that many of the plants I saw there were endemic and grew nowhere else.  In particular, the ancient Antarctic flora was only barely visible in Australia since the continent had turned hot and dry, unlike the cool, temperate conditions that had once dominanted in the southern tip of Gondwana.  Costa Rica was my chance to fill in the gaps and see some Gondwana species, and Podocarpus was one of the most distinctive examples of the Antarctic flora.  I was also interested in finding Podocarpus since the tree is one of the few native conifers found in Costa Rica.  (A pine plantation can be seen by the side of the road, but pines are an import from the north.)

So I beat the bushes in search of a conifer --- surely a conifer wouldn't be that hard to find?  Finally, as my time in Costa Rica wound to an end, my botanist buddies took pity on me and joined me for a field foray, leading me straight to the Podocarpus...which looked nothing like the conifer I was expecting.  The leaves were long and broad, only barely pine-like and the tree itself had none of the regularity I expect from conifers.  Good thing I had botanists along on the hike!



3-21-01
We're supposed to go tomorrow at 4 to look at the house, but we left the reserve at noon and sought it out.  It's big and bare, but it's a house and is on the most lovely side road.  I decided that I'm going to call and see if we can move in tomorrow.  I've already started packing up our room, so we'd better get it.  I'm just terrified someone else will snap it up!


Maggie:

3-21-01
Today on the way home from the Preserve, we snooped around what we imagine is our house. It is a squarish yellow house on top of a hill with a woods but not too exciting architecture. We saw the kitchen and living room by peeking, but the curtains blocked us from the bedrooms. We are very eager and our belongings are all spread over the floor for packing.

Anna:

Does this drawing look like an artist's flight of fancy?  It's not.  Costa Rica was chock full of treelets.

A treelet is technically any woody plant that's too tall to be a shrub but too short to be a tree.  Non-technically, the term is often used to refer to woody plants that grow like palm trees with one main trunk supporting an unbranched canopy.  To my eye, treelets look odd, but they are common in many rainforests.

Other unique shrubs abounded at the elevation of the cloud forest.  Tree ferns are pretty much identical to treelets, except that the species are ferns instead of flowering plants.  I fell in love with the octopus-like unfurling fronds at the top of tree ferns in Australia, and drew them with great abandon there.  In Costa Rica, I'd gotten a bit used to tree ferns and only made one quick sketch.  (The photo at the bottom of the page is also a tree fern.)

Finally, no discussion of unique Monteverde shrubs would be complete without mentioning bamboo.  Unlike treelets, bamboo is familiar to most of us, so the plants don't strike us as strange.  But bamboo is actually a grass stretched up into the subcanopy.  How much stranger can you get?



After three weeks of living in a bed and breakfast, we decided to move into a house for the remainder of our stay.  Flipping through my journals, my reasoning is unclear --- I call our new living situation "a big, expensive house", so clearly we weren't saving much money.  But the house was in Monteverde proper rather than in Cerro Plano, so it shortened our daily commute to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve.  I suspect that after packing my bags daily or weekly for ten months, I was also just itching to settle down somewhere.  As you'll read in later posts, though, moving wasn't quite as simple as making the decision and changing addresses.

Maggie:

3-20-01
Of course some of the initial glamor of Monteverde has worn old. No longer do we walk along the paths beside the road. We walk down the roads like the locals. But no matter what, having a kitchen sounds good. I am looking forward to doing my own shopping and dishes.

The house is a bit too much for us. Our plan is to eat simply and live in a huge, overly huge house. It has a living room, a kitchen, a fireplace, three bedrooms, two bathrooms. Much more than our childhood house, or any necessities of two healthy women.

My first impression of the cloud forest was pure awe, but after that the scientist took over.  Here's a quick rundown on the most distinctive trees of Monteverde's cloud forest.

Monkey Comb or Peine de Mico (Sloanea ampla) dropped spiny fruit cases all over the cloud forest floor.  The tree probably gets its common name from the tendency of the White-faced Capuchin to rub the fruits against its fur, an action that looks to the untrained eye like the monkey is combing its hair.  Scientists suspect that monkeys have little use for a hairbrush, though, and instead hypothesize that Monkey Comb is being used to deter ticks, or perhaps is being put to medicinal use as an antibacterial, anti-fungal, or anti-inflammatory agent.  Other scientists hypothesize that monkeys rub plants on their fur as a form of scent marking.  Untangling the purpose behind these clever monkeys' actions could turn up an ethnobotanical use for Monkey Comb.

Sapote or Zapote (Pouteria fossicola) is one of several plants given this same common name in Central and South America.  The plants all have one thing in common --- soft edible fruit (already eaten in the drawing above, leaving behind a large, hard seed.)  This Sapote's better known relative Chicle (also sometimes called Sapote) is the basis of chewing gum.

Angel's Hair (Cojoba costaricensis) is an odd tree to be dominant at cloud forest elevation since most of the high elevation trees had leathery, simple leaves.  On the other hand, legumes were a common occurrence further down in the dry forest --- stay tuned for more on Costa Rica legumes in a later post.

With a name like Raspa Lengua (Hasseltia floribunda) (literally "scrape tongue"), I suspect this tree might be an edible.  The only relevant pages on the English-speaking internet, though, note that Raspa Lengua is eaten by White-faced Capuchins.

The rest of the trees I drew in the cloud forest weren't considered diagnostic features, but I can't resist including a few more that caught my eye.  The bright red fruit caps of Blakea gracilis were one of my favorite finds on the forest floor, but the flowers are of more interest ecologically.  Blakea gracilis is probably pollinated by bees, but a related species in the Monteverde forest is rodent pollinated.  Can you imagine a mouse running along tree limbs to sip nectar from these little flowers?

Deer Antlers or Cacho de venado (Oreopanax xalapensis) commonly dropped huge compound leaves onto the path.  Sometimes only the long leaf stalks were left behind, and it took me several minutes to match these long brown "sticks" up to their parent tree.

And, finally, a slew of collected fruits --- I just can't resist!



Most of our cloud forest explorations took place in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, a 26,000 acre tract of protected land at the top of the mountain.  Although we could take a taxi to the top for 400 colones (about $1.50 at the time), I was pinching pennies and opted to instead take the bus up the hill and then walk the 5 to 6 miles home in the afternoon.  As Maggie wrote, "Going to the Preserve means getting up at 5:45 AM to catch the yellow school bus.  So in need of early sleep, I will end my writing somewhat incomplete."

Anna:

Although my last many posts have been about the Pacific slope seasonal forest around Monteverde, most people don't go to Monteverde to see this area.  Instead, the town is merely a staging ground for the cloud forest that sits atop the mountain.

Cloud forests are found on tropical mountains, where the peaks drift up into the clouds.  The copious moisture from constant fogginess eases the dry season, allowing huge quantities of mosses and other epiphytes to colonize the trees.  Due to the uniqueness of the cloud forest ecosystem, many endemic species tend to be found in such areas, making these spots a mecca for ecotourists.

From a less scientific standpoint, cloud forests are simply beautiful.  Imagine a forest constantly cloaked in fog, the trees turning into silhouettes, and you'll understand why thousands of people flock to Monteverde every year.

The images in this post are from a subset of the Monteverde cloud forest --- the elfin forest.  Although the mountain above 4,900 feet at Monteverde is all considered cloud forest, only the windy peaks are home to elfin forest.  There, trees are dwarfed and gnarled by the weather, and the forest captures even more moisture from the clouds than do the trees in the main section of the cloud forest, so epiphytes are particularly numerous.  The combination makes for vivid images and (from a botanical standpoint) easy access to the fascinating epiphytes that are often invisible above your head.

Our first trip to the cloud forest took us straight up into the elfin forest at Cerros Amigos (aka, the TV towers) --- elevation 6,043 feet.  The road up to the towers was very steep and I gasped my way to the top.


 Maggie:

3-7-01
I write quite literally from the clouds. It is chilly, so I am sitting inside the black bag for Anna’s bookbag. It was a long long walk from the hotel to the cloud forest, mostly uphill. I jogged a few short stretches. Some tourists saw me and were impressed.

As part of my ongoing quest to learn enough Spanish to get around the Yucatan, I've put together a second vocabulary list, this one focusing on plants.  (I've already posted an animal vocabulary list, with hints on how to expedite vocabulary memorization, if you're new to the blog.)

el árbol n. tree
el arbusto n. bush, shrub
el bosque n. wood(s), forest
el cactus n. cactus
crecer v. to grow, to increase
el elecho n. fern
la espina n. thorn
fértil adj. fertile
la flor n. flower
florecer v. to flower, to bloom, to blossom
la fruta n. fruit
la hierba n. grass; herb
la hoja n. leaf
la jungla n. jungle
la palmera n. palm
el pantano n. marsh, swamp, bog
el pétalo n. petal
la planta n. plant
polinisada por phrase pollinated by
el prado n. meadow, field; pasture
pudrirse v. to rot, to decay
la raíz n. root
la rama n. branch
el roble n. oak
la selva n. rainforest
la semilla n. seed
el tallo n. stem
el tronco n. (tree) trunk
la vegetación n. vegetation

I've been writing for weeks now about the Pacific slope seasonal forest around Monteverde, but I suspect you still can't imagine the whole picture.  What does a slightly dry rainforest look like on the side of a Costa Rican mountain?  I hope that the image above will put the Piper bushes and aroids in perspective.

As you can see, the activity in a rainforest is mostly high in the air, so I often contented myself with drawing flowers and fruits that had fallen to the forest floor.  The rest of the images in this post are Pacific slope seasonal forest detritus, mostly from trees that didn't quite make the cut to be included in my post about trees of Monteverde's Pacific slope seasonal forest.  Enjoy!

The Pica-pica (Mucuna urens) was one of the first plants I drew in Monteverde, and it remained one of my favorites.  With so much of the Pacific slope seasonal forest invisible above my head, I could appreciate a vine that dropped its flowers and fruits down on long stems for easy drawing.  Of course, Pica-pica didn't have botanists in mind when it developed its dangling flowers.  Instead, the adaptation is a vine version of cauliflory, ensuring that flowers are easily accessible to pollinating bats and hummingbirds.

Although Pica-pica and Ojo de Buey were common names for Mucuna urens in Monteverde, the plant is better known as Sea Bean.  The air-filled pods float downstream to the ocean, where they may drift for months before washing up on a foreign shore and germinating.  No wonder Pica-pica can be found throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Since I'm about to move on to the cloud forest next week, I wanted to toss in some extra images of three other common Pacific slope seasonal forest vines.  Take a close look at the Passiflora biflora leaves opposite and you'll see tiny dots that mimick butterfly eggs --- the plant's way of saying "This leaf is already occupied.  Move along and feed your kids on somebody else!"




3-27-01
Today the horrible finally happened --- my watch died.  It actually upset me more than it should have.  After all, it's only a watch.  But I haven't gone a day without it for 5 (6?) years and it's really a part of me.  I depend on it a lot and will probably get a cheap watch with date and time to eke me through these last few months.

Later, I did in fact come up with a cheap watch, but it barely kept time.  My relentless records of time in my journal and sketchbooks became vaguer, and one day I accidentally showed up at a lecture nearly an hour early.  Perhaps I had finally discovered the Central American concept of time?

The last family I'll bore you with this week is the Arum Family (Araceae).  In the southern Appalachians, the only really common aroid is Jack-in-the-Pulpit, but in Costa Rica the family was so profuse that even my non-botanically-inclined sister picked up the term "aroid".

Looking at several members of a plant family at once feels a bit like hearing a symphony, full of themes and variations.  Take a look at these images of Monteverde aroids.  Notice the similarities in the fruiting spadices despite the differences in size?

While in Costa Rica, I repeatedly wrote in my sketchbook, "This plant looks like a house plant", and among the aroids my guess was correct.  Anthurium, Philodendron, and Dieffenbachia are all common house plants, not only because of their lovely foliage, but also because they can grow well in the shady interior of houses.  I'll bet you didn't realize you were mimicking the dim interior of a rainforest in your home.

4-23-01
Last night we actually got up the momentum to go to the Bonfire/Bread twist roast/Sing/Slideshow.  And I had a lovely time!

A bread twist roast consists of biscuit dough (ours had too much butter and I'm told it's best to knead it a bit) put thinly over the end of a stick to make a cup and roasted over the fire.  Then the bread is taken off the stick and filled with desserts or with beans, etc.  Luscious!

Although no single tree species dominates a tropical forest, the Avocado Family (Lauraceae) contains many prominant forest trees in the Monteverde area.  With 66 species in the area, Lauraceae is also the most diverse family of trees at the elevation of the town.

I didn't notice lauraceous fruits until near the end of my stay in Monteverde because every species in the family fruits simultaneously at the beginning of the rainy season.  Once they started falling, though, I loved picking up lauraceous fruits as I walked along the road and trails.  Each one was like a tiny avocado --- one large seed in the center surrounded by firm, green flesh.

The fruits are too large to be gulped down by small, generalist birds and have instead evolved to be eaten by bigger specialists, like quetzals, bellbirds, guans, and toucans.  The elongated shape of lauraceous fruits helps them slide down the larger gullets of their favored dispersal agents, who are the lucky recipients of flesh rich in proteins and lipids.

As a budding botany geek, I was intrigued to learn that Lauraceae and Piperaceae are both members of the plant subclass Magnoliidae, an ancient line of plants that is considered to be neither monocots nor true dicots.  Scientists think that Magnoliids may have been among the earliest flowering plants to evolve, which would explain their pantropical distribution.

Geekery aside, you're probably more familiar with the Avocado Family than you think.  In addition to providing us with the oily fruits that give the family its name, Lauraceae includes Cinnamon, Spicebush, and Sassafras.  Pluck a Sassafras fruit this fall and tear it apart to see the exact same kind of fruits I drew with such glee in Costa Rica.


6/27/01
While Maggie glowed in the embrace of the expatriate American Quakers, I withdrew from the machismo of the Ticos (native Costa Ricans.)  Central American culture separates women quite neatly into the Virgin or the Whore, and by wandering around without a man (and leaving my bra at home), I was placed in the latter category.  As I drew plants up in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, Tico workers would walk by whistling and leering.  In retrospect, the problem was largely my own fault --- I was young and figured the world would bend around me, but a traveler is obligated to bend around the world.

Later, I discovered that Monteverde culture had become much more supportive of strong women in the last 35 years.  In the 1970s, 80% of the women in Monteverde were illiterate, and nearly none worked outside the home.  Then, in 1982, eight women artists came together to produce CASEM --- Cooperativa de Artesanas de Santa Elena y Monteverde.  The gallery coop gives women a space to show their arts and crafts, in the process channeling tourism dollars into the womens' families and also building the womens' self esteem.  If you ever make the trek to Monteverde, be sure to stop in and see the handicrafts of local Ticas.

Anna:

During my year abroad, I saw so many unfamiliar plants that I had to learn a bit of botany in self defense.  Plant families helped me put the flora of a region in perspective, and I came to think of all plants in the same family as cousins.  Sure, they each had their unique traits, but they often shared a certain resemblance and sometimes even acted similarly within different ecosystems or on different continents.

Piperaceae --- the pepper family --- caught my fancy with the plants' finger-like flower stalks and their pantropical range.  In fact, despite containing several genera, just about every member of Piperaceae that you'll meet is a Piper or a Peperomia.  I saw dozens of both in the Australian rainforest and again in Costa Rica where Piper species were the most common shrubs in the Pacific slope seasonal forest.

The drawing to the right is a Piper shrub with flowers just beginning to form, while the image below shows an unknown Piper shrub with those flowers expanded to full size.




And here are some Monteverde area Peperomias:














Since Piper species were the most common shrubs in the Monteverde area, I thought I'd throw in a few other drawings I made of dry forest shrubs.  Keep in mind that these shrubs aren't necessarily the most common species found in the tropical dry forest, but they are the ones that caught my eye.  I hope putting the images on the web will help someone else with their identification woes.

Notice how the Begonia cooperi flowers are quite similar to those on the Begonia involcrata even though the former is a shrub and the latter is an herb.  Flower shape often holds true within a family even when everything else changes.

Maggie:

3-7-01
We went to an Italian Restaurant for supper yesterday and lit the candle on the table with Anna's lighter. The waiter told us that his sister is from Seatle. "It is cold there, and rains all the time, and snows in the mountains. I don't know. I like it here in Costa Rica." I have to agree.

While ants are numerous sidekicks in just about every habitat I've explored, these insects are main characters in Monteverde ecology.  Stay tuned for a post about the most obvious Costa Rican ants --- leaf-cutter ants --- in the near future.  For now, I want to share the story of the most fascinating case of symbiosis I've ever seen.

The common Cecropia found in open areas all around Monteverde is home to a three way mutualism that benefits the tree, the ants, and the mealybugs farmed by the ants.  At first, the tree does most of the work, providing hollows within its trunk for an ant colony to move into, then feeding the ants with nutrient-rich Mullerian bodies attached to the petioles of its leaves.

The Azteca ants never leave the Cecropia tree once they move in, so they farm mealybugs to round out their diet.  The mealybugs feed on the phloem of the Cecropia and the ants lap up the honeydew from the mealybugs, so in a way the tree is still providing for the ants, albeit secondhand.

But once an ant colony becomes established, the tables turn and the partnership becomes more equal.  With their food and housing provided, Azteca ants have plenty of time on their hands to protect their host tree.  The ants quickly chew through vines that try to climb up the Cecropia's trunk, and they destroy epiphytes sprouting on the tree's branches.  Azteca ants also attack and drive away herbivores nibbling on the tree's leaves, especially the devastating leaf-cutter ants I'll write about soon.  Although less obvious to the lay observer, Cecropia's pet ants even feed the tree --- the frass they leave behind in the center of the trunk is sucked up by the Cecropia and provides 93% of the tree's nitrogen intake.

In fact, when scientists add up the pluses and minuses of the interaction, the disadvantages are few and all three species come out winners.  In nature, real symbiosis is rare, but the Cecropia-Azteca-mealybug story seems to be a tale of true partnership.

Although we felt lucky to be able to take part in a ready-made community during our stay in Monteverde, I sometimes felt like I wasn't holding up my side of the bargain.  If I had been an Azteca ant, the Monteverde Cecropia probably would have kicked me out as not worth its while.

5-5-01
Today was a pretty bad day.  Well it's only 3:30, but if the day is not quite over, it ought to be.

First came Meeting.  Tyse (our neighbor's dog) has broken loose, with chain trailing, and followed us there, despite me yelling at him.  He whined and barked during Meeting so that a lady went out and sat with him the whole time, which made me feel horrible.  Then, during announcements, he started up again, and I took him home.

It was also potluck day, and I had made a pudding.  The dessert gelled last night, but by the time I got it to Meeting, the dish looked horrible, and of course no one ate it.

The day left me feeling like I have nothing to contribute to the community --- all I do is cause problems.

Anna:

I bumped into my first strangler fig while in the Australian rainforest, and I was blown away by the intricate network of roots that made up the tree's trunk.  I learned that a strangler fig begins its life when a bird eats a fig fruit and deposits the seeds high in a canopy tree of another species.  The baby fig first sends up leaves of its own, then drops roots down along the trunk of the host tree until they reach the forest soil.

Then begins the struggle.  Usually, a young tree would have to wait patiently in the shadow of a canopy tree until the mammoth fell to give the youngster a little light and space to grow.  But the strangler fig has cheated and begun at the top, so it is able to overshadow the canopy of the host tree and girdle the host's roots within about a century.  By that point, the strangler is strong enough to stand on its own, so the rotting host tree simply provides a tasty meal of stump dirt for the strangler's roots.  Walking through a tropical forest, you will often come across hollow strangler figs like the tree Maggie was playing inside in a previous post.

There are several species of strangler figs found in the world's tropics and subtropics, and Monteverde has different dominant fig species in each habitat type.  The Florida Strangler Fig (Ficus tuerckheimii) is the common species around the elevation of Monteverde itself, and is the one I drew most often.

While Costa Rica's strangler figs bear their fruits on twigs like most trees do, strangler figs will always be linked to cauliflory and ramiflory in my mind.  Take a look at how the Australian strangler figs attach their fruits directly to the side of the tree trunk:

In case you can't read my miniscule writing, here is a quick description of this odd growth habit:

Later, I came across a few alternative explanations of ramiflory and cauliflory.  Since the fruits --- like this cauliflorous Zygia I found in Costa Rica --- are always large, some scientists suspect the adaptation came about to prevent twigs from breaking under the fruits' weight.  Others posit that cauliflory may have evolved to allow terrestrial animals access to the fruits for surer dispersal.  Whatever the cause, ramiflory and cauliflory always make me smile at the odd fruits sprouting out of the trunks of trees.


Maggie:

3-12-01
I love this particular Quaker church and community. The singing is powerfully spiritual, the silence is useful for contemplation. The messages and stories that are told after silence are amazing. The one that is stuck with me presently is about how it is more enjoyable to give than to receive. This wasn't exactly speech with the intent of motivating us to give. It was lightly the fact that often it is kind of hard for the receivers. The vision that went with this message was of givers and receivers with joined hands, one up, one down, all in an active chain.

Anna:

Disturbance is one of the key factors determining which plants grow where -- specifically, what kind of disturbance and how often the disturbance occurs.  From my normal stomping grounds in the southern Appalachian mountains, I know that oak and pine forests here depend on fire to kill encroaching cove hardwood species.  But fire is nearly absent in the tropics, so what keeps the forest shifting through various ages and states?

You may remember that the annual rainfall in the Monteverde area ranges from 7.5 to 23 feet per year, and it is actually the excessive water that adds dynamism to the Costa Rican forest.  Heavy rains result in mudslides, which in turn create ravines (known as quebradas in Spanish.)  In the dry forest around Monteverde, you can see streams running between sheer rock cliffs twenty (or more) feet tall.  The flower above (Begonia involucrata) is one of the many herbs that are often found colonizing disturbed ground around quebradas.

Quebradas are also a great place to look for epiphytes since many of these plants are able to make the leap from growing on trees to growing on rocks.  My favorite quebrada feature, though, was this strangler fig growing along the Hidden Valley Nature Trail.  The words on the sketch are probably too small for you to read, but are worth repeating here:

Maggie:

3-3-01
The creek and the plants that we saw were beautiful. I did a lot of discovering while Anna did her first sketch of the creekbed. I walked across a rickety, small bridge, then read that it was closed for repairs!

I was drawn back into my Costa Rican journals by a curiosity about which, if any, plants could be seen in both Costa Rica and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  It turns out that most of the Yucatan Peninsula is covered with tropical dry forest, a bit like Monteverde's Pacific slope seasonal forest (but even further on the dry side.)

Plants on the Yucatan Peninsula are often water-stressed for two reasons.  First of all, in the driest part of the Yucatan (the northwest section, where Uxmal is located), the dry season usually lasts for seven months, from October to May.  Meanwhile, the caves underlying the entire Peninsula allow rainwater to quickly filter down beyond the reach of plant roots.

The combination of factors means that many trees on the Yucatan peninsula drop their leaves every year as a water conservation measure during the long dry season.  From a botanical standpoint, though, the Yucatan's dry season is very different from our winter --- although the leaves are gone, the trees often take advantage of the "winter" months to flower and fruit.

The tropical dry forest is also nothing like the rainforest you may picture when you think of the tropics.  Delete the lianas, epiphytes, and towering trees from your mental image and replace them with short trees, parasitic plants and a well developed understory.  Many trees in the tropical dry forest are spiney, and cacti are common --- in fact, the Yucatan has 14 endemic cactus species (meaning that these species can be found nowhere else in the world.)

From a plant's point of view, the Yucatan peninsula is one big island.  Of course, it is surrounded on three sides by water, but the tropical wet forest on the inland side forms just as effective a barrier to plant movement, preventing dry-loving species from gaining a foothold there.  Scientists estimate that up to 10% of the plants found on the Yucatan are endemic, making the area a botanist's paradise.

If, like me, you're just trying to get a handle on what a typical Yucatan forest looks like, you should learn the top species.  The most common trees include Wild Tamarind (Lysiloma bahamensis --- perhaps this is the tree pictured above with the fascinating hairy pods?), Jamaican Dogwood (Piscidia piscipula), Alvaradoa amorphoides, Gumbo Limbo (Bursera simaruba), Cedrela mexicana, Chlorophora tinctoria, Cordia gerascanthus and Lonchocarpus rugosus.  If it helps you make sense of the jumble of scientific names, that list includes three legumes.

Anna:

Scientists estimate that Costa Rica is home to about 9,000 vascular plant species, and the Monteverde area alone houses over a third of these species.  I'm used to trees being the easy way to edge into the study of plants, but even a focus on Monteverde trees is daunting.  With 755 species to choose from, I spent my first few weeks in Monteverde wandering in a haze of beautiful, intriguing, but endlessly unidentified plants.

Weeks later, I tracked down the local plant experts (William Haber and his wife Willow Zuchowski) who patiently worked their way through my sketchbooks and identified my findings.  That night, I wrote in my journal:

Their hard work, combined with a plant list from Nalini Nadkarni and Nathaniel T. Wheelwright's Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest, came together to produce this quick overview of some of the most indicative trees of the Pacific slope seasonal forest in Monteverde.

Cecropia or Trumpet Tree (Cecropia obtusifolia) (pictured at the top of the page) is one of the easiest Monteverde trees to pick out of the forest.  Its palm-tree-like trunk is topped by distinctive, palmately-lobed leaves.  Cecropia is widespread throughout Mexico, Central America, and northern South America where it quickly colonizes disturbed areas.  I'll post more about the Cecropia later because it comes with an ecological story too good to miss.

Florida Strangler Fig (Ficus tuerckheimii) (also known as F. aurea) can be found from Florida south to Panama.  Although the species is not the only strangler fig in the Monteverde area, strangler figs in general are easy for even the most inexperienced botanists to recognize since their trunks are made up of a woven network of roots.  Their colorful, pointed buds --- like the one shown above --- are also quite distinctive.  Once again, stay tuned for the tale of how the strangler fig got its name.

Targua or Popcorn tree (Croton mexicanus) is a member of a pantropical genus, but the species itself is one of those trees that I can't find any information about, even in the current digital age.  My notes from Costa Rica, however, make it clear that Popcorn Tree was widespread in the Pacific slope seasonal forest.  I always knew the Popcorn Tree was around when I saw leaves the color of orange caution tape littering the forest floor.

Inga (Inga sp.) --- My plant experts couldn't identify this Inga leaf beyond the genus level, but I don't blame them since there are literally hundreds of Inga species scattered through the tropics.  Like many other members of the bean family (Fabaceae), Inga trees can fix nitrogen out of the air using a symbiotic relationship with soil bacteria.  As a result, the trees have been widely used in tropical agriculture to restore fertility to soil.  This particular species has extrafloral nectaries set between each pair of leaflets.  Ants are attracted to the sweet liquid and, in exchange, they chase away any animals who might want to nibble on the leaves.

Randia matudae --- You would think that a plant with such huge fruits would at least have a common name, but the English-speaking world doesn't seem to know one.  Nevertheless, this species is one of the diagnostic features of Monteverde's Pacific slope seasonal forest.


Symplocos limoncillo is another diagnostic tree of the Pacific slope seasonal forest.  This flower definitely comes from the right genus (and location) to be S. limoncillo, but with 250 Symplocos species spread across the world's tropical areas, the exact identity of this bit of Monteverde detritus is hard to pin down.

Dendropanax arboreus is found throughout Mexico, Central America, and South America, and there are so many common names listed in Spanish publications that I don't know which one to pick.  I was intrigued to discover that the trees have two different leaf shapes, a bit like our Sassafras.  However, the leaves of Dendropanax arboreus are uniformly lobed in the shade and uniformly simple in the sun --- doesn't that make you itch to dig into the whys and hows?









Maggie:

3-12-01
The Quakers were quite nice to me when I volunteered to help in the library. But I did hear them talking about the hippy tourists that flock here that annoy them.

Volunteering in a library is by no means work. I benefit from touching books more than the books from me, I am sure. Also I benefit greatly from hearing the voices of the other librarans at work. They are fun, friendly, (naturally and religiously) wise, and very interesting. Often I imagine that they are talking on and off about me.

My biggest regret from our Uxmal adventure last year is that I didn't manage to snap a photo of the thatched roofs that abounded along the highway between Progresso and the ruins.  Luckily, images of Mayan thatched roofs are common on the internet since thatching is such an integral feature of Yucatan life.

I'm a big fan of thatching in general since the method is lighter on the earth than any other roofing option (although more work, which is why you don't see it much in the United States.)  Using plants for roofing is an all around good idea --- you can grow your roof rather than mining metal or manufacturing shingles, and when the thatch deteriorates, you can just toss it on the compost pile to feed your garden.  Victoria Schlesinger reports in Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya that palm thatched roofs in the Yucatan last six to 20 years.  (For the sake of comparison, a shingle roof is only expected to last 20 years.)

Various palms are used for thatching in the Yucatan, including Cohune Palm (Orbignya cohune), Botán (Sabal morrisiana), Silver Palm (Thrinax radiata), and Huano Palm (Sabal yapa).  When identifying palms, the first thing to look for is whether the leaflets are pinnately compound (like the frond of many common ferns) or palmately compound (like a Buckeye leaf.)  If the latter, chances are your palm is in the Sabal genus, like this one I saw at Uxmal.  Jim Conrad reports that the Huano Palm is perfect for thatching --- check out his fascinating photo explanation to see why.

Anna:

Can you imagine spending eight hours drawing plants within a day's walking distance of your home?  Then repeating the endeavor every day for four months?  That's what we did in the spring of 2001, and I seldom felt a hint of boredom.

I had chosen Monteverde carefully...and not just for the expatriate American Quaker community that meant I could get by with limited Spanish.  Costa Rica is basically a chain of mountains, wet on the Caribbean side, dry on the Pacific side, and topped by cloud forests on the highest ridges.  Since Monteverde sits near the peak of the Cordillera de Tilaran,  we could easily walk to four completely different habitats and explore all of the niches in between.  I quickly discovered that rainfall was the most important factor in determining which plants and animals we would find on our journeys.

The Atlantic slope of the Cordillera de Tilaran is nearly aseasonal in its rainfall pattern, with storms from the Caribbean dropping water here year round.  The average annual rainfall in this area is staggering, reaching 23 feet in certain areas, and the wetness leads to lush plant growth.  The result is called the Atlantic slope rain forest and is the only true rain forest we experienced during our stay.  We would visit this area only once, so you'll have to wait for this adventure.

At the top of the mountain (above about 4900 feet in elevation) lies the cloud forest.  Although the cloud forest has less rainfall than on the Atlantic slope (a mere 10 feet on average per year), frequent mists from low-lying clouds keep the cloud forest in a constant state of damp.  You'll notice that several pages of my sketchbook (like the one at the top of the page) are wrinkled or smudged from the damp conditions, even during the "dry season."  We often made a trek up to the cloud forest to explore the epiphytes and other unique features of this diverse forest.

But the easiest habitat to reach was right outside our door --- the Pacific slope seasonal forest.  The town of Monteverde lies in the mountain's rain shadow and has a notable dry season from November to May.  Even though the total annual rainfall in the Pacific slope seasonal forest (around 7.5 feet) is nothing to sneeze at, six months without rain does away with some of the jungle-like features seen in cloud forests and Atlantic slope rain forests.  In fact, as you descend the west side of the Cordillera de Tilaran, conditions become drier and drier until you reach patches of forest that lose their leaves for the dry season.  We took several walks down the side of the mountain to explore this much drier forest, which I consider a fourth habitat type.


Maggie:

3-3-01
After the thrill of my life, I am lounging back in the hotel before supper.  The thrill occurred while Anna was drawing and I decided to explore the paths.... 

Eventually our accumulated dogs and I came to the road which we followed briefly before coming to another side path.  It looked like the place to be.  So I followed it to a few buildings which I found to be the library, Friends meeting house/(church), and Friends’ school.

I was ecstatic as I explored the library.  It was empty, even of librarians.  In fact, it runs on the honors system.  I rushed back to tell Anna and to bring her to my magnificent find.  I am excited to attend the Friends meeting tomorrow since I imagine we will meet many local Quakers.

During our tour of Uxmal, our guide pointed over at a tree with green and orange patches of peeling bark.  "That's the Tourist Tree," he said, going on to explain that the Gumbo Limbo (Bursera simaruba) is often nicknamed the Tourist Tree due to the resemblance of the bark to the sunburnt skin of unfortunate tourists.

The Gumbo Limbo tree grows wild from California and Florida, through Central and South America, and across the Caribbean islands.  But the species is so useful that it is also extensively planted.  Farmers often cut three foot long limbs, trim each end, and poke them into the ground to create fence posts.  The severed limbs will quickly root and grow, merely needing to be trimmed back each year so that the branches don't overshadow the field.  The trees are also used as windbreaks, for firewood and light lumber, and the resin is collected to use as glue, varnish, incense, and perfume.  Finally, the bark has been used medicinally to sooth itches, sores, and --- ironically enough --- sunburn.

What really caught my eye, though, was the importance of Gumbo Limbo in the life of the Stingless Bees (Melipona beecheii), which have been raised in domestication by the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula for thousands of years.  Traditionally, a hive of Stingless Bees would be collected from the wild by cutting off the entire hollow tree limb housing the bees, carrying the log home, sealing the ends, opening a small hole for the bees to fly in and out of, and hanging the hive on the side of a building.  The sealed ends of the log could be opened up when necessary to allow the beekeeper to remove honey and wax, or to split the hive to increase the number of colonies.  The Stingless Bees were considered to be sacred, with images of bees found on various Mayan artifacts, and some scientists believe that the honey from the Stingless Bees was second in importance only to maize in the culture of the Maya.

Although honey from the Stingless Bees is considered tastier than honey from the European Honeybee, the small bees produce much less than their larger counterparts.  So  it should come as no surprise that the European Honeybee became the primary bee species raised in the Yucatan in the twentieth century.  Currently, populations of Stingless Bees are declining rapidly, partly because of lack of interest and knowledge, but also partly due to environmental degradation.  While the European Honeybee is quite content pollinating clover and field crops, the Mayan Stingless Bee requires mature, flowering trees.  In fact, one of their favorite foods is the nectar and pollen from the Gumbo Limbo tree.

I splurged and bought a field guide (more on that later) for the Yucatan, and I've been enjoying looking back at least year's photos to finally get an idea what I saw at Uxmal.  I'm pretty sure this tree is Kapok (Ceiba pentandra), which is quite common in southern Mexico but can also be found throughout Central American, the Caribbean, the northern part of South America, and even in tropical west Africa.  (Kapok trees are also cultivated in plantations in Asia.)

Kapok is quite distinctive, with palmately compound leaves, a thorny trunk (when young), and buttresses at the base of the tree.  Until recently, the cottony fibers in the seed pods were widely used to stuff mattresses and other objects, especially life preservers, and were also used as insulation.  In addition, the leaves are sometimes used when preparing Ayahuasca (a hallucinogenic drink that seems to be popular at the moment in various circles.)

Kapok is often called by its scientific name Ceiba (pronounced "say-ba") in Mexico, which is actually a Mayan word referring to the tree of life.  Like the cedar tree in the center of Sunwatch Village, the Ceiba was sacred to Mayans, who believed it connected the three worlds.  Ceibas were planted in the middle of Mayan plazas and you can even see Ceiba thorns decorating Mayan ceramics, like the one shown below.  Isn't it strange how my obsessions with North American Native Americans and Mayans interlink?

The Kapok is a typical part of the tropical decidous forest in Mexico, although it can be found in other habitats.  The plant is well-adapted to the harsh conditions on the northern side of the Yucatan peninsula, since the buttress roots help the tree survive hurricane winds and since the tree can store water in its trunk for use during dry spells.  During the dry season (November through April in Mexico), Kapoks and their neighbors lose their leaves --- thus the term "tropical deciduous forest" for their habitat.

Do you want to see a wildflower display so exuberant that it made my computer programmer brother's jaw drop?  Then stop by Sugar Hill's Cliff Trail.  I've included a few photos of the highlights of our Sunday hike, but you have to visit for yourself to see the dozens of different species ranging in color from white to pink to red to blue to purple.

Red Columbine is beginning to bloom on the rocks near the top of the trail.

I'm ashamed to say that I always think that Squirrel Corn is Dutchman's Breeches until I look it up in a book.  Both are in the same genus and look quite similar, but the blooms on Dutchman's Breeches have much longer spurs (like pant legs) compared to the shorter lobes found on Squirrel Corn (and shown above.)  Maybe writing this down will help me remember?

Have you ever seen this many trilliums?  This photo captures a small section of the huge patch coating the north side of Sugar Hill.

Virginia Bluebells near the Frenchman's settlement are plants out of place.  If you want to take a longer hike, you can see them in their natural habitat on the west half of the River Trail.

Don't forget to take in the view when you reach the top of Sugar Hill.  With the leaves off the trees, it's easy to pick out St. Paul, trace the path of the Clinch River, and enjoy the pastoral scenes of nearby farmland.  Plus, planted pears spice up the view with their white blooms.

On the way back along the river trail, we discovered that the flowers of sassafras are perhaps even tastier than the leaves.

I hope you get a chance to put on your hiking boots and visit your favorite wildflower spot before the blooms fade.

The first native flower I see blooming in the spring is often an American Hazel.  This shrub blends into the background in the summer, but in March the catkins stand out in the brown woods.  First they look like this...

...then the catkins lengthen and soften until they are dangling in the breeze.  These are the male flowers, chock full of pollen to be carried on the wind to a nearby plant.

If you look carefully at the hazel twig, you'll find miniscule (but brilliant) female flowers above the male catkins.  Since gravity tends to drag pollen down as it wafts away on the breeze, female flowers are unlikely to be pollinated by the male flowers beneath them --- a good thing since the whole purpose of pollination is to mix up the offspring's genetics by combining two different bushes' genes.

Many of the other wind pollinated trees in our woods bloom in March as well.  You can probably imagine how much more likely their pollen is to reach another flower if the plants bloom before the leaves come out on the trees.  Red Maples and Slippery Elms are some of my favorite early tree flowers --- although they're tiny, if you look closely you'll be enthralled by their beauty and intricacy.

(Even though I'm talking about wind pollinated trees and shrubs, the first showy early spring ephemerals are out too!  Hit the woods and see for yourselves.)

Nearest towns: Lebanon, Cleveland

The Pinnacle is worth visiting just for the scenic swinging bridge, the raging waterfall, and the craggy rock feature after which the area was named.  But you will also want to spend some time hunting down the preserve's rare and unusual species.  Steep limestone cliffs provide habitat for Canby's Mountain-­Lover, Carolina Saxifrage, Northern White­-Cedar, and American Harebell, while Glade Spurge is found along the
side of Big Cedar Creek.  Unusually deep purple hepatica flowers pop up along the trails in early spring, along with a host of the usual early spring ephemerals.  The Pinnacle also abuts the Clinch River, giving you another chance to explore the river's diversity.

Nearest towns: Coeburn, Norton, Dungannon, Nickelsville

High Knob's feet are coated with lush cove hardwood forest that transforms into high elevation northern hardwood forest near the peak.  To find the rarest plants, start at the top and work your way down on the Chief Benge Scout Trail.

In addition to waterfowl, the other nearly ubiquitous feature of Oxbow Lake is its morning fog blankets.  Fog is an important feature of many mountain and coastal ecosystems, but until recently scientists were unsure how fog affects the plants and animals in these areas.  Now we are beginning to realize that in certain areas of the world with extremely heavy fog, water dripping from these ground-level clouds to the trees and soil can add as much water to the ecosystem as is deposited by rain.  These so-called cloud forests are usually found in tropical regions where trees are coated with moisture-loving mosses and epiphytes.

Even though we do not call them cloud forests, fog plays an important role in adding water to central Appalachian forests.  The nearby Whitetop Mountain receives an average of 35 inches of water from its fog blankets every year, about 71% as much water as falls onto the mountain as rain and snow.  How much water does fog add to Sugar Hill's coffers?  How does the extra moisture affect the hillside's plant life?  We are waiting on the next generation of scientists to tell us.

Spring always reminds me of a really good adventure story --- there's the angst of late winter, then the relentless build toward the climax, followed by the happily ever after period of warm weather, flowers, and bird song.  Right now, I feel like we're beginning the first tiny steps toward spring's peak.

In early January as the days lengthened, a few hardy birds began to sing.  I heard Great Horned Owls duetting from opposite hillsides, and the bright song of a cardinal pierced the cold air.  A month later, I was stunned to notice that the bluebirds had changed back into their brilliant summer plumage --- I'm afraid I just stopped what I was doing and stared for a while.

Last week, I hunted down a blooming Witch-Hazel, knowing full well that Witch-Hazel is a winter bloomer and not a sign of spring.  The American Hazel catkins that had sat on the branch all winter were starting to lengthen and soften, but were still far from full bloom.

On my farm, the honeybees came out for a cleansing flight in the midst of last weekend's balmy weather, and I even found them a quarter mile away in the woods.  Finally, Monday, I saw what all the fuss was about --- the first real spring flower was blooming in the yard.  Granted, speedwell is an alien invasive species, but at this stage of the spring adventure roller coaster, I have trouble minding.

A huge version of the common Smooth Solomon’s Seal arches over the end of the River Trail.  This fern-like plant is common in our woods, but most Solomon’s seal plants are a foot tall or even shorter.  Here and there, though, you will stumble across gigantic versions, up to seven feet tall.  What makes one Solomon’s seal a measly foot tall and others seven times that size?  The answer lies within.

No, not strength of will --- number of chromosomes.  Remember how humans have two chromosomes that determine our sex, the X and the Y?  Humans, and most plants, have two versions of every other chromosome as well, one set from their mother and one set from their father.  When a sperm unites with an egg, the 23 chromosomes from our mother join with the 23 chromosomes from our father and we end up with 23 pairs of chromosomes (or 46 individual chromosomes.)  As a result, we are called diploid organisms, meaning that we have two sets of chromosomes.

Sometimes, though, things go wrong.  Accidents deep within our cells may result in either the sperm or the egg coming with an extra set of chromosomes, a condition called polyploidy.  In humans, polyploidy is bad news since our bodies cannot handle the extra chromosomes --- polyploid infants usually die before or soon after birth.

Unlike humans (and most animals), plants do not seem to be harmed by polyploidy.  In fact, scientists estimate that 30-80% of plants may be polyploid, with some containing three, four, six, or even eight sets of chromosomes.  In the plant world, being polyploid can even be considered an advantage since polyploid plants tend to be bigger, like the polyploid version of Smooth Solomon’s Seal seen along the River Trail.  Many of our fruits and vegetables are similarly endowed, like the garden strawberry that has much larger fruits than its ancestors in part because of being octoploid --- each cultivated strawberry plant has eight sets of chromosomes.  Other polyploid crop plants include potatoes, wheat, and apples.  As the old saying goes, if it doesn’t kill us, it makes us stronger!

Although the animals are the most obvious feature of the east half of the River Trail, a few plants are bound to catch your eye.  In particular, you will have good views of an invasive plant that every naturalist should know.  Japanese Knotweed grows in dense stands along some sections of the Clinch, crowding out all native vegetation.  Although entirely unrelated, Japanese Knotweed bears a superficial resemblance to Giant Cane, and the knotweed tends to create conditions a bit reminiscent of the canebrakes that would have once grown in the same habitat.  Unfortunately, while canebrakes were home to many native plants and animals, Japanese Knotweed is a newcomer shunned by North America’s flora and fauna.

Once Japanese Knotweed catches a foothold along a river or streambank, it is nearly impossible to eradicate.  The plant spreads rapidly using underground rhizomes that can grow for up to two dozen feet in every direction from the parent plant, pushing new shoots up through pavement or anything else that gets in its way.  During floods, small sections of the Japanese Knotweed stems break free, sprouting and creating new infestations downstream.  Some land managers control their Japanese Knotweed populations using herbicides, but application is tricky along important waterways like the Clinch where chemicals dripping into the water could wipe out downstream mussel populations.

Scientists are stumped, but the ingenuity of common folks should not be taken lightly.  Peter Becker had been eating the young shoots of Japanese Knotweed along the streams near his home in Germany for years before he even realized that the plant was not native to the region.  He cooked up stems into delicious jams that tasted a bit like rhubarb as well as creating a savory relish to be eaten with meats and stir-fry.  He was thrilled to find out that Japanese Knotweed is a great source of resveratrol, a chemical that is also found in red wine and that many people think may be the cause of the wine’s healing properties.  Peter was less thrilled, though, when he learned that his gourmet feast came from a plant poised to wipe out a rare streamside plant community.

Rather than wringing his hands and giving in to the invasive plant’s spread, Peter created a profitable business that eradicated knotweed, fed the community, and lined his own pockets.  He chose a couple of pockets of knotweed to experiment on and then settled in for a season of hard work, cutting down the old stalks and burning them in the winter, then harvesting young shoots that sprouted back from the roots for ten weeks in the spring and summer.  The harvested shoots were turned into his jams and relishes and sold at farmer’s markets and then through a store and restaurant, while less tasty shoots that popped up later in the summer were turned into resveratrol supplements.  Meanwhile, native plant seeds were sown in the knotweed patch so that they could become established during the year of constant knotweed harvest.  Two years later, the knotweed in each patch had been eradicated at a profit of 140 euros (approximately $186) per square meter.  True German ingenuity!  A similar system could be implemented in our region to deal with our own knotweed infestation if anyone had the time and inclination to give it a shot.

A short distance past the turnoff for Marlene Path, the side of Sugar Hill turns rocky and precipitous.  As you round a small bend, Pete's Rock rises up beside you, tall and dry on the sunny side of Sugar Hill.  The cliff is a perfect spot to explore the plants that can survive dessication --- ferns like Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brake and Wall-Rue are two good examples.

On one of my first visits to Sugar Hill, I was thrilled to see a bird nest glued to the side of Pete's Rock.  Despite being passed by several hikers a day, the nest was full of tiny birds --- probably swallows that make a living skimming insects off the surface of the nearby river.  Who knows what you'll find sheltered under the craggy overhang? 

To the horsetails growing along the shore of the Clinch River, the ancient Arcto-Tertiary forest that gave rise to our cove hardwood community was a recent upstart.  Horsetails’ long slender shoots look like rushes, but the plants are actually close relatives of ferns --- and of the plants that dominated our landscape 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Era. 

Once again, there were no dinosaurs present, this time because dinosaurs were not yet a twinkle in their father’s eye.  Instead, the animal life at the time consisted of insects and spiders, including dragonflies with three foot wingspans.  The climate was wet and hot, similar to tropical rainforests today, but only the most ancient plants were present.  Ferns, clubmosses, and horsetails dominated the landscape, with relatives of all three growing to tree height.  I like to try to imagine our Common Horsetail growing dozens of feet tall, pushing up toward the sky between ferny fronds of other species. 

If plants could tell stories, the horsetails along the River Trail would tease us with tales of their many-times-great-grandparents whose bodies fell into a massive swamp, pushing down the fallen trunks of horsetails below them.  Unable to decompose quickly underwater, the massive remains of ancient horsetails and their relatives were pressed together into coal.  All of the coal mined in southwest Virginia began as ancient plants, living and dying in Carboniferous swamps 300 million years ago.

Nowadays, ferns and horsetails are small herbs scattered sparsely across the forest floor.  What happened to make the massive ferns disappear? Scientists tell us that different plants came along that were able to reproduce better and faster, pushing the ferns and their allies to the margins.  Ferns and horsetails reproduce using spores, which look like dust to the naked eye and have no room for storage of nutrients to give their offspring a jump-start on life.  When conifers developed, their large seeds gave them a marked advantage over the ferns, allowing conifers to sprout in harsh habitats where tiny fern seedlings would never have been able to gain a foothold.  Of course, even conifers are not our most common plants now --- they were soon overshadowed in turn by flowering plants, a group that encompasses most of the plants on Sugar Hill.  Flowering plants produce showy blooms, most of which attract insects to move their pollen from plant to plant, resulting in even more efficient reproduction.  And so the Common Horsetail ended up a historical side note, diminutive relative of the plants that dominated the moist Carboniferous forests.

The floodplain forest is home to one of Sugar Hill’s rarest plants along with another unusual species.  Together, these two plants represent the dueling reproductive strategies of herbs in our area.  Celandine-Poppy and Mist-Flower are like the Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare --- slow and steady versus quick and fleeting --- but in nature, there is room for everyone to be a winner.

First the tortoise --- the Celandine-Poppy.  Like many of the flowers in the nearby cove hardwood forest, Celandine-Poppies are perennials that mature and reproduce slowly, storing energy in their roots from year to year.  Their seeds are also dispersed slowly since each seed has a fatty bulge that attracts ants, tempting the insects to carry Celandine-Poppy’s seeds underground to a new location a few feet away.  Slow-growing herbs like the Celandine-Poppy are well-suited to life in mature forests where their ability to store sugar in their roots and bloom before the leaves come out on the trees gives them an advantage.  Unsurprisingly, the Celandine-Poppies in the floodplain are tucked back against the hillside, where raging floodwaters will have slowed to gently pond around and feed the Celandine-Poppies without pushing the old roots out of the ground.

If Celandine-Poppy is the tortoise, Mist-Flower is the hare.  Mist-Flower is a member of an immensely successful family --- the Aster family --- that is probably already familiar to you from the dandelions in your yard or the Oxeye Daisies growing along the side of the road.  The Aster family contains hundreds of species in southwest Virginia alone, most of which prefer to grow in old fields or other disturbed habitats.  If you pick a dandelion and peer closely at its flower, you will see what distinguishes this family from all others --- each “flower” is actually dozens or even hundreds of tiny flowers packed together.  The combined flower head is big and showy enough to attract pollinators, and once pollinated each tiny flower turns into a seed.  One Mist-Flower plant can easily produce a thousand seeds, each of which is framed by tiny hairs that catch the wind or water, spreading the plant’s young for miles in every direction.

Unlike the Celandine-Poppy that stores energy in its roots and blooms in early spring, most members of the Aster family start from scratch with few or no reserves each spring.  As a result, the Mist-Flower and its relatives need to suck up sunlight all spring and summer before they have enough energy to put out flowers.  This strategy works well in disturbed habitats like old fields and the banks of rivers since there is often bare ground where the young plant can start growing without a lot of competition from more slow and steady neighbors.

These two floodplain herbs are also indicative of the two main threats to floodplain forests.  Slow-reproducing Celandine-Poppies are most threatened by fragmentation since they are unable to spread their seeds between forest patches separated by pastures or yards.  Mist-Flowers, on the other hand, are threatened by damming up rivers, preventing the flooding that disturbs the soil and gives them a place to grow.  Only in protected forests along untamed rivers are the tortoise and the hare able to grow in harmony.

Heavy rains saturated the soil, but the rain kept falling.  Before long, creeks were up, pouring muddy water into the Clinch.  Slowly, the river raised its ponderous bulk up above the banks, spreading out across the flat land on either side, lapping at the feet of the nearby hills.  The aptly named floodplain was underwater.

As the rains ended, the river shrank back down between its banks.  But the slowly moving water that had spread across the floodplain left behind rich mud and sand, carried off slopes above by the eroding forces of water and now enriching the bottomland on either side of the Clinch.  Seeds had also been carried by the rushing water --- not just Bladdernut pods, but also the seeds of Sycamores, Black Willows, and Box-elders.  Some trees on the Clinch’s bank had been knocked over by the raging river, leaving gaps in the canopy and sunny spots on the forest floor.  The forces of nature that shape the floodplain forest had done their work.

The entire length of the River Trail runs through floodplain forest where signs of past floods abound.  The trail follows the curve of the Clinch River, wending between Sycamore, Box-Elder, and Slippery Elm --- typical floodplain trees that can colonize areas disturbed by high water and grow quickly to gain a foothold before the next flood comes to wipe slower-growing trees away.  The floodplain forest tends to be more open than the denser forests on higher ground, and plenty of light filters down to feed the healthy shrub layer dominated by Black Willow, Common Elderberry, Paw-paw, Spicebush, and Bladdernut.

Beneath the shrubs, the forest floor is coated with herbs that thrive on the infrequent deposits of rich soil.  Virginia Bluebells form masses of brilliant blooms in the spring, giving way to Purple-node Joe Pye Weed and Wingstem in the summer.  During every season, the floodplain community is vibrant with life.

The same rich soil that feeds the floodplain forest has drawn farmers to riverbanks for millions of years.  The earliest human civilizations were located in fertile river valleys, like the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, and Indus River civilizations that arose about five thousand years ago.  Even in our region, many of our towns (like St.  Paul) are located on the banks of rivers that provide us with water and rich soil for farming.  The unfortunate side effect of our interest in riverbanks is the demise of the floodplain forest --- while a few patches of old growth oak-hickory or cove hardwood forest may be found scattered across our region, floodplain forests are typically young and overrun with invasive species.  In many cases, the forests have been completely replaced by pastures or farmland.  In other areas, rivers have been dammed so that they no longer flood above their banks, protecting houses on the rivers’ edges but breaking down the complex web of forces that feeds the floodplain forest.

Although the Clinch River is dammed in Tennessee, the Virginia section of the Clinch flows as a natural river.  With new government programs that help farmers create riparian buffers --- strips of trees on either side of rivers fenced out of the adjacent pastures or cropland --- the floodplain forest seems to be rebounding.  As you walk the River Trail, you can see firsthand the resiliency of the floodplain forest.  Even though corroded barbed wire hints that the land was pasture in the not too distant past, the beautiful white trunks of Sycamores arch over the water and spring ephemerals dot the forest floor.  When it rains, I anticipate the rise of the life-giving river, feeding Sugar Hill’s floodplain forest.

Down past the tangle of invasives at the east end of the Marlene Path, the careful observer will discover a rare but tasty herb spread across the forest floor.  Burdick’s Wild Leek is a relative of the well known Ramps --- very similar in taste and growth form, just a bit smaller. 

Like Ramps, the little white bulbs of Burdick’s Wild Leek have served Appalachian folk for centuries as the first fresh food to appear in the spring.  In our age of February tomatoes and year-round peaches, we quickly forget that early settlers in our region made do with cornmeal and salt pork for much of the winter.  By March, they were desperate for anything fresh and green to ward off scurvy and give their tastebuds a break.  Ramp festivals in places like Richwood, West Virginia, and Whitetop Mountain here in southwest Virginia are remnants of the ramp dinners Appalachian folks held to celebrate the return of fresh food into their diets.  Festival participants report that ramps taste like garlic but smell even stronger, so that the scent of ramps tends to linger for days after these festivals end.

Like Ginseng, Ramps are on their way toward being loved to death.  The small patches hidden on Sugar Hill are probably remnants of much bigger populations, and we request that visitors leave the Burdick’s Wild Leek patches alone to grow back into their former glory.

The small patch of Giant Cane found near the bottom of Marlene Path is typical of the current extent of America's native bamboo.  But before Europeans grazed the cane nearly to death, Giant Cane was an integral part of the floodplain ecosystem.  Imagine thickets of bamboo so dense you could barely walk, reaching thirty feet into the air, and covering entire river bottoms, and you'll get an idea of the plant's former scope.  Some scientists think that the brilliant green Carolina Parakeets --- now extinct --- flocked around canebrakes and depended on cane seeds to trigger nesting behavior.  We may never know which other plants and animals veered toward extinction as canebrakes dwindled into isolated clumps.

Like oak-hickory forests, canebrakes may have been artificially expanded by Native Americans' use of fire.  Giant Cane depends on disturbances like fire to keep the forest canopy from closing and blocking out the light cane needs to thrive.  The short canes you can see along Marlene Path are probably responding to the paucity of sunlight beneath the forest canopy.

In fact, encouraging cane may have been one of the primary purposes local Native Americans had in mind when they lit woodland fires.  The bamboo was a raw material for building houses and weaving mats, bowls, and baskets.  Without cane, the Native American way of life followed the same path as the Carolina Parakeet.

In recent decades, scientists have begun to realize that fire --- like masting --- is an essential part of the oak-hickory community.  The exact role of fire, though, has been roundly debated.  Scientists agree that before humans arrived in North America, many ecosystems naturally burned when lightning ignited dead plant matter like fallen logs or dried grasses.  Once Native Americans reached the continent, they accelerated the burning process in many areas, starting wildfires to open up forests for agricultural land, to promote the growth of edible plants like blueberries, and to provide browse for game animals like deer.  Then Europeans arrived, and for a while the fires were tremendous.  Some fires were set purposefully for many of the same reasons Native Americans had burned the land, while other fires were set accidentally.

As our settlements encroached further and further into the forest, we entered an era of fire suppression.  Smoky the Bear warned us that “Only you can prevent forest fires”, and we took the message to heart.  Not only were people more careful of their own fires, we began to put out naturally occurring fires.  Fire was --- and is --- dangerous when it laps up against barns and houses.  It seemed better, safer, to just to quench the flames whenever they occurred.

In some areas, fire suppression was not a big deal.  In moist coves here in the mountains, scientists suspect that non-human fires would naturally burn once or twice a century, or even less often.  Fallen branches and trees quickly rot in our moist, humid climate, turning into rich soil for salamanders and millipedes to wander through.  Out West, though, fire suppression is another matter entirely.

Many dry ecosystems, like pine forests, depend on fires to stay in business.  When left to their own devices, these woods might burn every couple of years, killing out encroaching hardwoods and opening up the canopy for sun-loving pine seeds to germinate.  Without fire, some pines cannot reproduce at all --- the Table Mountain Pine, which can be found around here on extremely dry ridges, keeps its cones closed tightly around the seeds until fires come through to melt the cones open, releasing the seeds to germinate in the rich ash left behind.  In the western United States, many more species depend on frequent fires to release their seeds and sprout.

Ecologists warned us that we were getting in deep water by suppressing the natural fires in these ecosystems, but most of us were not interested in a pine tree that was unable to reproduce.  We started perking up our ears, though, when the fire suppression tactics hit us in the wallets.  Western forests are far drier than our Appalachian mountain woods, and when western trees fall to the ground, they are extremely slow to decay.  Without frequent fires to break the debris down, the forests became choked with bone dry wood, just waiting to ignite.  When lightning finally struck, or a campfire swept out of control, the wildfires ravaged the countryside like never before.  Before fire suppression, frequent fires cleaned up the debris at regular intervals, so fires tended to run through western forests fast and cool, seldom licking up into the tops of trees or doing real damage to anything except seedlings.  Post-fire-suppression fires, though, raged as if the forests had been doused with lighter fluid.  The flames leaped up into the canopies of the trees, racing and ravaging through the forests and into the suburbs.  You have probably heard about the devastating California fires of the last few years --- these fires are largely due to decades of suppressing every natural fire that came along.

Which brings us back to the oak-hickory forest.  Oaks are not quite as dependent on fire as pine communities are, but scientists are beginning to realize that fire has boosted their abundance.  Most acorns will not germinate in the shade, so they depend on some kind of disturbance to open up the canopy and give them a little sunlight in which to grow.  Without frequent fires, most oak communities in the eastern United States are slowly turning into other types of forests.  Around here, cove hardwood forests are advancing up the hillsides, slipping between aging oaks as the moisture-loving trees grow toward the canopy.  Without fire, our oak forests may disappear from everywhere except the driest ridges within the next century or two.

Some land managers are fighting back using prescribed burns --- intentionally lit fires that can be controlled to run quickly across the forest floor, mimicking the natural process of lightning-ignited fires.  In western States and in the pine forests near the Gulf coast, these prescribed burns seem to be doing a good job of keeping the natural ecosystems in balance while preventing devastating wildfires.  In oak forests, though, prescribed burns lead to more questions than answers.

Remember how I said that Native Americans set fires intentionally for thousands of years before European settlers arrived in North America?  Palaeontological evidence suggests that our oak-hickory forests --- now so widespread --- followed in the footsteps of the fires lit by Native Americans, and later by European settlers.  The reason our oak forests are beginning to fade away is that, in most parts of our mountains, oak forests are essentially man-made.  Should we be maintaining an ecosystem that would not occur over much of its range without the help of people?  On the other hand, if we let the oak forests fade back to their natural obscurity, will we lose plants and animals that evolved to live in these man-made oak forests?

The relationship between humans, oaks, and fire is a tricky one that brings us to a difficult question --- what exactly is natural? Like most difficult questions, there is no single right answer.  Short of packing up every human being in North America and shipping us overseas, we have to learn to coexist with our ecosystem, to compromise between our needs and the needs of the natural world.

When I think of the oak-hickory forest, I think of nuts.  Acorns and hickory nuts are a very important food source for most animals that live in this forest type since the nuts are large and full of nutrients.  Critters like turkeys can eat whole acorns and grind them up with rocks in their gizzards.  Nearby, squirrels perch on logs and nibble away the outer casings of the acorns, leaving the debris in a heap below their favorite perch, then chew up the tasty interior.  Native Americans ate a lot of acorns too, although they processed them by pounding and boiling them to remove the bitter-tasting tannins.

To anthropomorphize wildly, oaks and hickories get riled up when they spend so much of their energy making nuts that just get gobbled down by Blue Jays and squirrels.  Sure, both species like to cache nuts, hiding a few underground for later snacking, but these critters also have pretty good memories and tend to go back and eat up the nuts they have hidden.  Luckily, oaks and hickories are even wilier and over centuries they came up with a strategy known as masting.

Most years, oaks produce a few nuts --- not too many, but enough to keep the squirrels, Blue Jays, and turkeys alive.  Since these animals determine how many offspring to produce based on how well nourished they are, acorn predator populations stay steady, never growing past the point where the few nuts dropped by the oaks can sustain them.  Then one year, every single oak in an area somehow teams up and decides this will be the big year, the mast year.  Like a Thanksgiving dinner, the oaks produce so many nuts that the squirrels eat until their bellies nearly pop.  Every animal in the forest gorges during mast years and hides nuts for the winter, but there are just too many nuts to use them all.  Hundreds or thousands of leftover nuts litter the forest floor, rolling underfoot, and then sprouting to grow into oak trees.  During mast years, I can almost hear the oak trees snickering.  “Take that, you squirrels!” they seem to be saying.  “We fooled you!”

Hickories, beeches, and white pines all go through mast years as well, although their years do not tend to coincide with the oaks’ mast years.  In fact, saying that all oaks mast during the same year is an oversimplification --- there are actually two main types of oaks that mast on different schedules.  The white oak group contains White Oak and Chestnut Oak, as well as a few other species, all of which have rounded leaf lobes with no pointy bits.  The red oak group contains Red Oak, Black Oak, Pin Oak, and Scarlet Oak, all of which have long points at the end of each leaf’s lobes.  These two groups of oaks seem to speak different languages, with the red oak group masting in one year and the white oak group masting in another.

Scientists are still trying to decipher how a group of oaks decides whether to mast in a certain year.  Most likely, oaks respond to weather conditions like summer droughts and spring frosts, combined with an inherent tendency not to produce a big crop of acorns every year.  However, I have always wondered if their decision to mast might be a bit more complicated.  In the last couple of decades, scientists have started turning up startling examples of plant to plant communication.  In one example, an alder tree bitten by an insect emitted chemicals that alerted the neighboring trees that ravenous insects were in town.  The neighboring trees then produced nasty chemicals in their own leaves that kept the insects from nibbling.  If trees can “talk” and warn their neighbors to scare insects away, who is to say that they cannot actually “talk” about whether now would be a good time to mast?

As I walk down the Marlene Path, I like to imagine the oaks chattering away above my head.  “So, Jimmy, how are you feeling this year?  Ready to make some nuts?”  “Sure, Joe.  Those pesky squirrels are giving me headaches.  Let’s stick it to them!”

Like identical twins separated at birth, China and the eastern United States share many similarities.  Our climates and geology are remarkably similar, and as a result plants and animals from China often find it easy to grow and thrive in Virginia’s landscape.  So I was not surprised to discover that most of our invasive plants originated in Asia.  Autumn-Olive and Japanese Honeysuckle are two members of this “Asian Invasion” that we could have done without.

Autumn Olive is easily recognized by the silvery scales that coat the undersides of the shrub’s leaves.  The plant was first introduced to the United States in 1830, but it seemed to be a well behaved guest until the Soil Conservation Service bred the “Cardinal” strain in 1963 and began to recommend planting Autumn Olive to reclaim strip mined land and to promote wildlife habitat.  As the Soil Conservation Service promised, the numerous red Autumn Olive berries were beloved by birds, who gobbled them up and spread the seeds throughout the eastern United States.  Today, Autumn Olive is expanding rapidly and is considered by many scientists to be the most troubling invasive shrub on the horizon.

Japanese Honeysuckle was introduced as an ornamental plant in 1806, and like Autumn Olive took decades before it started to encroach on native habitats.  Despite that fact that the vine is now listed as an invasive plant in four states and can be found choking out native plants in most old fields in our area, I have seen it for sale in local nurseries within the past year.

I consider both Autumn Olive and Japanese Honeysuckle to be cautionary tales --- the ecologist’s version of Little Red Riding Hood’s “grandmother” turning out to be a wolf.  I know I have already said this in an earlier chapter, but it bears repeating: Please try to stick with native plants in your landscaping, and whatever you do, steer clear of alien plants listed as providing “wildlife habitat.”  If the birds like their berries as much as the catalog promises, you may soon see that exciting ornamental cropping up in your neighbor’s forest.

We all go through phases as teenagers --- our hip-hop phase, our rebellious phase.  I went through phases too, and the one I remember the most is my edible plants phase.

About a year before I hunted down the tract of old growth forest, my obsession was wild edibles.  For weeks, I pored over Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus.  I dug up daylily roots out of my flowerbed and boiled them, finding their taste bitter and not very palatable.  I agonized over whether it was ethical to dig up the slow-growing but supposedly delicious roots of the toothworts, finally deciding against it.  I read about pounding and boiling acorns until the bitterness is gone, then using them as flour.

Like most teenage phases, this one slowly faded away as I realized that I was too picky to eat two thirds of the cultivated foods that crossed my plate, let alone the wild ones.  But there are a few wild plants that I will still happily nibble on as I walk down the trail.  Teaberry and sassafras leaves are old friends, the first minty, the second spicy and slippery.  The Cliff Trail is home to two of my other favorite nibbles --- greenbriers and Spicebush.

There are actually two species of greenbriers to be found along the Cliff Trail (along with several more in southwest Virginia), and all of them form long, thorn-covered vines.  The more common of the two Sugar Hill species, aptly named Common Greenbrier, is my favorite for spring nibbling --- I like to pluck off the tender shoots that twine out of the end of the vine in spring and eat them raw for their slightly sour flavor.  I have been told that others cook the shoots like asparagus, but my greenbrier tendrils never make it home.  The other Sugar Hill greenbrier --- Hispid Greenbrier --- is easily distinguished by the smaller, hair-like thorns that line its stem.  Tender tendrils from the Hispid Greenbrier are also edible in the spring, though I rarely find enough to feel good about nibbling on them.

Friends who I introduce to greenbrier tendrils give me mixed reviews, but just about everyone likes Spicebush flower buds.  The Spicebush is closely related to the similarly spicy Sassafras, but its leaves are usually too strong for my palate.  In early spring, though, tiny round buds on the bush’s twigs swell until they pop open into pale yellow flowers.  The flowers, and especially the about-to-open flower buds, are just right --- slightly spicy, slightly sweet, without the kick of the adult leaves.  Like Common Greenbrier, Spicebushes are a dime a dozen in our region, so I feel no ethical quandary about snacking on their tasty buds as I hike Sugar Hill’s trails.

As with any teenage phase, the search for wild edibles does not come without dangers.  Before eating any wild plant, you should be positive that you are identifying it correctly and can distinguish it from poisonous plants.  Even easily identified edibles like greenbriers and Spicebush may cause allergic reactions in some people, so start off your experiments with small quantities.  Those caveats aside, it is certainly fun to know what to snack on when you run out of granola bars on the trail.

If you plan to only walk one trail on Sugar Hill, the Cliff Trail should be the one, and not just because of the maturity of the forest.  Rock outcrops along the trail drip with mosses, ferns, and flowers in a perfect example of the wet limestone cliff community, while dense jumbles of boulders beneath the cliffs showcase the boulderfield forest community.  Both of these plant communities are all about rocks that began as living beings --- limestone.

Limestone is not a typical rock.  Instead of forming from sand, silt, or molten lava, limestone can be traced back to tiny critters living in an ancient ocean.  Many of these ocean animals extract a mineral called calcium carbonate out of the water and use it to form hard shells like the ones you see washed up on ocean beaches.  When the shell-encased animals die, a few of their shells do end up on beaches but most instead drift down to the ocean floor where they are ground up by wave action and eventually compacted into layers of rock called limestone.  Over millions of years, the limestone on the ocean floor may be lifted up into mountains, leaving behind the remains of ocean critters in places like Sugar Hill.

Eventually, all rocks begin to weather into dirt, but the soil produced on top of limestone is very different from the soil produced by other rocks.  Sandstone, for example, breaks down into sandy soil that tends to be acidic, while limestone breaks down into alkaline soil.  Acidity and alkalinity are measures of pH --- even if you have not heard of pH, you have certainly experienced the sour acidity of lemons and the slippery alkalinity of bleach.

Just as we can taste or feel the difference between acidic and alkaline foods, plants can tell the difference between acidic and alkaline soil, and most plants prefer one over the other.  Many of the flowers you will find growing along the cliffs on Sugar Hill would not be caught dead growing on acidic sandstone.  These limestone-lovers include several of the ferns discussed in an earlier chapter as well as plants like Red Columbine and Smooth Sicklepod.

Other plants are found on the limestone cliffs because they are able to thrive in desert-like conditions.  Although the shaded hillside along the Cliff Trail stays moist for much of the year, the lack of soil on the cliff face means that plants go for long periods without being able to soak up water through their roots.  Three-leaved Stonecrop is perfectly adapted to surviving droughts --- the plant’s thick, succulent leaves fill up with water during rainy spells, storing moisture for the stonecrop to use during dry, sunny days between storms.  Wild Hydrangeas also seem to do well in rocky areas with only pockets of soil, and I often see them clinging to the side of cliff faces.  Pete’s Rock --- on the sunnier side of Sugar Hill --- is home to even more of these desert-adapted cliff plants.

One more niche is worth looking for along the Cliff Trail --- the boulderfield community.  Talus heaps of boulders are often found at the bases of cliffs, where winter’s freezing and thawing cracks blocks of stone loose to roll down and collect in a pile beneath the cliff.  For plants, boulderfields are even more difficult to colonize than cliffs are --- as the saying goes, a rolling stone gathers no moss, and stones in the talus heap do slowly move and roll as boulders knock into them from above.  Trees can seldom find a safe foothold in the boulderfield, but mosses and lichens manage to cling onto the more stable rocks.  Without even the tiny pockets of soil that collect in crannies in the cliff-face, lichens on boulders have to create their own dirt.  The lichens secrete acids that hasten the breakdown of the rock surface, forming little clumps of dirt into which mosses and eventually larger plants can grow.  Here in the boulderfields along the Cliff Trail, you can see the true beginnings of forest succession as bare rock slowly dissolves into soil and provides a home to lichens, mosses, and finally flowers and ferns.

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.

The provenance of the Multiflora Rose patch near the top of the Cliff Trail is less mysterious because this prickly invasive is found in woodland edges throughout our region.  Like many invasives, Multiflora Rose was introduced on purpose, first as the rootstock for cultivated roses and then as erosion control, wildlife habitat, and hedging.  A good-sized Multiflora Rose plant can produce up to a million seeds per year, and songbirds enjoy munching on the rosehips, spreading the seeds to new locations.  As a result, Multiflora Rose has now infested 45 million acres of land in the eastern United States and is estimated to cost farmers $48 million dollars annually to control in West Virginia alone.  The ecological damage does not come with a price tag, but is equally staggering, with Multiflora Rose forming dense patches that outcompete native plants.

Enter a mysterious stranger --- the Rose Rosette Disease.  Like Superman, no one is quite sure what the Rose Rosette Disease is (maybe a virus?) or where it came from (somewhere west of Virginia?), but its effects are obvious.  Infected Multiflora Roses grow abnormally thickened and thorny or elongated stems, clusters of small branches called witches’ brooms, and reddish leaves.  Within a year or two, the infected rose dies, but not before transmitting the disease to its neighbors.

Ecologists are thrilled at the effects of this superhero disease, watching dense stands of Multiflora Rose die as the Rose Rosette Disease spreads east across the country.  Cultivated rose aficionados are less excited since Rose Rosette Disease can be just as devastating to their carefully bred rosebushes.  The disease does not really seem to care what we think, either way.  It has recently entered Virginia and will probably soon wipe out the patches of Multiflora Rose on Sugar Hill.  This misplaced plant, like maple sugaring in southwest Virginia, will soon be a thing of the past.

The Bladdernut is not really all that far from its proper habitat --- in fact, you can find stands of the shrub along the River Trail that are rooted in just the right place.  The ones on the Cliff Trail would not be so odd if they were not 300 feet higher in elevation than the floodplain plant community.  You see, Bladdernuts like floodplains.  Actually, what they like the most is floods.

The shrub received its name because of the balloon-like bladder of air surrounding each seed, an adaptation to water dispersal.  If you pluck one of the odd, bulgy seed pods off the Bladdernut bush and toss it in the river, you will be able to watch as the pod bobs along on the surface until it rounds the next bend and drifts out of sight.  The plant is extremely well adapted to habitats that flood frequently, because the high waters naturally pick up the seed pods and carry them many miles downstream to a new floodplain just waiting to be colonized.  When the flood waters recede, the Bladdernut pod drops to the ground and slowly rots to reveal the seed inside, which will, in turn, sprout and grow into a new Bladdernut bush.

So how did Bladdernut shrubs end up near the top of Sugar Hill?  They seem to be doing fine in their new, cliff-side habitat, perhaps because Bladdernuts thrive on limestone as well as floods.  I cannot help wondering whether one of the settlers who used the Cliff Trail to reach the Frenchman’s Settlement might have planted a Bladdernut along the trail, or even just dropped a seed that he was fiddling with as he climbed.  The other possibility seems far-fetched --- that the Clinch River flooded so high that Sugar Hill was nearly completely underwater, allowing a Bladdernut pod to drift up and land on the edge of the Cliff Trail.

Two plants along the Cliff Trail seem to be out of place --- Bladdernut and Multiflora Rose.  The first is a floodplain plant usually found on the banks of large creeks and rivers; the second is an invasive species that was introduced to our area from Asia.  Why are they found far from their usual homes?  We can only guess.

Four decades after Pierre-Francois Tubeuf’s demise near its peak, Sugar Hill received its modern name.  The property had passed on to Old Hattler Bickley whose dreams were less far-fetched than Tubeuf’s had been --- Bickley just wanted to make a living off the land on and around Sugar Hill.  Old Hattler Bickley ran cattle and grew grain, but he soon discovered that Sugar Hill was also full of Sugar Maple trees that could be tapped in early spring to make maple syrup and maple sugar.

Bickley’s maple sugar operation was relatively unique in the area, but cooking down maple sap into sugar had been part of the native culture for hundreds of years.  According to Native American legend, the sweetness of maple sap was discovered by accident when Chief Woksis came home and threw his tomahawk into the side of a Sugar Maple tree outside his home.  The next morning, he pulled the tool loose and went hunting, not realizing that sap was leaking out of the gash and into a bowl at the base of the tree.  Later that day, his daughter noticed the bowl of liquid while cooking supper and poured the maple sap into their meat stew rather than walking all the way to the creek for water.  As the stew cooked, the maple sap was rendered down into syrup, giving Woksis and his daughter a tasty treat.

However the first maple sugar was discovered, the sweetener quickly became a prominent part of the culture of many eastern Native American tribes.  The sap of Sugar Maples is rich in sugars in the early spring, and during this season many Native Americans would relocate to spend an entire month tapping maples and boiling down the sap into sugar.  The maple sugar was used for seasoning for the rest of the year and was also traded to other tribes who lived outside the small area in which maple sugar could be produced --- the climate required for maple syrup and sugar production is found only in part of New England and in certain pockets further south along the Appalachian Mountains. 

European settlers learned to tap maples from the Native Americans, though relatively few tried the endeavor this far south.  Old Hattler Bickley’s operation is considered to be the first maple sugaring operation in the area, taking advantage of the cold, north-facing slope that allows Sugar Maples to grow in our more southern climate.  Bickley tapped trees on the hillside below the Frenchman’s settlement, then boiled down the sap to be sold at the Bickley Mills trading center in Castlewood.  If you keep your eyes peeled, you may see patches of charcoal in the soil where fires were kept burning all day to reduce the sap by 4,000%, turning maple sap into syrup and then into sugar.

I have tried to tap the Sugar Maples on my own land about ten miles away with limited success, and have heard others in our area complain that southwest Virginia’s mountains no longer get cold enough to produce the sugar-filled sap that boils down into maple syrup.  As global warming makes maple syrup and sugar production in southwest Virginia a matter for the history books, it is worth remembering Sugar Hill’s history as a sign of a colder time.

Spotted Mandarin grows in both the Ridge and Valley and Cumberland Plateau provinces, but is never found in very large numbers in any location due to its requirement for mature forests.  The plant is easily confused with its more common cousin, Yellow Mandarin, except in late spring when the purple dotted petals give away Spotted Mandarin’s identity.  Both mandarins can be distinguished from the related bellworts by the mandarins’ rough leaves, much different from the smooth, thin leaves of the bellworts.

After Black and Blue Cohosh, Twinleaf is the most prominent plant on the forest floor along the Americorps Trail.  Although Twinleaf is considered rare across much of its range, the limestone underlying the Americorps Trail provides a microhabitat that promotes vast stands of this delicate herb.

Twinleaf’s primary medicinal use is to treat rheumatism, but I find the species’ white flowers an even more compelling reason to seek it out in early spring.  Consider paying a visit to the Americorps Trail on April 13 to honor Thomas Jefferson, for whom the plant was given its scientific name.

The intricately divided leaves and tall stature of Black and Blue Cohosh make them two of the most striking species on the mature cove hardwood forest floor.  Keep your eyes open as you walk the Americorps Trail and you will find these two types of plants growing side by side.

Every stage of their life cycle is eye-catching, from the purple leaves of the Blue Cohosh pushing up out of the soil in the early spring, to the tall white spires of Black Cohosh flowers in June, and finally to the grape-like fruits that appear on Blue Cohosh in the summer.  Both plants are reputed to have similar healing properties with Black Cohosh roots being used to treat gynecological problems and induce abortions while Blue Cohosh roots have been used to ease menstrual pain and induce labor.

Goldenseal’s wrinkly leaves and white flowers are distinctive, but the yellow roots are the primary source of this plant’s medicinal powers.  The species has been used as an antibiotic and to treat ailments ranging from inflammation and diarrhea to cancer. 

As a child growing up one county south of Sugar Hill, I remember my father giving me dried Goldenseal roots to chew on when I woke with a cough --- a bitter-tasting remedy that my mother worried was too strong for a child.  Whether because of the medicinal properties of the herb or the awful taste, I never seemed to need a dose of Goldenseal for two nights in a row.

Until railroads breached the mountains in the late nineteenth century, bartering and subsistence farming were a way of life in Appalachia.  Only small trade goods of high value were worth transporting into the outside world to sell for cash money --- items like moonshine and dried ginseng (aka “seng”) roots.

Gathering medicinal herbs has continued to be an Appalachian source of revenue through the present day with dried ginseng roots now selling for as much as $600 per pound.  Most ginseng roots are eventually exported to China where they are considered a panacea, serving as an aphrodisiac, cure for diabetes and sexual dysfunction, and generally ensuring a long life.  Although ginseng is now hard to find in these hills due to overcollecting, the Americorps Trail is a good spot to observe several other medicinal plant species including Black and Blue Cohosh, Goldenseal, and Twinleaf.

With the possible exception of Twinleaf, all of these species were much prized by the Native Americans, who used them to cure illnesses ranging from menstrual cramps to cancer.  The English name “cohosh”, in fact, is derived from an Algonquin Indian word referring to the gnarly roots, suggesting that both Black and Blue Cohosh roots were used medicinally long before European settlement of the Americas.

Once Europeans entered the Appalachian region, use of medicinal herbs kicked into high gear.  By the early nineteenth century, Goldenseal was prized as a healing herb in both Europe and America.  A century later, 100 to 200 tons of goldenseal were being dug every year, with about a tenth of that being exported to Europe.

Overharvesting combined with habitat loss have since depleted the populations of most of our medicinal plant species and many are now listed as rare or endangered.  Goldenseal and ginseng are currently cultivated to supplement the dwindling native plants found in our rich woodlands.  To preserve these unique plants for our children and grandchildren, please refrain from collecting plants within Sugar Hill.

The southern half of the Loop Trail is truly red in tooth and claw, full of murder and chemical warfare.  As you return to the parking area, you will pass by one more bloodthirsty species, this one a native plant.

The yellowish-orange vines of dodder are easily mistaken for a mass of fishing line --- they clearly do not appear to be a plant.  As you probably learned in elementary school science, plants are green and feed themselves by turning energy from the sun into sugars through photosynthesis.  Dodder does not do any of that.  Instead, dodder twines around nearby plants and sends modified branches, called haustoria, into the support plants’ stems.  The haustoria suck nutrient-filled sap out of the host plants, feeding the parasitic dodder.

Not every plant is a suitable host for the dodder, though.  Scientists are not quite sure what makes a host plant tasty or disgusting to the twining dodder, but they do know that dodder can tell the difference.  After making an initial loop or two, the dodder decides to either send haustoria into the support plant or just grow a longer tendril, reaching out toward a more tasty specimen.  A recent study by Penn State researchers suggests that dodder reacts to airborne chemicals when determining the suitability of a host plant --- in essence, smelling its prey.

In our area, dodder is most often found in moist habitats where it seems to thrive on hosts including jewelweed and Clearweed.  Dodder can also be an agricultural pest, choking crops such as potatoes.  In my own garden, I have a terrible time keeping the dodder off my carrots --- once it catches hold of one carrot leaf, the dodder branches off in several directions to penetrate every nearby plant.  After a week or so, the result is a tangled mass of dodder covering a few choked carrot plants.  Despite the devastation, I cannot help being intrigued by this parasite that acts nothing like a conventional plant.

Tree of Heaven and Garlic Mustard are two alien invasive species that can be found along the south half of the Loop Trail.  The Tree of Heaven not only outcompetes native trees, its roots also exude a chemical that poisons plants trying to germinate in its shadow --- a trait known as allelopathy, which may be familiar to people who have tried to plant a garden near a Black Walnut.  Tree of Heaven quickly forms dense stands in open areas and is extremely difficult to eradicate since the trees will resprout from their stumps if cut and will also spread rapidly through wind-dispersed seeds.  The tree is easily identified by its divided leaves and by the foul odor given off by broken twigs.

Although Tree of Heaven is troublesome, Garlic Mustard has Appalachian ecologists terrified.  This little plant does not seem very dangerous at first glance, and its leaves are tasty to nibble on as you walk down the trail.  But unlike most of our invasive species that die back as soon as a mature forest begins to shade the forest floor, Garlic Mustard is able to invade dense forests where it overruns our stunning displays of early spring ephemerals.  In many moist forests in our region, the ground is now covered by a nearly unbroken stretch of Garlic Mustard.  The best offense is a good defense --- if you notice a few Garlic Mustard plants in your woods, be sure to pull them up before they go to seed.  More dense stands of the invasive require multiple years of mowing, pulling, or even herbicide treatment before they are fully eradicated.

May-Apples move into an area just as meadowlarks are moving out.  Dense stands of their umbrella-like leaves are a common sight in early successional forests, though May-Apples can also be found at the edges of fields and in more mature forest.  Each May-Apple stand begins as a single plant, then quickly reproduces through underground runners until the patch ends up covering an area as large as six feet or more in diameter.  Peek under the umbrellas in late April or early May and you are likely to find the large white flowers that two-leaved plants produce.  (One-leaved May-Apples will not be blooming that year.)

Although May-Apples reproduce readily through underground runners, they have another trick up their sleeves that helps them colonize new areas.  As their flowers fade in late spring, the ovaries swell into a fruit that is reputed to be edible to humans when ripe.  I have never managed to find a ripe fruit, though, since the maypops (as they are colloquially named) are a favorite food of the Eastern Box Turtle and dangle just at turtle head level.  In fact, without the turtle, May-Apple seeds seldom germinate --- a thick coating on May-Apple seeds means that only about 8.5% of the seeds germinate if left to their own devices.  But when a box turtle munches on the maypop, digestive juices break down the seeds’ coating just enough to raise the germination rate to 38.7%.  So, chances are that the May-Apple patch you are walking through began life as a seed pooped out by a passing turtle.

The Eastern Box Turtle is the only land turtle you are likely to see on Sugar Hill and chances are you will stumble across one after a few hikes.  I like to count the rings on the turtle’s back to get an idea of its age --- like a tree, box turtles make a new ring every year.  These turtles have been known to live up to eighty years, becoming mature after about seven to ten.

Habitat fragmentation is taking a heavy toll on their populations, though, and I wince every time I pass a smashed box turtle in the middle of the road.  When I see a living box turtle on the tarmac, I do my best to stop and help it to the other side, but am careful to always move it to the side toward which it was heading --- turtles know exactly where they are going and will turn around and head back across the road if you put them on the wrong side.  They will also head back to their home territory if captured and released on the other side of town, so please do not move box turtles more than a few feet from where you find them.

What kind of forest greeted the first settlers to our region?  We like to think of North America before European settlement as a vast expanse of unbroken forest, but the truth is that forests have been pushed, chopped, frozen, or burned down as long as they have existed.  Every time, the forest eventually regrows.  Sometimes the regrowth is slow --- if an entire hillside sloughs off in a mudslide, the bare rock that is revealed may take thousands of years to turn back into forest.  On the other hand, if a single tree dies from insects or disease, the surrounding forest may close up the gap in just a few years.

The south half of the Loop Trail is a perfect example of what scientists call forest succession --- the stages that an ecosystem goes through as it regrows a mature forest after some type of disturbance.  In this case, the original forest was wiped out by centuries of farming, remnants of which are seen in the mature apple and pear trees which line the peak of Sugar Hill.

Once the farmers left the land to its own devices for a few years, nature quickly began to take over.  This first step in forest succession is called the old field stage and is visible just south of the Frenchman's settlement along the Loop Trail.  Ankle to shoulder high plants abound in the old field stage, and most of the earliest ones have wind-dispersed seeds.  The most common examples are thistles and milkweeds which produce light seeds with hairlike projections, well-adapted for catching a breeze and wafting for a few feet or a few miles.

The growth of thistles and milkweeds provided protective cover, quickly attracting birds to the old field.  Like wind, birds are another vector for the spread of old field plants, leaving behind seeds of species like Pokeweed when they defecate.  These bird-dispersed plants produce tasty berries as an inducement for their avian friends to spread the plants' seeds into new habitats.  Other plants, like burdock, grow seeds covered with little hooks that catch in the fur of passing animals, hitchhiking to a new spot.

Milkweeds, thistles, Pokeweed, and burdock maintain their dominance of the old field for only a few years in nature before they have built up enough organic matter in the soil to allow wind-dispersed tree seedlings to gain a foothold.  The first trees to enter an old field in our area are often Box-Elder, Red Maple, Eastern Red Cedar, and Tulip-tree.  Without the frequent mowing which maintains the fields on Sugar Hill, young trees would smother out most of the old field herbs within a decade.  The dense thicket that forms is often full of thorny shrubs like Multiflora Rose and blackberries and is known as early successional forest.  Native Americans often burned forests to produce these thickets since they house and feed game animals and are often full of plants edible to humans as well.

Just as the old field herbs enriched the soil to allow early successional trees to grow, the early successional trees lay the groundwork for their own demise.  Another decade or two may pass before the Red Maples and Tulip-trees form a dense canopy, but once they do their sun-loving seeds are no longer able to germinate.  Instead, magnolias, Beech, and other trees begin to sprout in the dense shade on the forest floor.  These trees are the first signs of what scientists call the climax forest --- the type of plant community that will live in an area in the absence of disturbance.  The cove hardwood forest discussed in the last chapter is one of the climax forest types that can be found on Sugar Hill.

After a few hundred years, the forest has hit its stride.  The rabbits and meadowlarks that hid in the old field and early successional forest have given way to Pileated Woodpeckers that hunt for grubs in standing dead snags and Black Bears that curl up on winter nights inside hollow trees.  Trees have aged and range in size from saplings to behemoths.  Some have fallen over, leaving behind logs that host mosses, voles, and salamanders.  None of Sugar Hill has quite reached this stage --- which is commonly known as old growth --- but the hill above Oxbow Lake comes close.

And then little disasters strike.  A tree is blown over and takes down dozens of its neighbors, opening up a treefall gap --- a sunlit opening in the forest.  If the gap is large enough, a little field forms, full of milkweed and burdock, then young Tulip-trees, then Beeches and magnolias, and the cycle continues.

Humans leave more behind us than chimneys and foundations.  When I walk these hills, I like to keep my eyes open for signs of old homesteads --- patches of daffodils or daylilies blooming in the woods, an old apple tree dropping its fruits in seemingly untouched forest, or wildflowers transplanted out of place.

The large patch of Virginia Bluebells near the Frenchman’s settlement is an example of the latter sign of human life.  Virginia Bluebells usually form dense stands along riverbanks --- and you can find a natural stand or two along the River Trail.  But the patch near the Frenchman’s settlement was clearly placed there by human hands.  I wonder if Tubeuf’s “niece” transplanted these spring flowers from the river as she tried to establish her new home in the Virginia countryside.

Many of the plants outlined in this chapter are most visible in the spring, but you will notice the interwoven vines of Dutchman’s Pipe at any season of the year.  Like the wild grapes that grow nearby, Dutchman’s Pipe begins as a sprouted seed on the forest floor, then winds its way up into the canopy, draping over tree branches to cushion its ascent.  Unlike the grapevines, though, Dutchman’s Pipe has smoother bark that does not come loose in curling strands.

If you keep your eyes open in June, you may see another field mark of the Dutchman’s Pipe --- black caterpillars speckled with orange spots.  These are the offspring of the Pipevine Swallowtail, so named because its caterpillars munch solely on the leaves of Dutchman’s Pipe and the related Pipevine.  You have probably heard of Monarch caterpillars that will only eat milkweed and related plants, but you may not realize that several other caterpillars are just as picky eaters.  Adult butterflies, like many adult humans, are happy to flit from food source to food source, but caterpillars are more like human children who refuse to eat anything except pizza.  To the caterpillars of the Pipevine Swallowtail, Dutchman’s Pipe is pizza --- the only food worth eating.

Why so picky?  Scientists cannot explain why your kid will only eat pizza, but they have made progress toward deciphering the picky nature of Pipevine Swallowtail offspring.  As the caterpillars munch on Dutchman’s Pipe leaves, they gather poisons out of the plants and safely pack them away within the caterpillars’ own bodies.  Blue Jays and other predators may consider the big caterpillars and butterflies easy pickings, but as soon as they eat their first poisoned caterpillar, the jays get a serious case of food poisoning and quickly learn to hunt down more nutritious food.  Although a few Pipevine Swallowtails may die in the process, the species as a whole is able to bypass most predators through its childhood of picky eating.

As you will soon learn, nature is full of cheats.  Several other butterflies in our area look remarkably similar to Pipevine Swallowtails --- the most common example is the black female version of the usually yellow Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.  The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars cannot eat Dutchman’s Pipe leaves without getting sick themselves, but they can mimic the species that does.  The result?  Blue Jays tend to leave the black Eastern Tiger Swallowtails alone, afraid to take any chances on another noxious nibble.  Like the grapevine, the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail has learned to get ahead by working the system.

Summer Grape is probably the most common liana in southwest Virginia and is also a character in several interesting stories.  For example, my father always told me that if I got lost in the woods, I could cut the stem of a grapevine and drink the lightly sweetened water that gushes down from the plant’s upper reaches.  Although I was tempted, I never tried to drink from a grapevine because I knew that I would be killing a plant that took years to reach its current height.  But I did spend a lot of time looking up at the leafy peak, wondering why grapevines grow so tall.

Later, I came to understand trees as the plant version of our Cold War arms race.  Every plant needs sunlight, and trees figured out that if they grew a bit taller than their neighbors they could unfold their canopy in full sun and suck up all of the energy raining down from above.  The neighbors did not want to be outdone, so they grew just a little taller themselves.  Back and forth, the height contest spun out of control, until it finally had to end when trees were no longer able to push water from their roots any higher into the sky.  Each tree had thrust its leaves dozens of feet into the air, only to end up neck and neck with its neighbors after all.

I like to think of grapes as free loaders in this forest Cold War.  The lianas do not bother to build deep roots and strong trunks which would be necessary to hold up a tree-sized canopy.  Instead, they simply use tendrils to latch onto shrubs and trees as they climb toward the light.  In a fraction of the time (and for a fraction of the energy) that it takes for a tree to reach canopy height, a grapevine can wiggle its way up through the trees to achieve full sun.  It is easy to see that grapes are the true winners in the forest arms race.

Once you learn the few dangers in our forests, you can settle in to enjoy the facets which are just plain fun.  I grew up in a world of grapevines, leaning my weight tentatively against each one before swinging out over the hillside, summer wind blowing through my hair.  Later, I met scientists who were also familiar with my vines and I quickly learned to refer to them as lianas.  These vines begin on the ground but form woody stems much like a slender tree as they wind up to the canopy of the forest.  Although most people think “rainforest” as soon as they hear the word “liana”, two liana species form quite a show on the hillside above Oxbow Lake.

“Leaves of three, let them be” is not the most useful jingle to distinguish Poison Ivy from less troublesome plants.  Several other species in our forest have three leaflets, including the harmless Box-Elder and various blackberries.  When pointing out Poison Ivy, I more often turn people’s eyes toward the aerial roots that are coated with thousands of tiny rootlets and help the vine cling to the sides of trees.  With a little practice, you can also learn to identify the leaves by looking for the typical shiny coloration and blister-like bumps that often form on the surface.

Scientific Name: Impatiens pallida
Family: Balsaminaceae (Jewelweed Family)
Habitat: Moist, shady places
Blooms: June to September

Walk along any creek in our region and you will quickly find the orange flowers and succulent stems of Spotted Jewelweed.  Sit down nearby and before you know it a Ruby-throated Hummingbird will flit out of the woods, feathers sparkling brilliantly green and red in the sun, to dip its long beak into the jewelweed flowers.  Once the hummingbird has moved on to the next plant down the line, I like to tap the seed cases of the jewelweed lightly with my finger and watch them explode, sending seeds in all directions --- no surprise that another common name for jewelweed is touch-me-not.

The Yellow Jewelweed found at Sugar Hill is slightly less common in our region than its orange-flowered cousin.  Beyond the flower color, the two species are nearly interchangeable, although Yellow Jewelweed is more likely to be found growing on shady, wet hillsides over limestone.  Even thick technical manuals like Strausbaugh and Core’s Flora of West Virginia wax eloquent when describing this lovely plant --- “flowers pale yellow...hanging on their pedicels like jewels or ladies’ earrings.”  The Yellow Jewelweed might just make up for the Wood Nettles you waded through to reach it.

Scientific Name: Laportea canadensis
Family: Urticaceae (Nettle Family)
Habitat: Rich woods
Blooms: July to August

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for coves --- the abrupt stream valleys you find in these parts where the sun barely reaches the bottom on winter days.  Salamanders and rare plants share my fondness, and I have spent many long hours poking around in deep, damp hollers in search of both. 

Unfortunately, nettles love coves too.  Some nettles are harmless --- the translucent stems and short stature of Clearweed are a common sight in cool, shady woods.  But the two stinging species quickly block their less caustic relatives from your mind.

Wood Nettles can be found in just about any cove in our region.  Their coarsely toothed leaves and inconspicuous flowers mark them as nettles.  Meanwhile, the leaves alternating up their stems distinguish them from our other stinging species --- the aptly named Stinging Nettle.

When I first heard that the Stinging Nettle was introduced from Europe, I was intrigued.  Why would anyone carry a plant across the Atlantic Ocean that sets your skin tingling with pain?  Dipping into several books on wild edible and medicinal plants, I quickly discovered that Stinging Nettles make a delicious cooked green and can be used to cure arthritis.  Some sources suggest that Wood Nettles can be used in a similar manner.  Be sure to cook well, though, to deactivate the sting!

As you can tell, I like to seek out characters in the forest with fascinating stories.  But not all of the forest’s characters are heroes.  In Medieval Europe, the forest was considered a dangerous place full of aggressive beasts, ogres, and witches.  Our modern American forest is tamed down and virtually ogre-free.  In fact, when I go for a walk in the woods, I keep my eye out for only two terrors. 

No, not the rattlesnake and copperhead (the only two poisonous snakes that live in the area) or the Brown Recluse and Black Widow spiders.  Although all of these animals are poisonous and live in our region, they are rarely seen and unlikely to harm the average hiker. 

I do not worry over wolves and mountain lions, both of which have been virtually (or completely) wiped out in our area and which are secretive anyway.  The bobcats and bears that do roam our hills are more likely to run away from you than toward you.

In the plant world, both Poison Sumac and Poison Oak --- despite popular lore to the contrary --- are not residents of southwest Virginia.  So, despite all of these potential dangers, I watch out only for Wood Nettles and Poison Ivy.

When you brush up against a patch of Wood Nettles, hairs on the undersides of the leaves and along the stems shoot acids into your skin.  The related Tree Nettle of New Zealand is strong enough to kill dogs and horses, but stinging nettles in our area are more of an irritation than an actual danger.  The resulting itching, stinging sensation is equivalent to a bee sting and disappears without treatment within a few hours.  Still, I take a few precautions, wearing jeans or other thick pants in the woods in the summer since nettles can sting through thinner fabrics.  If I do get stung, I like to smear the wounded skin with the gooey centers of jewelweed stems, which grow in similar damp habitats and are usually close at hand.  Although scientists think that the jewelweed juices do little actual good, I have noticed that they cool the skin and ease itching for a short time, by which point the nettle sting has often faded away by itself.

I have been the recipient of dozens of nettle stings, but I feel lucky to be among the 15 to 30% of the population that has no allergic reaction to Poison Ivy.  I figure I inherited my resistance from my father, who as an infant crawled out the back door of his West Virginia home and was found rolling around happily in a large patch of the itch-inducing plant.  In most folks, contact with any part of the Poison Ivy plant, from leaves to roots, results in a painful skin rash that turns into raised bumps and blisters.  To the profound relief of my grandparents, my father developed no rash.

On the other hand, my mother is a magnet for Poison Ivy rashes --- she is probably one of the sensitive few who start itching when they come in contact with as little as one millionth of an ounce of urushiol (the compound in Poison Ivy that results in allergic reactions.)  This quantity is equivalent to about one thirtieth of the size of an average grain of table salt.  As a result, my mother is quick to ask me to pull any Poison Ivy plants out of her yard.  I have to admit that I am a good naturalist but a bad daughter.  I leave the Poison Ivy alone and wait until the waxy white berries ripen in late fall, attracting up to sixty bird species who feast on the fruits.  If I am lucky, I even see over-wintering Yellow-rumped Warblers attracted to this wild bird feeder.

It is worth taking a moment now to familiarize yourself with nettles and Poison Ivy.  Steer clear of these dangers and your visit to Sugar Hill should be ogre-free.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit’s unusually shaped flowers are even more unusual on the inside.  Unlike most plants whose flowers house both male parts and female parts, Jack-in-the-Pulpit flowers are either male or female.  In case that sounds too simple, let me hasten to add that the plants do not stick to the gender they were born with.

After a few seasons of growth as a young plant, a Jack-in-the-Pulpit has stored enough strength in its roots to put forth a flower.  His first flower is nearly always male, tucked down under a single leaf.  In this phase of his life, the plant has a chance of passing on his genes by pollinating nearby female plants without too much outlay of energy --- pollen is relatively “cheap” to produce.

In nature, females nearly always spend more resources reproducing than males do.  Female animals have to nourish the young growing inside them for days or months, or at least spend the energy to build big eggs full of nutrients.  Similarly, female plants have to pour their resources into producing fats and proteins to give their seeds a chance to grow.  So it is no wonder the young Jack-in-the-Pulpit chose to start his reproductive career as a male.  A single grain of pollen could net the plant an offspring without all of the muss and fuss of making seeds and berries.

Another year, or maybe several, pass now.  Our Jack-in-the-Pulpit may spend some more time as a male as he builds up energy in his roots, or he might even skip blooming that year. 

Finally, he crosses some invisible divide and “decides” to change his gender.  Out come two leaves with a female flower nestled down between them.  The plant then pours her energy into producing a showy spike of red berries, rich enough to tempt passing animals into carrying them to new spots in the forest.  She has not only passed on her genes but has also sent her children out into the world to colonize foreign lands.

In some cases, our Jack-in-the-Pulpit may remain a female for many years.  But if a droughty summer lowers her reserves or a passing hiker transplants her into his poor-soiled garden, she quickly reverts to her masculine side.  The next year, only one leaf appears and the flower inside is male again.  Back and forth, the plant changes its gender, ready to cope with environmental catastrophes or take advantage of the rich harvest from a good year.  With such a flexible lifestyle, it is no wonder Jack-in-the-Pulpit has managed to survive in our forests for 65 million years.

Wild Ginger lacks the perky flowers of other early spring ephemerals.  In fact, most hikers miss its flowers entirely --- to find them, you have to lift up the leaves and look for a little brown cup that does not really resemble a flower at all.  Whenever I see Wild Ginger flowers, I think of the related species Little Brown Jug, named for the brown blooms that resemble another product of the Appalachian mountains.

Once, I wondered why Wild Ginger has such drab blooms hidden away where no one can see them.  Most of the other early spring ephemerals are pollinated by flying insects that are attracted to the bright colors facing the sky.  But Wild Ginger has gone another route.  It seeks out ground-dwelling beetles who stumble upon the Wild Ginger flowers as they amble across the leaf mold, crawl inside, and then wander back out covered with pollen to dust the pistils of the next flower.  Later, ants collect the seeds and carry them back to their burrows where some sprout and turn into new plants.  Now I find myself asking myself --- why should Wild Ginger flowers look up when they have so much to gain by looking down?

Trilliums (and the rest of the plants discussed later in this section) are not quite ephemerals because they hold onto their leaves well into the summer.  But they are not conventional herbs either, which grow throughout the year.  These plants tend to be bigger and showier than the ephemerals, and they also tend to bloom just a little later since they are not forced to do all of their photosynthesizing in a six week period before the canopy closes above them.  Every year I wait in fond anticipation for the first tiny Carolina Spring-Beauty flowers, then am gladdened again a few weeks later when the trilliums bloom.

The hillside above Oxbow Lake is so full of trilliums in April and May that I find it hard to have eyes for anything else.  At first, the sea of three-petaled white blooms above three-parted leaves seems to be made up of interchangeable units, until I peer a little closer and notice that these trilliums are not all the same.  Most are the common Big White Trillium that can be found in nearly any forest around these parts, but here and there Purple Trilliums are interspersed.  The latter species often sports a purple flower in other parts of the region, but in southwest Virginia a white variety is more common, making Purple Trillium hard to distinguish from its more common cousin.  The differences are subtle --- a purple ovary in the center of the Purple Trillium flower, smaller, more leathery petals, less voluptuous leaves.  The beginning botanist can sharpen his eyes by teasing apart the trillium species on the east slope of Sugar Hill.

Just as descendants of the Arcto-Tertiary forest are well-represented in the canopy of the cove hardwood forest, they are widespread on the forest floor as well.  Wood Anemone and Sharp-lobed Hepatica are two examples of plants with close relatives found both here and in Asia, but nowhere in between --- signs of an Arcto-Tertiary ancestor.  In fact, the majority of the herbs on the floor of the cove hardwood forest show one of two related patterns, both of which are shared by herbs in China and (scientists believe) in the ancient Arcto-Tertiary forest. 

One pattern consists of perennial plants like trilliums and Jack-in-the-Pulpit that send up a bloom and leaves in the spring, then linger in the shade of the forest canopy for the rest of the year, putting out no new growth.  Instead, these plants are sucking up what little light comes their way and turning it into energy to store in their roots and feed next year’s blooms and leaves.

The other pattern is even more distinctive, enough so that this category of plants has been given its own name.  The early spring ephemerals bloom even earlier in the spring than the trilliums, some in late March when the days are still cold and only flies are out and about to act as pollinators.  Most --- like the toothworts, Rue Anemone, and Spring-Beauty --- have white or pale pink flowers to attract these generalist pollinators.

After blooming, the ephemerals quickly unfurl leaves and soak up late winter sun before the trees above them wake up.  Then the ephemerals' leaves fade away just as quickly.  By May, most of the early spring ephemerals are long gone, except for the roots nestled in the leaf litter that have stored enough energy to repeat the cycle next year.  Their tiny seeds have been carried away by ants to germinate a few feet from the parent --- small wonder that these species take so long to recolonize a forest after it has been clearcut.  Although once widespread in cove hardwood forests, the masses of early spring ephemerals found at Sugar Hill are now becoming the exception rather than the rule.

As I pursued a degree in biology, I slowly grew out of the field guides that had defined my childhood.  Peterson’s Field Guide to Wildflowers had served me well, but I eventually reached the point where flipping through the guide was not sufficient to identify my mystery plants.  As with any other coming of age ritual, I was filled with both excitement and trepidation when I opened up my first technical manual.

And I was right to be scared.  My eye was met by page after page of diagnostic keys, each of which had so many technical terms that identifying a plant became an hour-long chore of flipping from the key to the glossary over and over and over.  Worst of all, I often had no idea where to start in this thousand-page manual where plants were divided up by family rather than by color.

Soon, though, I grew into my manual.  I began to learn a few plant families that are easy to identify without resorting to the glossary, and one of the first of these easy families was the mint family.  A quick twirl of the plant’s stem between my thumb and forefinger and I knew without a doubt that my mystery plant was a mint --- mints have stems that are square in cross-section rather than round.  I soon discovered that most mint family members also have diagnostic flowers with long tubes topped by irregularly shaped petals.

Guyandotte Beauty is one of those plants that is not found in Peterson’s Field Guide to Wildflowers.  It is simply too rare.  Very little is known about this uncommon flower except that it is scattered very sparsely across the central Appalachian mountains and is listed as rare in most of the states where it has been found.  In Virginia, the plant is known only from the Clinch and Powell watersheds.  Luckily, Guyandotte Beauty’s square stem and distinctively shaped flowers show it up as a mint relative right away.  But the plant is not a run-of-the-mill mint ---  its huge, showy blooms match its name and make the plant stand out in the late spring woods.

Tennessee Chickweed is one of the species that is rare in Virginia primarily because it has a limited range.  In the Commonwealth, it has only been found in Russell, Scott, Washington, Smyth, and Botetourt counties, and it has a similarly spotty distribution in the mountain counties of neighboring states.

In each case, Tennessee Chickweed prefers mature cove hardwood forests and can be found scattered amid other spring flowers, though the plant seems to bloom less often than its neighbors.  In fact, instead of carefully measuring petals and leaves when faced with an unknown large chickweed, I usually look for the presence of blooms ---  if more than one bloom is visible on every fifth plant, the species is unlikely to be Tennessee Chickweed.

Arthur’s gauge of diversity served me well as I wandered the Appalachian woods in my  early teens.  But by the time I reached college biology, I was ready for a bit more hard data.  I had heard about the vast number of rare species that can be found in southwest Virginia, but now I began to wonder --- what makes a species rare?

A few of our region’s rare species have been hunted nearly to death.  Ginseng and Goldenseal have been dug by herb gatherers for centuries, and even deer had become uncommon in our area by the middle of the twentieth century due to hunting pressures.  Other species are rare due to habitat destruction --- plants and animals that require old growth forest are finding fewer and fewer places to call home as we cut down forests for wood and paper or just to claim the land for houses.

Some species are rare because their habitat is naturally rare.  Two counties west, The Cedars Natural Area Preserve is home to several rare species that can live only in the uncommon limestone glades habitat.  In many areas of The Cedars, thin soil and exposed bedrock prevent the growth of trees, resulting in patches of grasses and other herbs.  The habitat itself is considered globally rare, as are many of the species living there.

Scientists are less concerned about a third type of rarity --- species that are rare in one region, but common in other parts of their range.  For example, many northern species like Canada Violet find cool pockets to call home high in the southern Appalachian mountains.  These species are only locally rare.  Even though only a hundred individuals of some of these species may be found in the state of Virginia, tens of thousands are spread across the New England states.

Sugar Hill is home to six plant species that the state of Virginia lists as rare.  These species have no legal protection and most are secure on a global scale.  On the other hand, all are threatened in Virginia by habitat loss.  Most of them depend on the mature forests that can be found on Sugar Hill but that are less and less frequently seen in the rest of the region.

The numbers following the name of each rare plant in this book and website refer to the level of rareness of each species both globally ("G" followed by a number) and in the state of Virginia ("S" followed by a number.)  In each case, species are given a numerical rank ranging from 1 (extremely uncommon) to 5 (secure.)  The rank of each species is based on Townsend (2005), which includes the following explanations of the listed ranks:

Throughout this book and website, I will point out the rare species which can be seen along Sugar Hill's trails.  Keep your eyes peeled for the six rare plants, as well as for a variety of other uncommon species which did not quite make it onto the Virginia Rare Plant List.  Several of these species can be found nowhere else in the area.

The remnants of the Arcto-Tertiary forest, both here and in China, have made for two of the most diverse temperate regions of the world.  Within our local remnant, the Clinch River watershed stands out as a “biodiversity hotspot”, meaning that the watershed contains more types of plants and animals than can be found anywhere else in the continental U.S.  These waters flowing past Sugar Hill contain more mussel species than can be found in all of Europe and China combined.  Scientists also marvel over the varying colors and species of millipedes, the diversity of snail life, and the stunning variety of plants in our area.  On Sugar Hill itself, a survey of just the herbaceous understory plants (the small plants on the forest floor) turned up 155 species. 

Where does one start when exploring this astonishing diversity?  As a youngster beginning to learn about the Appalachian forest, I was lucky enough to spend a few days following in the footsteps of the noted local naturalist Arthur Smith.  Only years later did I discover how well known Arthur was in the region --- at the time, I was tempted out in the field by the extra chocolate bar he liked to bring along to share as part of our lunch.  In addition to feeding my sweet tooth, he simplified the world in a way that made sense, showing me how to gauge an area’s overall diversity by keeping an eye on the ferns.  Arthur explained that places with a large number of different fern species tend to have a higher diversity of other kinds of life --- more wildflowers, more salamanders, more trees.

First he taught me to watch out for our most common ferns --- Christmas Fern with its simple leaflets shaped like stockings and Ebony Spleenwort with its shiny black stem.  On moist, shady hillsides, the divided fronds of Maidenhair Ferns are likely to arch delicately over the leaf litter.  Rattlesnake Fern is considered an indicator species for Ginseng and can be found in the moist coves where that species once grew before overcollection nearly wiped it off the map.  Drier, more open woods are often home to Hay-scented Ferns, so named for the grassy odor that wafts up from their lacy fronds when brushed by a passing pant leg.

Other ferns are less widespread, each with its own microhabitat.  On Sugar Hill, the limestone cliffs house Walking Fern, named for its habit of rooting a new fern at the end of its attenuated, arrowhead-shaped frond.  Bulblet Bladder Fern also thrives on limestone where it reproduces by dropping little bulblets from the underside of its fronds.  Each bulblet will sprout tiny new leaves and grow into a daughter fern.  Meanwhile, drier limestone cliffs on the western side of the hill are home to Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brake, an unusual fern with asymmetrical fronds, and Wall-Rue.  Finally, Goldie’s Wood Fern and Narrow-leaved Glade Fern thrive in habitats similar to those enjoyed by Maidenhair and Rattlesnake Ferns.

Eleven fern species have been found so far at Sugar Hill, a large number for a preserve so small.  Just as you can measure an area’s overall diversity by counting its fern species, you can also get an idea for what drives that diversity.  Varying habitats abound on Sugar Hill, each with its own array of plants and animals.  Ancient heritage and a varied terrain are two of the factors that make Sugar Hill a treasure trove of Appalachian nature.

Scientific Name: Viola canadensis
Family: Violaceae (Violet Family)
Habitat: Rich woods
Blooms: April to July

Although much of the forest covering Sugar Hill is clearly cove hardwood forest, a few signs indicate that the community is transitional between cove hardwoods and northern hardwoods.  The latter plant community is relatively similar to the cove hardwood community, but here in the central Appalachians is found at higher elevations.  Sugar Maple, Beech, and Yellow Birch dominate northern hardwood forests, although many cove hardwood species can be found intermixed.  One county west, High Knob clearly rises up into the northern hardwood forest, which may explain why some northern hardwood species can be found at Sugar Hill.

Canada Violet is one of those northern hardwood species.  The careful botanist will find five violet species scattered across Sugar Hill, but Canada Violet is the biggest and boldest, with large white petals that are brushed with purple on their backs.  Canada Violet is a perfect example of a species that is uncommon in Virginia but well known in other parts of the country.  The northern hardwood forest and its associated species coat the majority of New England and the Great Lakes States, and Canada Violet is widespread in parts of the continent from which it draws its name.

Sixty million years ago, dinosaurs had recently disappeared from the earth and mammals were just starting to take their place. The vast Arcto-Tertiary forest coated the northern latitudes of North America, Europe, and Asia with broadleaf deciduous trees much like the ones you see around you today. Beech, chestnut, elm, alder, birch, hornbeam, aspen, walnut, hazel, sweetgum, sequoia, and ginkgo shared the canopy.

Just like in our current Appalachian forests, the trees of the Arcto-Tertiary forest turned brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red before dropping their leaves in the winter. And in early spring before the leaves returned, herbaceous perennials on the forest floor burst into bloom, only to fade away as the trees regained their leaves.

This rich forest depended on a warm, humid climate and before long its range began to contract. Two or three million years ago, the glaciers of the first ice age drove the plants of the Arcto-Tertiary forest south. The glaciers melted then re-formed time after time. In Europe, the Arcto-Tertiary forest was battered up against the east-to-west aligned Alps until most plants perished. Much of North America and Asia had turned into grasslands as the climate dried, so on these continents the forest became restricted to a couple of mountain ranges --- those in eastern North America and those in eastern China.

In these two refuges, the forest survived by migrating north and south as the climate warmed and cooled. The mountains provided protected nooks and crannies --- high elevation ridges where cool-loving species could grow during warm spells and sheltered valleys where warm-loving species could grow during ice ages. Here in North America, the Arcto-Tertiary forest eventually became limited to a little tract of mountain land spanning eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and southern West Virginia.

After the glaciers finally receded, plants from the Appalachian refuge began to reforest the surrounding areas. Birches, beeches, and maples spread north into New England. Oaks and chestnuts were carried south and east by squirrels and Blue Jays while other oaks and elms ventured west into the drier prairies. But nearly every species retained a foothold here, making up the diverse cove hardwood forest.

Unlike other forest types that are named by their dominant trees --- oak-hickory and beech-maple, for example --- the cove hardwood forest is distinguished by its lack of dominant trees. Instead, dozens of species can be found growing side by side, many of them closely related to the trees that grew here 65 million years ago. Some of these trees, such as the Tulip-tree (also known as Yellow Poplar or Tulip Poplar), have relatives in only one other part of the world --- the mountains of eastern China. When I walk the northern leg of the Loop Trail, I inevitably get lost in my imagination, journeying over continents and through millions of years back to the Arcto-Tertiary forest that once dominated the northern hemisphere.

We all love stories in a language we can understand, so I am not surprised that folks on my hikes detest scientific names. After all, most of the scientific names are in Latin, a language which probably died out for a good reason. Nevertheless, scientific names are essential to a solid understanding of ecology since one species of plant could have a dozen common names and some of the same common names can be used for multiple species.

I have dealt with this problem in a couple of ways.  I chose a reference book (listed in the bibliography) for each type of organism and stuck to the common names listed there during discussions in the main text of this book. For the sake of clarity, I also present the scientific name of each species in most picture captions along with a bit of information about where plants and animals live, when they are most visible, and other facts for the more serious naturalist.