The oil nut’s curious little green fruits

For me, the fall season is one of the most invigorating times to get out in the woods and prowl around. Many of the most beautiful wildflowers found in the Blue Ridge, especially the lobelias and gentians, are then coming into their own.

Chinquapins a hardy, unusual shrub

Do you have chinquapins growing on your property or in your vicinity? If so, you’re fortunate. For my money, “the little brother of the chestnut” (as it’s sometimes called) is one of our more graceful and interesting plants, especially during the late summer months when their fruits are ripening.

The turkey’s role in Cherokee culture

The come back of the wild turkey in the southern mountains in recent years is one of the notable success stories in wildlife restoration. Thirty or so years ago, the sighting of a flock of wild turkeys was a rarity. Thanks to the combined efforts of the National Wild Turkey Federation and its local chapters, working in conjunction with federal and state wildlife agencies, such sightings — while always memorable — have become rather commonplace.

A legacy of lookers

From time to time, I like to reflect upon the plant hunters, botanists and horticulturalists that first entered these mountains during the late 18th century to survey, collect, and propagate the unsurpassed floral riches of the region.

The Smokies back then

Scott Weidensaul, who lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania, is one of my favorite nature writers. His Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994) has become one of the basic books about the natural history of the entire range of the Appalachians from Canada to Alabama. I’ve read most of Weidensaul’s books and was pleased to learn a few days ago that another has been published this year. I ordered a copy immediately via Amazon.com and await its arrival with anticipation.

A perfect time for a visit in the park

Now is the perfect time to plan a mountain getaway excursion in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. One of the drives favored by many is the Blue Ridge Parkway to Balsam Mountain Campground Road and along Heintooga Ridge to the Round Bottom Road and Big Cove loop.

The mountains tumultuous past

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up; and though I can look with happy admiration at the lowland flowers, and woods, and open skies, the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of examining detached wildflowers in a conservatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if the scenery be resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its own flatness in all the detail of it ... it appears to me a prison, and I can not long endure it.

—John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1850)

Indian hemp for the long haul

For me, those plants found here in the Smokies region that have verified practical human uses are, in the long run, of more interest than those with often overblown reputations for sacred or medicinal uses.

Careful of the jimson weed

“Jimson Weed is featured in a set of mystic books recently popular, Carlos Castaneda’s tales of mind expansion with the Mexican Indian shaman, Don Juan. Seeds of this common weed do indeed contain an hallucinogenic component, but, as is so often the case, the same chemical is also highly toxic, and the line between ‘a trip’ and ‘the final trip’ is a fine one and one which varies from one individual to another.”

— Jim Horton, The Summer Times (1979)

Purt, nigh Lizabethan

I’m no expert on regional linguistics, but through the years I’ve delighted in the dialect English still spoken here in the Smokies region. One sometimes hears or reads that it dates back to the Elizabethan era — that is, to the second half of the 16th century, when Shakespeare appeared on the literary scene — or even earlier.

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