The
black locust trees
are blooming, a pretty sight.
That
fact is noted by connoisseurs of the light and delicate locust honey.
Meanwhile, hopeful gardeners might cast an anxious glance at the
trees if they put any stock in the old mountain saying – “a
good locust bloom means a poor crop year.”
The
vigorous legume is nothing if not contradictory. Friend,
foe, or both? A
source of tough, durable wood, the tree can be a stubborn, aggressive
and thorny pest.
The
genus, Robinia, is named for Jean Robin (1550-1629),
herbalist to Henry IV of France and his son, Vespasian Robin
(1579-1662),
who first cultivated the locust tree in Europe. The black locust
(Robinia
pseudoacacia)
was known as False Acacia and was naturalized in many countries for
its ornamental qualities.
After
struggling against locust for decades (and enduring the scratches to
prove it) I have to chuckle at the mental picture of Vespasian Robin
eagerly planting the locust trees brought back from the New
World.
Of
course, a jar of locust honey, a pile of locust stakes, and the
beauty of their blooms are all worthy of admiration.
This
story of our current locust bloom was going to be short and sweet until I opened Stalking
the Wild Asparagus by
Euell Gibbons. On page 93, he shares a recipe for locust
blossom fritters,
and that set me to thinking about the word “fritter.” A
little etymology lesson reveals that the verb “fritter” in the
sense of “whittling away” one’s time comes from the Latin
word fractura.
The noun form associated with “fried batter” comes from the
Latin frictura.
fritter (v.) "whittle
away," 1728, from fritters "fragment or shred,"
possibly alteration of 16c. fitters
"fragments or pieces," perhaps ultimately from O.Fr.
fraiture "a breaking," from L.
fractura.
fritter (n.) "fried
batter," 1381, from O.Fr. friture "something fried,"
from L.L. frictura "a frying."
Euell Gibbons (1911-1975) Remember when a wild plant forager could become a national celebrity?
Today's language lesson complete, let's return to Euell Gibbons' instructions for cooking up the flowers of Black Locust, or Wisteria or Elderberry Blow.
“All
make delicious fritters,”asserts
Mr. Gibbons.
Remove
the coarse stems and dip the clusters in a batter made of 1 cup of
flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar, I teaspoon of baking powder, 2 eggs and
½ cup of milk. Fry the dipped clusters in deep fat, heated to about
375 degrees for approximately 4 minutes, or until they are a golden
brown. Place them on a paper towel, squeeze a little orange juice
over them, then roll in granulated sugar, serve while they are piping
hot and watch them disappear.
Mama always sent me to cut roses for “me and her” to wear to church on Mother’s Day. “You wear a pink or red rose if your mother is living and a white rose if she has died,” Mama explained. -Jaine Treadwell, writing in the The Troy Messenger
Growing up in a small Southern mill town I was indoctrinated in 1001 customs, traditions and niceties.
Not enough of it took.
I like to say that those social graces are essential to preserving our humanity and our civilization, both of which are in big trouble these days. But in practice, I have been negligent and inconsistent, with one exception. I have remained faithful to one of those life lessons from long, long ago: I have always remembered that the only place for cornbread batter is a sizzling hot cast-iron skillet.
On this day, with white flowers blooming all around, my memory turns to the same old tradition that Jaine Treadwell wrote about.
My mom, Mary Rose Eury, and me in 1960
Treadwell's story is my story. Sixty years ago, I heard the same explanation when my mother pinned a red rose to my lapel while we got ready for church on Mothers Day.
I’m curious if anyone still observes this little tradition. I wonder if it was just a southern thing. In any event, I hope it still happens somewhere, quaint practice though it may be.
For those whose roses are red, as for those whose carnations are white. Mothers Day is a good day for cornbread...as long as it's cooked up in a sizzling hot cast-iron skillet.
Close perusal of a topo map is a good way to launch this quest for the heart of the Cowees, in Jackson, Macon and Swain Counties, North Carolina. The Cowee Mountain range divides the watersheds of the Little Tennessee and Tuckasegee Rivers. Until the 1940s, those rivers converged at a point several miles west of Bryson City, North Carolina, but upon completion of the Fontana Dam, the point of their confluence is deep beneath the waters of the Fontana Lake.
If we call this the “lower” end of the Cowee Range, then it would take a crow’s flight of about 35 miles to the southeast to reach the “upper” end of the range: Highway 64 between Cashiers and Highlands, NC passes through Cowee Gap. Specifically, the gap is where the boundary between Jackson and Macon Counties intersects with the Eastern Continental Divide (ECD).
On one side of the ECD, waters flow to the Atlantic, and on the other, waters flow to the Mississippi River and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico. Facing south from Cowee Gap, you can view the impressive Whiteside Mountain and the headwaters of the Chattooga River, in the Savannah River watershed.
Looking south from Cowee Gap, Whiteside Mountain is at right
Look northward from the ECD, and you’ll see upper reaches of the Tennessee Valley watershed. The headwaters of the Little Tennessee are to the west of the Cowee ridge, and the headwaters of the Tuckasegee are to the east.
The crest of the Cowee range is easy to follow on a map. Why? When Jackson County was carved out of Macon County in 1851, the new boundary followed the divide between the Little Tennessee and the Tuckasegee. I enjoy tracing this county border on a good topo map and reading the names along the dotted line that runs from peak to peak.
If only, I tell myself, if only a hiking trail followed this line. What a great adventure it would be to hike the full extent of the Cowee Crest, from Cowee Gap to Fontana Lake! The Nantahala National Forest includes vast swaths of the Cowees, but intervening tracts of private land would render the construction of a continuous ridegetop trail all but impossible. Still, it is fun to imagine how such a trail would have changed perceptions of the Cowee Mountains, and an “identity” for the range as a whole might have entered the public consciousness.
Lookout tower at Yellow Mountain, highest point in the Cowees
Fortunately, one well-maintained trail does wind along several miles of the Cowee ridge, leading to the highest point on the range at Yellow Mountain (5127’ elevation). This is arguably the best hike in the Cowee Mountains and is in the top tier of the most outstanding hikes in the entire Southern Appalachians.
There’s no better place than the historic fire lookout tower atop Yellow Mountain to contemplate the question, “Just what makes the Cowee Mountains the Cowee Mountains?” In subsequent installments, I’ll be proposing some possible answers to that question.
Writer Wilbur Gleason Zeigler (1857-1923) traveled west of the Balsams on May 10, 1879 and observed the area near Cherokee:
A great part of this hilly land away from the river is now under cultivation. Dismal young forests of field pine show that it had once been cleared, worked until worn out, and then left for nature to again train into its primitive wilderness. It reminded me of the dreary pine woods of the State next south of this. Nothing could look more lonesome than, surrounded by these pine fields, old, empty farm houses, one or two of which we passed, with dingy, weather-beaten sides, moss grown roofs, crumbling chimneys, gaping, sashless windows and doorless entrances. Not a domestic creature could be seen around them, and even the birds seemed to sing mournfully in the still flourishing orchards.
Zeigler later wrote about the conditions he had seen:
The question naturally comes up: why are these so many of these ugly blots, marked by scrubby pines, upon the face of an otherwise fair landscape? The answer is, indifferent farming, resulting, in a great many cases, from the ownership of too much land. There was no object in saving manures and ploughing deep, when the next tract lay in virgin soil, awaiting the axe, plough, and hoe.
Zeigler’s entry for May 10 also included this:
We were in Swain county. Fine farms of rich black soil lay on either side between the river and the environing mountains, which grew higher, steeper, wilder and closer together as we advanced. The farm houses were large, looked old fashioned in their simple style of architecture, ancient with the gray, unpainted exteriors, but homelike and cheerful, surrounded by their large, blossoming apple orchards.
(W. G. Zeigler, "On Foot Across the Mountains," May 10, 1879, Asheville Citizen, May 22, 1879)
Note - Zeigler, an Ohio lawyer, explored the mountains with fellow lawyer Ben S. Grosscup and they authored a splendid book, The Heart of the Alleghanies; or, Western North Carolina, published in 1883.
My greatest skill has been to want but little. For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it. -Henry David Thoreau
Find the cost of freedom Buried in the ground. Mother Earth will swallow you. Lay your body down. -Stephen Stills
On December 17, 2008 I almost bought the farm. I was shooting pictures alongside Kephart Prong in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While peering through the viewfinder, I heard a tremendous crash. Leaping back from the camera, I saw the enormous tree limb that had just fallen. Had I been standing 18 inches farther north at that moment, this would have been the last picture I ever took:
Puh-leeze. Can we retire that comforting observation from our box of tools for making sense of life and death?
I was mulling this over the other evening while feeling particularly blissful. I had just tracked down a patch of pink lady slippers and was being serenaded by thousands of frogs while the moon was glowing golden overhead. I was on a bridge overlooking what might be my favorite river on the planet.
Moments of greatest contentment are a good time to think about death. The way I see it, if you haven’t learned how to die, you haven’t learned how to live. I’m still working on it.
This spring, I have delved into learning the wildflowers. With each foray into the woods, I’ve been kicking myself for waiting so long to get acquainted with the botanical diversity that graces these mountains. But as "civilization" becomes less appealing by the year, the natural world is increasingly attractive and hospitable. Flowers are a mighty fine portal to that realm.
I had intended to keep these thoughts to myself, but something odd happened this morning. I was thinking about Thoreau and wondering if he had made any pithy remarks about wildflowers. While researching it, I learned that Thoreau was buried on May 9, 1862. His coffin was covered with wildflowers as it was lowered into the ground of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.
Beyond the coincidence of the May 9 date, I discovered another coincidence. A well-known passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eulogy to Thoreau includes a reference to the lady slipper (Cypripedium):
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or a squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. On the day I speak of he looked for the Menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium not due till to-morrow. He thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days.
On that latter point about Thoreau, Emerson probably got it right. Neither one of them, however, could have anticipated a complicating factor announced by researchers in 2008:
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, November 4, 2008, vol. 105, pgs., 17029–17033), was that, on average, around Walden Pond plants are indeed flowering about a week earlier than they were during Thoreau’s time, coincident with local warming of about 4.3°F over the past 100 years. But hidden in that "average" are exactly which plants are doing well and which ones are not. A disproportionately large number of weedy, non-native species are the ones blooming earlier; these plants seem to have the genetic and behavioral flexibility to take advantage of those earlier warmer temperatures and blast out their flowers, getting an early start on reproduction. But the charismatic wildflowers—things like buttercups, anemones and asters, dogwoods, lilies, orchids, St. John’s worts, violets, and others are losing out. For whatever reason, they seem not to have the ability to move their flowering clock forward to get a jump on spring.
In the eulogy, Emerson did reveal a bit about Thoreau’s take on weeds:
"See these weeds," he said, "which have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields and gardens, such is their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too,—as Pigweed, Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-blossom." He says, "They have brave names, too,—Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth, etc."
Re-reading Emerson, I realize how little I have to say, when Emerson has already said so much in his inimitable manner. So, here are a few more excerpts from his tribute to Thoreau, who was buried 147 years ago today.
His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature,—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society. "Why should I? To detach the description from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it." His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.
His determination on Natural History was organic. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist, that "either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him." Snakes coiled round his legs; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. Our naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets: he would carry you to the heron's haunt, or even to his most prized botanical swamp,—possibly knowing that you could never find it again, yet willing to take his risks.
He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was not pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire.
He had many elegancies of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of meliot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond-lily,—then, the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and "life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight,—more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always destroying his forest. "Thank God," he said, "they cannot cut down the clouds!" "All kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint."
There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called "Life-Everlasting," a Gnaphalium like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens), climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweiss, which signifies Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.
It was getting late. I was ready to head back home and check out the pictures I'd taken. I got into the car, stepped on the gas, grabbed a random cassette and popped it in the player.
Traveling music.
Hmmm....
Disco.
Thumpp-uhh -Thumpp-uhh-Thumpp-uhh-Thumpp-uhh
Well now, I get low and I get high, And if I can't get either, I really try. Got the wings of heaven on my shoes. I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose. You know it's all right. It's ok. I'll live to see another day. We can try to understand The New York Times effect on man.
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin', And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive.
Joseph Cathey was a well-read merchant, miller and farmer at the Forks of the Pigeon in Haywood County. May 6, 1853, he planted “a 16 rowed yellow corn that grows with small and low stock and ripens early, has a small cob but rather a deep grain, and shells out well from the ear.”
He had soaked the seed in “drippings of stable manure, with copperas and salt petre dissolved in it.” Cathey believed that the result of the soaking was “to prevent the moles from eating it, as they run in the ground considerably, but they never interrupted the corn as I could see.”
Cathey was competing in the Indian Corn Sweepstakes of the North Carolina Agricultural Society, to see who could grow the most bushels on one acre of reclaimed land. Cathey wouldtake second place, with 101 bushels. The winner, from Buncombe County, was Nicholas Woodfin, who harvested 149 bushels and three quarts with the ears averaging seven and one-half inches long. Woodfin spared no expense to prepare the soil on his Buncombe County farm, applying plaster, ashes, and hundreds of wagon loads of muck and manure to enrich the ground.
Woodfin and Cathey achieved remarkable yields in spite of the drought in 1853. As Cathey noted, “the corn came up and grew well, until the 8th or 10th of July, when the drought, which had lasted then for about six weeks, began to affect it very much, and the drought continued for 2 weeks longer.” He went on to say, “The soil was a light poor sandy quality, and I believe that this dry year, without manure, it would not have made more than 8 or 10 bushels of corn.”
In earlier years, Cathey’s neighbors encouraged him to seek political office. After his 1842-44 service as State Senator, Cathey chose to step out of the political spotlight in favor of his entrepreneurial, community, and family life in the Upper Pigeon Valley of Haywood County.
Later, by 1860, Colonel Cathey was a Unionist who felt that newly elected Abraham Lincoln should be given a chance to carry out his promises not to abolish slavery and to promote compromise within the Union. Cathey was finally forced to declare for secession when President Lincoln asked the states to provide troops to “coerce” South Carolina back into the Union after they fired on Fort Sumter. Cathey knew, too that if North Carolina remained in the Union, it would be surrounded by states that had seceded.
Although there were no schools in Haywood County during his childhood, he was taught to read and do mathematical calculations. That Cathey was a learned man was evident from the multiple correspondences he carried on throughout his life. He was tutored in penmanship since he wrote in an elegant Spencerian style of handwriting.
Cathey’s meticulous daybooks and ledgers record transactions made at both his mill and his store and indicate an educated and organized mind. The oldest ledger available, dated 1849-1853, is a detailed book containing the names of his patrons, dates of transactions, lists of the exact items purchased, quantity, price, and balances on any accounts.
Cathey endured difficulties during and after the Civil War. He lost two sons, two sons-in-law, and a number of friends to the Civil War, and then on the night of August 14, 1869, Cathey’s mill burned down. The miller, George Bryson and his wife perished in the fire. They were buried in the slave cemetery across from the home Dred Blalock started building in 1860 for Colonel Joe Cathey’s son, Joseph Turner Cathey. It was rumored that the friends or family of a Confederate widow, who suspected Cathey of keeping money her husband had sent her, burned down the mill.
The restored Francis Grist Mill, just a few miles up the road from the site of Cathey’s mill.
[A serious longitudinal study of letters to the editor would reveal a great deal about changes in American culture. When reading LTEs these days, the term “more heat than light” comes to mind, in contrast to this example from the past.]
May 4, 1889
Nearly all the farmers have taken their cattle to the mountain range, have sheared their sheep and ‘turned them to the woods,’ and now have little feeding to do, excepting their work horses and mules. We are all about done planting corn, and I think the land for that crop has been better prepared for planting than it usually is. Our oats, sown on clay land are doing no good, on account of dry cool weather. Some farmers are talking about plowing them up and planting in corn. Wheat is looking very promising and will be a good crop if nothing occurs in the future to injure it.
I think the freeze last night ruined our prospects for peaches, apples and grapes. The clover fields are looking fine, especially where land plaster has been sown on the clover. I am glad to see the farmers sowing more clover, and using plaster to nourish it. I am satisfied that this is one of our best means for renovating the upland fields; and I am further satisfied that we have a soil in this community, well adapted to the production of clover, if we will but study and practice the proper mode for its culture and management.
– A. J. Long, Sr., Near Webster, N. C. (letter to the editor of the Tuckasegee Democrat newspaper)
Later that month, Mr. Long realized that the fruit crops were not as severely damaged as he had feared, and he also mentioned the thermal belt, a concept brought to prominence by Macon County’s Silas McDowell:
“Mr. Editor: Two weeks ago I gave it as my opinion that all the fruit about Webster was killed by the frost, but observations since have convinced me of my mistake. I find now, that in all the orchards (unforeseen contingencies excepted) there will be some peaches and out on the high lands, near the thermal belt, there will be abundance of both peaches and apples. I notice that the peach and damson trees in Webster are full of fruit; and I can see that the people in town are flattering themselves, that they will yet, have a peach pie this summer. … A. J. Long, Sr. Near Webster, May 20th, 1889″
APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. -T. S. Eliot, from The Waste Land
He groped for a doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone. -Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward Angel
We do not want merely to see beauty. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves. -C.S. Lewis, from Transposition and Other Addresses
This month I’ve been mulling over the fact that my life is (no less than) two-thirds gone. And that is an optimistic appraisal of the prospects for my longevity. Something about the month of April encourages the contemplation of mortality. Maybe it has to do with the rapid emergence of new life from a desolate landscape. The transformation occurs so quickly in April it can remind us how our own lives hurtle forward from seed to flower to fruit and to the inevitable phase of life’s cycle, death.
Pardon me for calling death a phase, but I’m struggling to find the right words. No, death is not the aberration, the exception, the interruption that comes later on. It isn’t easy to get beyond the way life and death have been dichotomized, posed as opposites. The inseparable unity of life and death, their ongoing coexistence, has occupied human thought for a long, long time, and it remains the ultimate mystery.
April has always been a favorite month of mine, and now more than ever thanks to my fairly recent interest in wildflowers. Living in the Southern Appalachians, I could spend all day every day of the month of April searching for the rainbow of spring blooms and still have more to see. When the page turns on April, I feel the regret of knowing I missed so much. The month sped by and now it’s gone. I’m not guaranteed even one more April, and if I’m fortunate enough to experience thirty more, that seems precious few for the great joy they bring.
In the spring of 1862, Henry David Thoreau must have known it was his final April. When he died on the 6th day of May, the early flowers were still filling in the New England woods that he loved. His mourners fashioned a wreath of wild andromeda to lay upon his coffin, a humble gesture befitting the man who had said “For Joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it.”
An incident he mentioned in the conclusion of Walden illustrates his take on life and death:
Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
It was an April day that led Thoreau to see the coming of spring as a green fire:
The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire — “et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata”— as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Living here, I enjoy a front-row seat for one of the greatest conflagrations of green fire in the world. No place on the entire planet (outside of the tropics) has greater plant diversity than the Southern Appalachians. And of the many distinct plant communities one might encounter during, let’s say, a one-hour drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway, no ecological neighborhood holds more abundance than the rich cove forest.
In Exploring Southern Appalachian Forests, Stephanie Jeffries and Thomas Wentworth catalog the traits of several ecological systems. As soon as I read their description of the cove forest, I pictured one particular place not far from home:
Diverse, cathedral-like stands of stately trees tower well over 100 ft above an open understory that features a stunning diversity of herbaceous plants. Cove forest soils are generally deep, and soil moisture is abundant. The herbaceous layer is remarkable for its diversity of spring wildflowers (before canopy leaf-out), when trilliums, spring beauties, trout lily, mayapple, and many others are in full bloom. Blue cohosh, common black cohosh, wood-nettle, bland sweet cicely, and yellow mandarin are among the best herbaceous indicators of rich cove forests.
Yes, I know such a place, and the more I recalled visits there in Aprils past, the more it exerted a magnetic pull on me. The drawing card of that cove is a forest service trail leading up the hill to an impressive waterfall. But for me, the real stars are the spring flowers that line the path. There may be another short trail where you could view a larger number of different wildflowers, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. Again this year, it was everything I remembered, and more.
Bringing along a camera sabotaged my original plan of walking the entire trail to the waterfall and back before dark. At some point in the past, I might have called myself a nature photographer. But I managed to acquire just enough proficiency to appreciate the gigantic chasm that separated me from photographers with real talent. The humbling light-bulb moment came during a workshop at the Nantahala Outdoor Center. After the instructor shared a slide show of his stunning camera work I was inspired, alright. I was inspired to pitch my Nikon into the nearby rapids of the Nantahala River.
Excellence as a wildflower photographer demands infinite patience, relentless determination, and meticulous attention to details. An expensive macro lens helps, too. Though I come up empty on all those requirements, I still enjoy toting my camera along on spring wildflower expeditions. Truth be told, I could be called a producer of “plant pornography,” zooming in for intimate closeups of the engorged reproductive parts of organisms at the peak of their procreative powers. Whew! Of course, that is precisely what the profusion of spring wildflowers is all about – a botanical sex show.
Setting aside the prurient aspects, these trips are a good opportunity to develop the most essential skill of an accomplished photographer, the ability to see. By bringing the camera, I search for the best shot, the ideal subject, the pleasing composition. I slow down. I pay attention. I get closer to the ground. Peering through the lens I start to see things that I would have remained blind to, otherwise. I slow down. Thirty minutes is not too long to spend with one flower when you are learning what it means to see what is there.
So if I am fortunate enough to capture an image worth printing, framing and hanging on the wall, that’s fine. And if not, the less tangible results are more rewarding anyhow. Ralph Waldo Emerson touched upon something like this in his eulogy of Thoreau:
His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature,—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society. “Why should I? To detach the description from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it.” His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.
April in the cove, crawling around on my belly to get the best camera angle on a clump of wild orchids is when the cares of “the world” fall away, and I find a bliss, a transcendent experience, that I seldom find anywhere else. Though nothing seems more certain or solid than that experience, it has an elusive quality to it. Bittersweet longing is inseparable from the joyous contentment of the moment. Only recently, I learned that this mysterious enigma is something C. S. Lewis explored throughout his writings. Over and over, he sought different ways to express the inexpressible about such moments. He wrote in The Problem of Pain:
You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported . . . All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it – made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
Though we lack a word for it in English, the German term “sehnsucht” comes close to this concept. William Wordsworth’s poetry frequently reflected, or at least hinted at, the theme of sehnsucht, as in the closing lines from Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:
And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquish’d one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Without using the word itself, C. S. Lewis offers as helpful a definition as one is liable to find for ‘sehnsucht” in Surprised by Joy:
In a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else, it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic; and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally be called unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.
Another April ends and I regret not spending more time in the cove. I know the longing will stay with me all year, and next April the cove will draw me back again for a few moments of joy, respite from what Thoreau called the “dead dry life of society.”
As one whose life is mostly gone, I don’t claim a great stockpile of wisdom. This I have observed – we spend the first part of our lives acquiring and accumulating. We grab on to people and things as if our lives depend on it. Then, unless we’re unusually slippery truants from the school of life, we spend the rest of our years learning to let go of the people and things we grasped so tightly, as they slip away one by one by one, until we learn to let go of mortality itself.
What would it mean to let go of the desire for another April in the cove? Am I attached to that place so tightly because it teaches me, in some paradoxical way, that my own mortality is insignificant? In Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces, the characters have this conversation:
“I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death.” “Ah, Psyche,” I said, “have I made you so little happy as that?” “No, no no,” she said. “You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”
Or as Lewis puts it another time:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
And that just about sums up what I learned this month, on a walk through the rich cove forest, in a place not far from here.
That is more than enough pretentious yammering from me. Here’s another Wordsworth passage, from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:
These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
[What better way to commence this site than with an article about Silas McDowell. I’ve been inspired by his work for more than forty years and wrote this piece for theSpring 1992 edition of Katuah Journal. McDowell lived near the Cullasaja River in Macon County in the 19th century and in innumerable letters and articles shared his own explorations of the Cowees. This will be the first of many posts featuring Silas McDowell.]
Amongst the valleys of the southern Alleghanies sometimes winter is succeeded by warm weather, which, continuing through the months of March and April, brings out vegetation rapidly, and clothes the forests in an early verdure. This pleasant spring weather is terminated by a few days’ rain, and the clearing up is followed by cold, raking winds from the northwest, leaving the atmosphere of a pure indigo tint, through which wink bright stars, but if the wind subsides at night, the succeeding morning shows a heavy hoar frost; vegetation is utterly killed, including all manner of fruit germs, and the landscape clothed in verdure the day before now looks dark and dreary. – Silas McDowell
On the morning of April 28, 1858, Silas McDowell encountered this bleak scene when he went out to inspect his farm. The Macon County fruit grower had spent almost thirty years establishing his orchard of 600 apple trees near the banks of the Cullasaja River. However, this late spring freeze “made nearly a clean sweep from our mountain valleys in Western North Carolina of the richest promise of a fruit crop that we have ever had.” For anyone else, the incident would have been a crushing disappointment. For McDowell, it was another opportunity to examine nature’s mysteries and to find a better way of farming in the mountains.
McDowell had deliberately selected a sheltered valley for his orchard. Only a settler too poor to buy bottom land would have tried to grow fruit high on the mountainsides. And yet, on this April morning, McDowell realized his mistake. While his own trees “seemed as if clothed in a black pall,” he observed on the mountains looming over his orchard a broad horizontal band of vegetation left unscathed by the freeze.
Around 1780, Thomas Jefferson had witnessed similar temperature inversions in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia. He reported, “I have known frosts so severe as to kill the hiccory trees round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain.” Silas McDowell understood that this was more than simply a quirk of topography and climate. He suspected that thermal belts could be the secret to successful fruit production in mountainous areas.
By the summer of 1858 he wrote that “all description of fruit trees which have the good fortune to be located in this vernal region, are now bending beneath a heavy crop of fruit.” He began to promote the value of this zone for fruit growers and contributed a report to the United States Agricultural Reports for 1861. In his article on the “belt of no frost” McDowell explained:
The beautiful phenomenon of the ‘Verdant Zone’ or ‘Thermal Belt’ exhibits itself upon our mountain sides, commencing about three hundred feet vertical height above the valleys, and traversing them in a perfectly horizontal line throughout their entire length like a vast green ribbon upon a black ground.
Born in South Carolina in 1795, McDowell moved to Asheville in his youth for training as a tailor. He practiced his trade in Charleston and Morganton before settling in Macon County’s Cullasaja Valley, where he gained renown as a fruit grower, amateur naturalist and story teller. His articles on the mountains were published in popular magazines and caught the attention of leading botanists, who sought his help in finding rare plants of the Southern Appalachians. When a visiting scientist asked which college he had attended, McDowell pointed to the hills surrounding his farm and replied, “These wild mountains are the only college at which my name has ever been entered as a student!” In a tribute to Silas McDowell, T. F. Glenn remembered him as modest and unassuming, and also:
…intuitive, impulsive and passionate. His companionship with nature was a marked feature of his character. His glowing imagination imparted to the most trivial objects beauty and sublimity. By a native force of genius, by dint of fiery energy of will, by persistent application, he surmounted obstacles.
McDowell’s tenacious efforts to raise winter keeping apples had earned him a reputation among southern fruit growers even before the thermal belt episode. When McDowell and his bride, Elizabeth, moved to Macon County in 1830 they brought a baby’s cradle filled with small apple trees from her grandfather’s orchard near Asheville. Being especially fond of winter apples, McDowell chose varieties recommended by northern pomologists. His results were like those of other southern growers:
I made a complete failure, for when my trees began to bear fruit, it matured and fell from the tree long before the proper time, and though they were an excellent collection of Autumn Apples, there was not a good Winter keeper amongst them.
For fifteen years, McDowell struggled to raise winter keepers. Then, the editor of a farm paper in Athens, Georgia suggested that he take grafts from native seedling apples. McDowell followed James Carmack’s advice and searched the hills around his home for fruit stock. He found what he had been looking for:
Amongst old Cherokee seedling Apple trees – as well as other Southern seedlings, I have succeeded in conferring on Southern Pomology a list of names of Winter Apples, which both as to their highly aromatic taste, as well as late winter keeping qualities, cannot be excelled by as many varieties of Winter Apples in the United States.
His catalog of new apples featured the Carmack, Nickajack, Bullasage, Mavereck Winter Sweet, Royal Pearmam, Hoover, Golden Pippin, Buff, Kingrussett and Neverfail. “None but late keepers in the list,” McDowell noted with delight. In 1870, William Saunders with the Agriculture Department concluded, “There is not a doubt about it, the finest winter apples in America are grown on these mountain lands.” McDowell could take much of the credit.
McDowell, always concerned with the region’s economy, believed that vineyards established within the thermal belt could be a mainstay of mountain agriculture. “The Grape,” McDowell predicted:
…will never fail to yield to the husbandman a rich and abundant crop of its luscious and heart-cheering fruit; and had the vine locomotion, corporal and mental sense, I would bid it to ‘Tarry not in all the plains; but flee to the mountains for its life,’ and take refuge under the protection of the Thermal Stratum!
Much as he had in his quest for winter apples, McDowell explored the mountains to find superior varieties of grapes. He speculated on the potential of hybridizing some of the specimens:
We cannot well command our risibles when, in fancy, we anticipate the aspect of that monster Grape that will be produced by the hybridal cross betwixt the Hon. A. G. Semmes’s eight pound bunches and the Mammoth Grape Prof. C. D. Smith and ourself measured yesterday, the single berries of which girted three and a quarter inches round.
After the Civil War, McDowell continued to write on agricultural topics, presided over the Fruit Growers Association and pleaded for extension of the Western North Carolina Railroad. He was constantly learning more – from natural phenomena, the culture of the Cherokees and the latest farm journals. In his judgment, the climate and terrain of the mountains did not have to be obstacles to successful farming. Instead, the unique character of the mountains could support a distinctive form of agriculture.
Diversity was one aspect of the mountain agriculture he envisioned:
Dairying, grape culture, bee culture, sheep husbandry supplemented by a woolen cloth factory. Are these the only items of new industries our mountain section is capable of?
He went on to suggest one more:
I have recently learned that a man studied Fish culture, constructed him a three-acre pond near the city of Atlanta, Ga., and then from Florida procured a can of eggs of the Scaly Trout species.
After hatching the eggs and raising the fish to maturity, the man realized an income of fifteen thousand dollars in one year. Wanting to attempt a similar venture with mountain trout, McDowell had a small pond built amid a grove of oaks near his home:
Their feed will consist of the waste from the kitchen and table, with all small animals that come my way, chopped up fine, supplemented by a lazy cat, in an emergency. There is nothing but the lack of a pure stream and vim to hinder any man having a mountain farm, to do the same thing, and have a fat trout for breakfast every day the year through.
McDowell lived long enough to see the impact of extractive industries on the mountain environment. When Western North Carolina’s first corundum mine opened near McDowell’s farm in 1871, he turned a disaster into a blessing. Thirty years before, a flood had swept across the best portion of his farm, “a fertile bottom-field of about 50 acres.” McDowell described the damage. “I found that field, on which I expected to make forty bushels of corn to the acre, to be a miniature Sahara of white sand, and would no longer pay the expense of resetting and keeping up the fences.”
The field had remained in this condition until the coming of the corundum mine, which was polluting the Cullasaja River. “As the mine was worked by means of a hose-pipe, a red stream of clay and water came running down the mountain’s side defiling our beautiful river and chasing away the fish.” It occurred to McDowell that he could protect the river and reclaim his field at the same time:
Thanks to Sir Samuel Baker for his suggestions in relation to redeeming some of the African deserts by sitting them with the muddy waters of the Nile. And I forthwith applied to Col. Jenks, who controlled the mine, for leave to run a ditch down the mountain from the mine to my sands – a distance of three-fourths of a mile. The next thing I did, was to throw up a dike on the river side of the bottom, to hold on the sands the muddy waters until they are absorbed – a thing not hard to do, as the sands swallow them up very fast and ‘thirst for more.’ The water of my ditch performs the carrying service of ten dump carts, and does the thing for nothing and we may add, loads itself. This enterprise I view as my last act in life’s drama, and I feel ambitious to do the thing well, and make my best bow to my fellow-farmers as the curtain drops.
Silas McDowell died in 1879. His life work, promoting agricultural practices appropriate to the region, endures. McDowell brought curiosity, ingenuity, perseverance and humor to the task, qualities that would enhance any efforts to renew mountain agriculture as we approach the 21st century.
