a high-climbing, woody vine that is known by several names, including Carolina jessamine, poor man’s rope, or yellow jasmin.It smells good. It’s native to the U.S. southeast.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 February 2011.
-jsq
Further, William Bartram did mention it in his Travels of 1791, as
French mulberry.
Curiously, even though Google books does have Bartram’s book,
ngrams doesn’t seem to show French mulberry for that date,
but does show American mulberry.
Even more curious, William Bartram’s father, John Bartram,
corresponded with Linnaeus, the founder of modern
botanical terminology.
The currently most popular name is beautyberry, which turns out to be related to the scientific genus name, Callicarpa: Greek kalli means beautiful, and Karpos means fruit.
The plant has all sorts of uses: Continue reading
The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel.
Here’s a very interesting biography of this very influential
pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including
many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida
life and politics:
The Art of Managing Longleaf:Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard, who was originally hired by quail plantation owners around Thomasville to figure out why their quail populations were decreasing. The answer included a need to thin and especially to burn their longleaf pine tree forests. Stoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century between them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing timber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees to pay for the whole thing. Their Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks. In this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically different from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut “efficient” timbering cycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail: Continue reading
Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty talks about a tree from Peru,
“huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years”:
“At the bottom of the profile, I found lots of huarango pollen. This indicates that large forests were originally growing in that area.Hm, around here we’ve only seen a 700-year flood last year. When it happens again in a year or so, what will we call it?Subsequently, I saw cotton pollen and other weeds, but still a lot of huarango pollen. It seems at this stage farming was in balance with the environment,” Chepstow-Lusty said.
Then, about 400 A.D., the Nazca apparently stopped growing cotton, switching to large crops of maize.
The researchers found a major reduction of huarango pollen, indicating that people started clearing the forests to plant more crops.
But the agricultural gain from clearing forests was short-lived. When a mega El Nino event hit the south coast of Peru in about 500 A.D., there were no huarango roots to anchor the landscape.
The fields and canal systems were washed away, leaving a desert environment. Today, only pollen from plants adapted to salty and arid conditions can be found, Chepstow-Lusty said.
“The bottom line is that the Nazca could have survived the devastating El Nino floods had they kept their forests alive. Basically, the huarango trees would have cushioned that major event,” Beresford-Jones said.
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest,
by Lawrence S. Earley
The tallest and strongest of pine trees, longleaf made great sailing ship masts , tar for caulking ships, and of course saw timber. How the early settlers cut down trees for houses and to clear land to farm. Their hogs and cows running loose in the woods ate the young longleaf, suppressing new trees for a hundred years. Then professional forestry took over, trying to suppress the fire that destroyed northern white pine forests, yet which preserves southern longleaf pine forests. The sad story of turpentine: we knew better, but we did it anyway.
The peculiar life cycle of a tree that starts out looking like a clump of grass, and can stay that way for decades, yet promotes and survives fire and can grow more than 100 feet tall and live for centuries. The thousands of species of plants, animals, and fungi the forest protects, many of them, like wiregrass, also adapted to fire.
How tuberculosis and quail led to new understandings of longleaf and fire, and the people who discovered those things. We do know how to grow these trees now, and lots of people are doing it: for jobs, for sawtimber, for the beauty of the forest.
I was going to start by posting a short list, but each item was turning into a review, so I’ll just post them one by one as reviews.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home),
by Janisse Ray.
How dirt poor crackers and corporate greed destroyed most of the most diverse ecosystem in North America; yet these same people are the tragic heroes of the book. Half autobiography, half ecology, this book will either get you with Janisse’s “stunning voice” or you won’t get it. If you’re from around here, you’ll hear the wind in the pines, feel the breeze, and see the summer tanagers yellow in the sun. If you’re not, here’s your chance to meet a “heraldry of longleaf” up close and personal.
“I will rise from my grave with the hunger of wildcat, wings of kestrel….”See Janisse read in Moultrie. “More precious than handfuls of money.” See her wikipedia page for a pretty good bio.
But read the book.
If nothing else, you’ll never think the same again about Amazon
deforestation once you realize we already did that to ourselves,
and in the south we live in the devastated remnants of what was
one of the most extensive forests on earth, with longleaf pine trees
100 feet tall and 500 years old, maintained by fire, protecting everything from the Lord God bird to the lowly Bachman’s sparrow, from the rattlesnake-eating indigo snake to the beetles that live in gopher tortoise burrows.
The forest can return,
because reforestation can pay.
Meanwhile, there are still places
where you can see how it used to be.
Janisse Ray had a lot to do with preserving Moody Forest, too,
but that’s another story.
-jsq
This is Elsie’s 100th year: Continue reading
Some of you may remember my aunt, Elsie Quarterman, born in Valdosta,
played basketball for Hahira High School:
At 99 years old she won’t be outwalking everybody like she used to, but she will be there. Road trip to Lebanon, Tennessee? Y’all come!Cedars of Lebanon State Park will host its annual Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade Wildflower Festival April 30 – May 1. Held in partnership with The Center for Cedar Glade Studies of Middle Tennessee State University, this event will offer visitors an opportunity to learn more about the area through seminars, guided nature walks, exhibits, guest speakers and naturalist displays. All events are free and open to the public.
“We are honored to be hosting this 33rd annual event and excited about the roster of experts on hand during this two-day festival,” said Park Ranger and Naturalist Wayne Ingram. “We have numerous activities and educational opportunities planned for all ages and encourage everyone to join us – rain or shine.”
Dr. Elsie Quarterman was professor Emeritus of Vanderbilt University and pioneered cedar glade research in the early 1950s. Coupled with her extensive research at this site, Dr. Quarterman has been an advocate for natural area protection throughout her distinguished career. Her efforts helped Tennessee in 1971 become one of the first states to pass legislation to protect natural areas in the U.S.
Echinacea tennesseensis, the Tennessee coneflower, thought to be extinct until Elsie rediscovered it: Continue reading
Janisse Ray
spoke and read from her books in Moultrie last night.
The place was packed with a wide variety of people:
Here’s her opening poem: Continue reading
Janisse Ray plans
to speak in Moultrie and sign books.
The Georgia Center for the Book, with the support of the Georgia Humanities Council, is working with the Moultrie-Colquitt County Library System and the Moultrie Chapter of the Georgia Conservancy to present a free public lecture and book-signing by Ray on Tuesday, Jan. 26, at 7 p.m., in the library auditorium.Why should you care?Ray was born in Baxley, Ga., and is an environmentalist activist, poet, a memoirist and the award-winning author of “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.” This book, a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast, was published by Milkweed Editions in 1999.
Ray has won a Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999, an American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000. “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” was a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as the Book All Georgians Should Read.Are you tired of development trumps all? Do you like trees and home-grown vegetables? Come hear Janisse Ray!As an organizer and activist, she works to create sustainable communities, local food systems, a stable global climate, intact ecosystems, clean rivers, life-enhancing economies, and participatory democracy. She is a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper and is on the board of the Environmental Leadership Center of Warren Wilson College and Satilla Riverkeeper.