Forsythia heralds the spring season

The recent warm spell has the birds singing and various plants budding. One of these is forsythia. My wife, Elizabeth, recently placed several clippings in a vase in our home, near a window, where the light and warmth will force them into early bloom. But they’ll soon be flowering in gardens and in the wild, where they have become naturalized. They are one of the few flowering plants that flourish in March, brightening dooryards, woodland edges, and stream margins with their delicate spires of yellow flowers.

A member of the Olive Family, forsythia belongs to a genus containing seven distinct species, all of which are native to eastern Asia, except for one that’s found in eastern Europe. Three of the Asian species are the ones introduced as ornamentals into Europe and this country beginning in the early 19th century. They are known by their generic name (Forsythia) and by common names like golden bells, yellow bells, and “yaller” bells.

The scientific name honors William Forsyth (1837-1804), a founding member of the Royal Horticultural Society of London. It was Forsyth, by the way, who encouraged the botanical studies of John Fraser, the Scottish botanist who explored the Southern Appalachians during the late 18th century, discovering Fraser fir, Fraser sedge, and other notable plants.

Numerous variegated, dwarf, and many-flowered horticultural varieties of forsythia were developed in the 20th century; however, three of the Asian species ae the ones you’re likely to encounter around old homesteads here in the Smokies region. If you’ve been wondering, as I have, about the kind of old-time forsythias growing on your property, it’s possible to make a reasonable determination based on various growth characteristics.

Weeping forsythia (Forsythia suspensa) was introduced into cultivation in 1833 by Philipp Siebold (1791-1866), a German physician who worked for the Dutch East India Company in Japan from 1826-1830. He later established a nursery at Leiden, where he also introduced Japanese azaleas, bamboos, camellias, hydrangeas, and lilies. Weeping forsythia grows eight feet or more high, with slender branches often bending to the ground and rooting at its tips. The flowers are bright yellow. The toothed leaves are often deeply lobed or divided into three parts. The twigs are hollow except where leaves occur.

Greenstem forsythia (Forsythia viridissima) was introduced into cultivation in 1844 by William Fortune (1813-1880), a Scottish plant collector sent to China in 1843 by the Royal Horticultural Society. In those days, the trip from China to England around the Cape of Good Hope took up to five months in salt-spray conditions that killed most exposed plants. Fortune shipped his plants home in Wardian cases, glass boxes sealed together so that no moisture escaped, with sufficient soil in the bottom of the container so that root cuttings or small plants could be grown.

In this manner, he was able to introduce such plants as Chinese anemone, golden larch, Oriental bleeding heart, Chinese fringe tree, lacebark pine, double-file viburnum, white-flowered wisteria, old-fashioned weigela, and forsythia. Greenstem forsythia has erect, bright green branches, reaching up to 10 feet high. The flowers are greenish-yellow. Most of the lance-shaped leaves are toothed, although a few may be smooth-edged. This is the only forsythia species graced with autumn leaf color, a lovely purplish red. The pith inside the twigs is partitioned.

Korean forsythia (Forsythia ovata) was introduced into cultivation in 1919 by E.H. “Chinese” Wilson (1876-1930), an English plant collector sent to Asia on four separate occasions by the Arnold Arboretum in Cambridge, Mass. Wilson was responsible for introducing hundreds of plant species into cultivation, including regal lilies. He located a new species of forsythia in the remote Diamond Mountains of Korea. This species has proved to be the hardiest of all the forsythias, one that does well in northern New England and would prosper in the higher elevations here in the Southern Appalachians. The bright yellow flowers are smaller and not as prominent as those of the species described above. The ovate leaves clearly distinguish it from any other forsythia.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Owls remain mysterious, alluring

Of late, I have been hearing the owls sounding off on the slopes and ridge lines behind our home. Some folks think of owls as evil omens, but I like to listen to them. They are, for me, the nocturnal call of the wild.

Learning to identify the owls that reside here in the Smokies region by sight or sound isn’t difficult. There are but five species one can reasonably anticipate encountering: barn, saw-whet, screech, great horned, and barred. Two others — the snowy and the long-eared have been reported from the mountains — but they are highly irregular winter visitors.

The barn owl, a white bird with a heart-shaped face that lends it a monkey-like appearance, is only occasionally encountered here. If you live on a large open farm with outbuildings that seem to be haunted by ghostly creatures emitting screams and chuckles, you probably have barn owls.

To see or hear the little eight-inch high saw-whet owl during the breeding season, you have to visit the spruce-fir country along the Blue Ridge Parkway or along the Clingmans Dome spur from Newfound Gap in the Smokies (especially at Indian Gap and the parking area of the Spruce-Fir Nature Trail), where they reach the southernmost extension of their range from the great Canadian zone forest. They can occasionally be observed in the lower elevations during the winter months.

In Birds of the Smokies (1991), East Tennessee State University ornithologist Fred Alsop noted: “The first report of this small northern owl’s occurrence in the park was made in 1941. Its presence has lured and excited many birders since .... The owl is named for the quality of its monotonous whistled song which, to the ornithologist who named it, sounded like someone sharpening (whetting) a saw.” The first nesting sites for this owl in the southern mountains were located for the first time in recent decades.

More common than the barn or saw-whet owls are the screech, great horned, and barred owls. In December when they are mating, I hear great horned owls hooting on the high ridges along the so-called “Road to Nowhere” that leads into the national park north of Bryson City. These great birds are the equivalent of a wildcat in regard to hunting prowess. They often live and feed in suburban or urban areas, where rodents are plentiful. If you have a cat that’s missing, think great horned owl.

Screech owls are not aptly named, their call actually being a quavering, descending whinny. A better name would be “whinnying owl.” Alsop noted that: “They may be reddish, brown, or gray in their plumage and in the park the reddish phase outnumbers the gray by approximately four to one; brown plumaged birds are extremely rare.”

Learn to imitate their whistling call and they’ll answer you right back, especially from July into October. A mediocre imitator of owls, I have nevertheless lured them to within 15 or so yards or so of our back porch, probably hoping to see who the fool was making such a racket.

My favorite owl is the barred, which Alsop noted is “probably the the most frequently encountered owl in the Smokies.” If you spot a fair-sized owl, lacking “horns,” with a barred upper breast, it’s most likely a barred owl.

I sometimes hear them during daylight hours when walking backcountry trails, especially near gaps at about 3,500 to 4,000 feet. My notion (scientifically unverified) is that many bird species frequent gap areas so as to easily pass back and forth from one watershed or the other for sunlight or food.

I don’t ever recall walking up from Coopers Creek in the national park above Ela to Deeplow Gap on Thomas Divide Ridge without hearing a barred owl in the gap area. Up north, they are thought to say, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?” While down south they seem to say, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?” A native mountaineer might hear one calling out, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-uns?” Same bird — differing regional dialects — depending on the ears of the beholder.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The common beauty of the robin

Some birds — blue jays, cardinals, mockingbirds, song sparrows, etc. — are so much a part of our everyday lives that they have virtually become invisible. We see them without truly paying attention to their comings and goings, to their particular characteristics.

Of these, the American robin is perhaps the most characteristic. Our elementary school primers inevitably contained illustrations of robust robins pulling long worms out of holes. These days, robins populate television screens on Saturday mornings as they hop about in cartoon features, representing — as it were — the idea of a “bird.” We know what a robin looks like in outline and we know how to spell “r-o-b-i-n” — but do we know anything much about the living entities that are robins?

In my case the answer, until recently, was “No.” Large flocks of robins gathering in recent weeks in the cove where we live adjacent to the national park gave me pause to think about them and do a little research and direct observation.

From the mid-Atlantic states westward to Arkansas and southward through southeastern forests and sometimes cities, large wintering roosts may be established, but then the birds shift their concentrations with cold fronts or after nearby food resources are depleted.

The common name is short for “Robin redbreast.” The origin of the second part of that name is obvious, but in reality a mature female’s breast feathers are often more orange than red. Robin is, of course, the diminutive of Robert, being used as either a masculine or feminine given name. The name was initially applied to the English robin (a warbler with a red breast) and transferred by the early settlers to America’s red-breasted bird.

When I started observing birds closely some years ago, I was interested to learn that the robin is a member of the thrush family; that is, it’s a cousin of the two other common thrushes that frequent Western North Carolina: the wood thrush and the bluebird.

Another family member, the hermit thrush, visits all parts of the Smokies region during the winter months (migrating here from the north) and has been extending its breeding range south in recent years. They are common on Mount Mitchell during the summer months.

Swainson’s, Bicknell’s, and gray-cheeked thrushes migrate through our area in spring and fall on their way to and from breeding grounds farther north. These three species are rarely observed except by experienced birders.

Thrushes are large-eyed, slender-billed, strong-legged birds that as adults often display spotted breasts. Robins and bluebirds are, of course, not spot-breasted when mature, but this family characteristic is obvious while the birds are young.

Formerly just a woodland bird, many robins have now abandoned their forest abodes to nest near human residences where shrubs and scattered trees provide protection and easy access to lawns. Still, when driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway or other high-elevation roadways during the breeding season, it’s always surprising how many robins one sees at elevations above 5,000 feet. And when you camp in the spruce-fir region, it’s often the robin’s song that first breaks the pre-dawn silence.

In winter, you can easily spot the large nests that the female constructs in the crotch of a small tree or on the horizontal limb of a larger tree. Inside the nest you will find a mud cup lined with dry grasses and other vegetation.

Robins feed upon various insects, fruits, and berries, but their preferred food — just like the school primers and cartoons say — is the lowly but nutritious earthworm, which they apparently locate by both sight and sound. A robin with a cocked head is actually listening for underground worm movement. And they have been observed using small sticks to rake aside leaves in order to expose worms and insects — an instance of “tool use” normally not associated with birds.

During the winter months — especially January and February — robins gather in large communal flocks that may number a thousand birds. Flocks that frequent our cove periodically (about once every five years or so) roost in a stand of large white oaks high on the ridge so as to catch the first warm rays of the morning sun and gradually work their way into the valley as the sun warms up the slopes.

In the 19th century, Audubon reported that hunters sought out their communal roosts with “bows and arrows, blowpipes, guns, and traps of different sorts,” causing “a sort of jubilee” as they slaughtered the birds for their plump breast meat. One of my great-aunts in piedmont Virginia, who grew up during the lean, hard days following the Civil War always professed a fondness for robin meat. She paid me an allowance for each one I shot with my BB gun and brought to the kitchen. That’s how I got into birding.

Charlotte Hilton Green, in her book Birds of the South (1933), stated that, “The greatest migratory flock of robins ever known was seen near New Hope, Gaston County, North Carolina. Game Warden Ford estimated that there were several millions roosting in the pinewoods. For over a week they wheeled about in the sky, coming to rest in the woods, and in flight they appeared like dark clouds. This great flock was the nearest approach of modern times to the flocks of passenger pigeons that, only a few generations ago, were so numerous that they darkened the earth during their migratory flights .... May the day never come when our robin red-breasts will likewise fail to be numbered among the winged travelers of the skies.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Getting to know liverworts

Some years ago, when I was first interested in plant identification, I became curious about liverworts. They are one of the distinctive plant groups (like fungi, lichens, mushrooms, etc.) without advanced vascular systems.

The very name “liverwort” was intriguing, but I didn’t really know what one looked like. So I studied the illustrations and texts in several plant books and went out looking for liverworts in the woodlands near my house. It was the sort of low-key “adventure” that botanizers relish. We’d rather locate a new type of plant, however mundane, than encounter a dinosaur.

I was armed with the information that “wort” means plant or herb, and that the first part of their common name derives from the fact that about one-fifth of all liverworts grow in flattened lobes (thalli) that somewhat resemble the human liver. Moreover, liverworts were reported to be “particularly abundant in rocky, moist places where the light level is too low for competing flowering plants.”

I decided to restrict my hunt to those more obvious types that display a ribbon-like thallus rather than those that closely resemble moss. And it seemed as if I needed to head down the creek from my house, where there’s plenty of shade and an abundance of rock seepage slopes along the pathway.

I’d advanced perhaps 75-feet down the creek when I spotted my first liverwort stand. A little colony was growing on a small outcrop situated in perpetual shade just above the creek. I’d walked past it hundreds of times in the past without knowing that liverworts even existed.

Several weeks later, looking out my kitchen window toward the springhead behind the house, I spotted a colony of several thousand liverworts growing along a small streambed. Which all goes to prove, I suppose, that you generally have to know what you’re looking for before you’ll actually “see” it.

I have become fond of liverworts and no longer go near a seepage area or waterfall without looking for them. In liverworts, one can observe an example of the type plant that bridged fundamental evolutionary gap between aquatic algae and the land-dwelling plants millions upon millions of years ago. Like ferns and club mosses — which represent the next step up the evolutionary ladder — they live on land and reproduce by spores but must do so in damp places because they have no protective outer layer to prevent water loss. In addition, their free-swimming sperm require a film of water to reach and fertilize the egg cells.

I have learned that liverworts exist in two forms that can be readily distinguished. First, there’s the gametophyte plant (the ribbon-like thallus); and second, there are the sporophyte plants (resembling tiny umbrellas) that grow out of the thallus and contain the male and female sexual parts.

As each liverwort plant is either male or female, colonies that reproduce successfully in a sexual manner (cross-fertilization) grow closely together — often overlapping in dense, tangled mats — so that the transmission of sperm can take place via the constant moisture covering the plants. Such a colony resembles a miniature rain forest as viewed from an airplane.

To insure reproduction when there isn’t enough moisture, liverworts also reproduce asexually by little cups or nests that form on the thallus. Inside these cups, very small spherical bodies (gemmae) appear that eventually detach themselves and germinate directly into new plants. The cups containing these gemmae resemble tiny bird nests.

And as a final reproductive backup, some species are able to divide themselves where forks develop along the thallus strands and go their separate asexual ways. Each of these detached branches may fork again and separate, without any apparent limit, ad infinitum.

It’s easy to cull through a dense liverwort colony and locate branching divisions that are just about to divide in this manner. It’s a system whereby the youngest part of the plant body is always in the forefront, nearest the fork, while the older, dying part brings up the rear. Curiously enough, when death reaches a fork, it creates new life.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

An interested observer

omething banged against the office window above my desk. I assumed it was a bird of some sort. And since my office is upstairs over Main Street just off the town square in Bryson City — where the bird population is not varied — I was thinking house sparrow or starling.

Standing and looking out onto the window ledge, I saw an immature mourning dove. Obviously stunned by the collision, it remained hunkered-down on its belly, looking straight up through the windowpane at me. Since it didn’t appear to have a neck or wing injury, I didn’t attempt to open the window and help out.

Sure enough, after several moments, the bird got to its feet, shook its head to clear out the cobwebs, walked over to the edge of the ledge and peered down to check out the street below. It then came back to the window for another look at me.

I suppose from a bird’s point-of-view the species “Homo sapiens” is something of a curiosity. From my viewpoint any chance to observe an animal up close for an extended period — especially a bird— is welcomed.

Mourning doves have been, it seems to me, becoming more numerous each year here in Western North Carolina. Even walking up on them in downtown parking lots — where they come to find grit to help in the digestion of food — is a common experience. Often they wait until almost tread upon before suddenly flying straight up on reverberating wings to a nearby telephone line or tree.

When a plant or animal is encountered almost daily, it’s all too easy to sort of stop seeing them. Something registers in our brain identifying it as a dove or a daisy or a squirrel or a daylily or our neighbor, but in such instances we have to make an effort to really see anew with fresh eyes.

“Study the familiar,” one of the old Chinese sages admonished. Chinese sages were always admonishing other people to do this or that; yet, paying attention is easier said than done.

That sudden early-morning thump on the windowpane had in this instance truly gotten my attention so that I was able to look more closely than is usually the case. We — the bird and I — studied one another for the next 15 or so minutes.

Other than being slightly smaller and lacking the purple iridescence on the nape and sides of the neck of mature doves (especially males), this bird also had not assumed the sleek, streamlined plumage it would acquire before long. It had the fluffy sort of baffled appearance characteristic of young birds of any species.

It did have the distinctive black spotting on the brownish-gray upper body that serves as camouflage for the species in open fields and nest sites. And its head was noticeably small in contrast with overall body size — a feature that’s easy to note when spotting mourning doves on telephone wires along roadsides.

In our area, mourning doves like to build their nests in white pines where the spoke-like whorl of limbs joins the main trunk. It wasn’t possible to determine exactly how old my visitor might be, but it’s probable that he or she wasn’t more than a couple of weeks out of the shell. Mourning doves have protracted breeding seasons, during which they produce up to six broods during a given year. Once a baby dove is about twelve days old, it’s shooed out of the nest.

While in the nest, they are fed an extremely nutritious milk-like substance called “pigeon’s milk” or “crop milk” generated from seeds in the lining of the adult’s crops. This fluid is then “pumped up” so that the babies access it by inserting their bills into the base of the parent’s bill just above a red marking that serves as a feeding-target. After dining in this manner for about 10 days, the immature birds are weaned onto a diet of seeds ... then they’re on their own.

When not eyeballing me, my newfound acquaintance on the ledge waddled back and forth inspecting and occasionally digesting bits of sand and debris. After awhile, the bird moved over to the window and pecked on the glass, as if wanting in.

I started to unlatch the window and open it a few inches to see if the bird did indeed want to join me. But the commotion was too much for the inquisitive bird’s nerves. In the blink of an eye, it was across the street perched on the alarm tower atop the fire station.

The telephone on my desk rang. By the time I’d hung up and looked again, it was gone.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Wolf lore

In the beginning, the people say, the dog was put on the mountain and the wolf beside the fire. When winter came the dog could not stand the cold, so he came down to the settlement and drove the wolf from the fire. The wolf ran to the mountains, where it suited him so well that he prospered and increased, until after awhile he ventured down again and killed some animals in the settlements. The people got together and followed and killed him, but his brothers came from the mountain and took such revenge that ever since the people have been afraid to hunt the wolf.

— James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900)

 

I’ve been thinking about wolves. This past weekend my family watched the VHS version of “Jeremiah Johnson,” starring Robert Redford. Directed by Sydney Pollack, who passed away this past May, the movie premiered in 1972.

Having seen less than 100 movies in my entire life, I’m not a film critic by any means. But I think it’s a good movie, with exciting scenery (apparently in Utah), sparse dialogue, and lots of action.

One of the episodes involves an attack on Jeremiah’s horse and burro in which he helps fight off a pack of wolves. The savagery lasts for several hectic minutes, with hooves flying, wolves snarling and gnashing, guns blazing, and Jeremiah severely wounded before the pack retreats.

Timber or gray wolves formerly ranged over most of North America, but no longer exist in the wild in the eastern United States. The demise of the wolf began with the arrival of the colonial settlers, who brought an inbred fear and hatred of the “blood-thirsty varmint” from Europe and would not tolerate raids upon their livestock.

The first wolf bounty was set in eastern North Carolina in 1748 at 10 shillings for each wolf scalp. Bounty hunters pursued them with guns, dogs, and wolf pits. After the American Revolution, the bounty in North Carolina climbed to $5 per scalp.

This intense pressure helped drive most of the remaining wolf population into the North Carolina mountains by the early 1800s, where skillful hunters familiar with the upcountry terrain were required. The period of the Civil War marked a resurgence of wolves as many excellent marksmen were pulled out of the mountains or otherwise occupied by the conflict so that the multiplying wolves became increasingly brazen.

But by the 1880s, they had become a scarce commodity even in Western North Carolina. According to Mammals in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1985) the “last gray wolf was killed in Haywood County in 1887.

That date seems unlikely as “The Bryson City (NC) Times” was referring to wolves being “up around Clingman’s Dome” on into the early 1890s. And reports of their presence in both WNC and east Tennessee lingered on into the early 20th century.

Scalp bounties were paid in both Swain and Clay counties North Carolina in 1889. The Swain County bounty was paid by the county commissioners, who “allotted Q.L. Rose $5 for wolf scalp.” That was, of course, the legendary fiddle-player, storyteller, blockader, and hunter Aquila (“Quil”) Rose, who made his home on Eagle Creek in the present day Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In Cherokee lore, wolves were known and revered as Wa’ya. They were the companions and servants of Kanati, the mythical master hunter of the Cherokees. One of Kanati’s wolves had magic powers that enabled it to cure another wolf that had been bitten by a snake. Because of its ability to remain awake during the first seven days of creation, Wa’ya was given the power of night vision so that it could be active at night and easily prey upon other animals for sustenance.

According to anthropologist James Mooney, who collected Cherokee lore during the late 1880s, primarily in the Big Cove community of the Qualla Boundary, an ordinary Cherokee would never kill a wolf “if he can possibly avoid it, but will let the animal go by unharmed, believing that the kindred of a slain wolf will surely revenge his death, and that the weapon with which the deed is done will be rendered worthless for further shooting until cleaned and exorcised by a medicine man.” Certain hired killers who followed elaborate rituals for atonement could slay wolves that raided stock or fish traps.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

An early account of Western NC

While crossing the Blue Ridge north of present Asheville in the early 1540s, Hernando de Soto’s scribes entered some brief descriptions of the landscape in their journals. In all likelihood, a letter written in 1674 by Abraham Wood, a Virginia merchant and Indian trader, contained the first descriptions of the mountainous terrain of Western North Carolina penned in the English language.

Alum Cave for a breath of fresh air

I recently happened upon an interesting article that described an excursion made in 1860 to the Alum Cave on the Tennessee side of the present-day Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Titled “A Week in the Great Smoky Mountains,” it was published in the Southern Literary Messenger, which during an impressive 30-year run (1834-1864) was the South’s most important literary periodical. Published in Richmond, Va., the monthly magazine was edited in its early years by Edgar Allan Poe.

Highlands plateau still a world of green hills

Several years ago I wrote about Bradford Torrey’s A World of Green Hills, which was published in 1898 by Houghton Mifflin and Co. The book is divided into two parts, equally devoted to Torrey’s travels in Western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia (Pulaski and Natural Bridge). The North Carolina portion was set primarily on the Highlands Plateau, which he accessed from Walhalla in upcountry South Carolina via a horse- and mule-drawn wagon.

Upper world guardians

We are all fascinated by birds. In addition to being pretty (even buzzards are pretty in their own way), they can sing and fly. Unlike me, many of you can actually sing; so, you will not be as awestruck by that capability as I am. But my guess is that few of you can fly, except in your dreams.

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