Northerners in our southern climes

Elevations above 4,000 feet in the Blue Ridge Province can be thought of as a peninsula of northern terrain extending into the southeastern United States, where typical flora and fauna of northeastern and southeastern North America intermingle.

Many plants and animals find their southernmost range extensions in the Blue Ridge, which extends from southern Pennsylvania (just south of Harrisburg) into north Georgia (just north of Atlanta), inclusive of portions of central Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northwestern South Carolina. These include Blue Ridge St. John’s-wort, blue-bead lily, pink-shell azalea, witch-hobble, rosebay and purple rhododendron, mountain wood fern, narrow beech fern, mountain ash, table mountain pine, mountain and striped maples, fire cherry, Fraser magnolia, red spruce, northern flying squirrel, least weasel, woodland jumping mouse, rock vole, New England cottontail, bog turtle, brook trout, muskellunge, saw-whet owl, ruffed grouse, common raven, and numerous salamander species.

Not a few of these high-elevation species are endemic to the province, being found no place else in the world. Some are only encountered in a few counties and no place else in the world. But most are “northerners” who have discovered there is suitable habitat down south.

No wildflower outing into the upper elevations of the mountains would be complete without an observation of Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense). Rather inconspicuous in regard to individual plants, this member of the Lily Family often forms dense colonies that carpet the forest floor.

It flourishes in the high-elevation, cool, moist, spruce-fir region above 6,000 feet, as well as, less frequently, in northern hardwood forests between 6,000 and 4,000 feet. From May into June the plant displays dense clusters of small, white flowers described by botanist Peter White in Wildflowers of the Smokies (1996) as “having a starburst appearance.”

White also noted that Canada mayflower “is a rather unusual member of the Lily Family in that the flower parts are in twos and fours instead of the usual threes and sixes.” Flowering colonies are quite fragrant, producing a sweetish odor that can be detected along a high trail during the moist morning hours.

The spreading, underground stems of the plant produce erect stems from two to eight inches tall that are zigzagged in appearance. Each stem usually has two heart-shaped shiny leaves with lobed bases that clasp the stem. Those producing but one leaf will not bear flowers.

The generic designation Maianthemum means May-flower, while the species tag canadense is also appropriate in that the plant is primarily northern in distribution, ranging throughout Canada, the northeastern United States, and southward in the mountains.

A good place to look for Canada mayflower is the picnic area at the Balsam Mountain Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This location in the park is accessed via a spur road off the Blue Ridge Parkway above Cherokee. Also look for a dense stand at the trailhead adjacent to the Bear Pen Gap parking area alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway at milepost 427.6.

Any place that you encounter this glistening little “northern” groundcover will be a fine place to be.

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..

Caught in the spider’s alluring web

Spiders are one of the most interesting — and sometimes disconcerting — critters to observe. Especially fascinating, to me, are the various webs they create to capture prey and provide themselves with protection.

Spiders are often confused with insects, which are related to crabs and lobsters and have a skeleton of sorts on the outside of their bodies. Unlike insects — which normally have three distinct body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen) and six legs — spiders have only two body parts and four pairs of legs.

Spiders live mostly on insects, which they subdue with poisonous fangs. Two leg-like structures behind the fangs are often held out like antennae. These probably serve as sense organs. Unlike insects, spiders have several simple eyes (sometimes as many as eight) rather than compound eyes.

The success of spiders as a group can be attributed to their ingenious use of silk, which is made as a viscous plastic in special glands located in the lower abdomen. The liquid silk is gathered in nipple-like organs called spinnerets. It solidifies when drawn through the small spigots on the spinnerets — a process similar to that used in the production of synthetic fibers. Authorities maintain that spider silk is actually stronger than steel of comparable thickness!

From this elastic “steel” spiders weave complex webs that appear in almost every design imaginable. The most complex spider webs are created by the garden species known as orb weavers. These consist of a series of radiating lines that support a spiral thread covered with highly sticky droplets, which attract and ensnare insects.

Every few days the orb weaver creates a new spiral thread so as to keep it fresh and sticky. While waiting for insects to come along, the spider resides in a silken retreat of rolled up leaves off to the side of the web. Vibrations along a special silk line leading from this retreat to the sticky spiral thread let the orb weaver know that dinner’s ready.

In the early morning after a heavy dew, beads of moisture collect on the spider webs constructed in grassy meadows, making them easy to spot. After the sun dries the dew later in the morning, the webs are still there, of course, but are much harder to locate.

Many of these meadowland webs are constructed by sheetweb weavers, which are spiders that usually have a pattern on the abdomen. Take a closer look at these glistening structures and you’ll observe that they’re shaped like domes or bowls. Two of the most interesting of the sheetweb weavers found in the eastern United States are the ones known as the hammock spider and the bowl-and-doily spider.

Hammock spiders construct a web shaped like a hammock. The spider stays concealed in a far corner of his creation until he nets an insect. Leaves that fall into the web are sometimes used as hideouts as well.

The bowl-and-doily spider constructs a shallow silken bowl about six inches across that sits directly upon a doily-like flat maze of threads. The bowl is clearly designed to trap insects. When they fall into the bowl, the spider bites them from below and wraps up their bodies in the silk for safekeeping. The purpose of the doily is less certain, but it perhaps serves to protect the spider from attack from below by predators.

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 unique ways of the kingfisher

Belted kingfishers are one of my favorite birds. A pair fishes along the small creek on our property during the breeding season. In winter they move downstream to the Tuckasegee River, although the male will make infrequent appearances from mid-November into March, probably to maintain control of his hunting territory. Each spring they return for good, raising a ruckus as they fly over our cove with rattling calls that are a part of their mating ritual.

With most bird species, the male is usually the more conspicuous. The female kingfisher is an exception, however, having a chestnut breast band in addition to the gray one displayed by the male. Because she broods her young deep in the ground, the female's maternal duties don't make her an easy target for predators. She has no real need for the sort of subdued protective coloration characteristic of female cardinals, towhees, and countless other species. Her decorative breast band makes her one of the few female birds in the world with plumage more colorful than her mate’s.

If you have kingfishers that are active in your vicinity from March into early summer, look for their nesting dens. Situated in a steep bank, the entrance hole is about the size of a softball. If it’s being used, there will be two grooves at the base of the hole where the birds’ feet drag as they plunge headfirst, in full flight, into the opening. The tunnel leading to the nesting cavity may be from three to 15 feet in length. Kingfishers have toes that are fused together, thereby helping them excavate more efficiently. Obviously designed to prevent access by predators, these nesting dens can be located some distance from water, often in roadway cutbanks or where there has been excavation around a building site.

Ornithologists have determined that an adult-sized bird consumes about 10 fish, each about four inches long, per day. A pair of kingfishers with nearly-grown young would have to catch about 90 fish per day to feed their offspring and themselves. That’s a lot of fish. During inclement weather, the number of fish caught is drastically reduced because of murky water. Crayfish are used as a substitute food; nevertheless, nestlings often starve to death during such periods.

Once the kingfishers are fledged, their parents teach them to fish by dropping dead fish into the water for retrieval. After 10 or so days of this sort of instruction, they are expected to catch fish on their own and are driven from the parental territory.

It’s not surprising that such a conspicuous bird would have a place in Cherokee bird lore. They composed stories that accounted for the kingfisher’s fishing tactics and incorporated the bird into their medicinal ceremonies.

When anthropologist James Mooney was collecting Cherokee lore here in Western North Carolina during the 1880s, he recorded two accounts of how the kingfisher (“jatla” in Cherokee) got its bill. Some of the old men told him the animals decided to give the bird a better bill because it was so poorly equipped to make its living as a water bird: “So they made him a fish-gig and fastened it on in front of his mouth.”

A second version Mooney recorded was that the bill was a gift from the benevolent Little People, the Cherokee equivalent of Irish leprechauns. They had observed a kingfisher using a spear-shaped fish as a lance to kill a blacksnake that was preying upon a bird’s nest. So they rewarded him his own spear-shaped bill.

This outsized bill accounts for the kingfisher’s success as a fisherman. One of the prettiest sights in the bird world is that of a kingfisher hovering over the riffles in a small stream before plunging headfirst underwater after its prey. Its success rate is phenomenal. Before going fishing, the Cherokees evoked the kingfisher in sacred formulas (chants and songs) that would hopefully insure equal success.

Because it was so adept at penetration in regard to excavating its nesting tunnels and fishing below the water’s surface, the Cherokee medicine men also evoked the kingfisher in medicinal formulas that were a part of the healing ceremonies used to cure internal diseases. They wanted their medicines derived from plant materials to penetrate their patients’ bodies deftly, like a kingfisher plunging into its burrow or diving under water. And they wanted to extract the diseases with dispatch, like a kingfisher emerging from the water with its prey firmly clamped in its bill.

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 alluring calls of song birds

In the opaque early-morning light outside our bedroom windows, the birds that reside in our woods — or do we reside in their woods? — commence warming up for the day with tentative calls and whistles. The male cardinal seems to take the lead most mornings. Before long, however, the patterns arrange themselves into a tapestry of music.

Throughout the year male and female birds of the same species use various call notes to stay in contact with one another or as signals of alarm. For instance, male and female eastern towhees whistle a call that sounds like “tow-hee.” Therefore the common name.

During the breeding season, the male of the species makes the vocalization we recognize as song in order to establish a breeding territory, attract a female, and warn other males of the same or competing species out of that territory.

The male towhee’s song sounds for all the world like “drink-your-tea.” If you learn the phrases associated with specific calls and songs (“mnemonics” or memory devices), you will be able to identify birds readily whether you actually see them or not.

Some male birds can really sing. Rose-breasted grosbeaks sound like robins that have had music lessons. (Scarlet tanagers, on the other hand, sound like robins with a sore throat.) In my opinion, winter wrens emit the most sensational bird vocalization in the southern mountains: a musical series of bubbling warbles and trills that may last for five seconds or more.

There are several bird songs that seem to mystify people. You can hear their songs on a regular basis but never seem to locate the birds. I am invariably queried about these “mystery” songs each year. Two of the most common “mystery” birds of the southern mountains are the yellow-billed cuckoo and the ovenbird.

The yellow-billed cuckoo is a bird that is often heard but seldom seen. Along with the Swainson’s warbler, it is one of the most furtive birds that breeds in Western North Carolina. The cuckoo is known to farmers as the “rain crow” because its hollow, low-pitched “kowp, kowp, kwop, kwop” vocalizations are often sounded just before a summer thunderstorm.

If you must see a yellow-billed cuckoo, sit down near a black cherry tree that contains tent caterpillar nests and watch for movement. You may well have to sit there for a good while — bring your lunch — but you may be rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of the bird described as “a wandering voiced.”

The ovenbird resembles a thrush but is actually a warbler with an orange crown. It nests on the ground in an oven-shaped nest. All day long you can hear their rising “teach-teach-teach” vocalizations without ever seeing the bird except, at best, as a flitting shadow.

Fred Alsop notes in his Birds of the Smokies (1991) that ovenbirds sometimes create a “vocal domino pattern,” when “the singing of one territorial ovenbird often stimulates the adjacent territory holder to proclaim his presence, which induces a third male to announce that he is still on station, which may cause other males to follow suit or hand the challenge back to the original singer.”

There are many CD and cassette guides to bird calls and songs. Although I don’t recommend the two-volume “Stokes Field Guide to Birds” (1996) by Donald and Lillian Stokes as an everyday field guide, I do recommend “Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs” (Time-Warner Audio Books, 1997) by Lang Elliott with Donald and Lillian Stokes. This 3-CD boxed set provides precise call and song recordings of 372 species. The 64-page band location booklet that comes with the set also provides one of the best listing of the “mnemonic” phrases used to recognize bird vocalizations that I am aware of.

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..

Yaupon and the ‘Black Drink’

For some years now — when walking the woodlands around ancient Cherokee settlements — I have been on the lookout for an evergreen holly species that’s not native to Western North Carolina or the southern mountains. I haven’t yet encountered this particular holly and would very much appreciate hearing from anyone who has.

What I’ve been looking for is yaupon (Ilex vomitoria). This species of holly is common in coastal areas and uncommon in isolated spots in the piedmont. It is an evergreen, much-branched shrub or small tree that can be from six- to 20-feet tall with a diameter of about six inches. The elliptical, leathery, round-toothed leaves are about an inch and a half long. The red (rarely yellow) clusters of berries appear from September into November on female trees. As with other holly species, male and female flowers are borne on separate plants.

All of the Southeastern Indian tribes utilized the dried twigs and leaves of yaupon to make a brew thought to be a purifying agent. As the scientific name of the species indicates, one of the ways it “purified” was by inducing vomiting.

As early as 1573, the Spanish naval officer Pedro Menendez made peace with a group of Indians living where yaupon was not available by sending one of his men to them with an offering of the plant. They considered it to be “the greatest gift that can be made to them.”

Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski note in Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 1991) that “yaupon can be made into a mild tea, but if drunk in a concentrated brew can cause hallucinations and vomiting. It was used by southerners as a substitute for coffee and tea during the American Civil War.”

According to Charles Hudson’s account in The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), the beverage was also thought to generally cleanse the soul, serve as a social bonding agent, and be the ultimate expression of hospitality.

“In their own language, the Indians called the brew ‘white drink’ because white symbolizes purity, happiness, social harmony, and so on, but the Europeans called it ‘black drink’ because of its color,” observed Hudson. “To make black drink, the Indians first dried the leaves and twigs and put them in an earthen container and parched them over a fire to a dark-brown color. This roasting made the caffeine more soluble; coffee beans are roasted for the same reason. They placed the roasted leaves and twigs in water and boiled it until it was a dark-brown liquid. The drink then was poured through a strainer and into vessels to cool. As soon as it could be poured over one’s finger without scalding, it was ready to be consumed. Drinking it hot heightened its effect: caffeine is thirty times more soluble in boiling water than at room temperature ...The Indians sometimes used it as an emetic. On these occasions they would drink it in large quantities, and in a quarter to half an hour they would vomit. Sometimes they would hold their arms across their chests and expel the contents of their stomachs six or eight feet ... In any case, the emetic effect was more the exception than the rule. The Indians would often sit in council and drink black drink for hours at a time with no marked physical reactions.

“The physiological effects of black drink are mainly those of massive doses of caffeine (which) stimulates the central nervous system, exciting it at all levels. In fact, caffeine is the only true cortical stimulant known to modern medicine. It enables a person to have more rapid and clearer flow of thought, makes him capable of more sustained intellectual effort, and sharpens his reaction time. It also increases his capacity for muscular work and lessens fatigue. Moreover, some evidence suggests that large doses of caffeine speed up blood clotting .... These effects from large quantities of black drink could have been important and even decisive factors in activities such as the ball game (stickball) or warfare.

“But the Southeastern Indians drank black drink for ideological reasons as well as practical reasons. Meetings of the councils of chiefdoms were preceded both by drinking black drink and by smoking tobacco .... Two men came in through the door, each with a very large conch shell full of black drink. They walked with slow, measured steps and sang in a low voice. They stopped when they were within six or eight paces of the miko (chief) and members of the white clans sitting to his right, and they placed the conch shells on little tables. They then picked them up again and, bowing low, advanced toward the miko. The conch shell was then handed to the miko; the servants solemnly sang in sustained syllables, ‘Ya-ha-la,’ while the miko held the shell to his lips. After the miko was finished drinking, everybody else in the town house drank.”

Hudson also noted that Indian tribes in the interior portion of the continent where yaupon was not native “transplanted” the shrub “so that it would be close at hand.” Cherokee use of yaupon in “black drink” ceremonies has been well documented.

In his Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, The extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, first published in 1791, the Pennsylvania botanist William Bartram was the first non-Indian to note that the Cherokees cultivated the plant here in WNC and doubtless elsewhere within their mountain homeland.

In May of 1775, Bartram was traveling up the Little Tennessee River north of present-day Franklin. He laid over for two days at Cowe, a village situated at or near present-day Burningtown.

“Early in the morning,” Bartram recorded, “I set off attended by my worthy friend Mr. Gallahan, who obligingly accompanied me near fifteen miles, we passed through the Jore village, which is pleasingly situated in a little vale on the side of the mountain, a pretty rivulet or creek winds about through the vale, just under the village; here I observed a little vale of the Casine yaupon .... the Indians call it the beloved tree, and are very careful to keep them pruned and cultivated, they drink a very strong infusion of the leaves, buds, and tender branches of this plant, which is so celebrated, indeed venerated by the Creeks, and all the Southern maritime nations of Indians ....”

Frances Harper, in an annotated edition of Bartrams Travels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958) traced the botanist’s route through WNC and concluded that his “course lay up the valley of Iolta Creek. The ‘Jore village’ may have been ... on the divide between Iotla and Burningtown creeks .... The yaupon was here far inland from its natural range, and it must have been introduced by the Cherokees. It is very doubtful if it can have survived in that spot to the present day without the care of Indians.”

Well, maybe so — but then again, some fine day I might just locate a stand of yaupon naturalized somewhere in a sheltered spot up in the Big Cove community on the Qualla Boundary or in a far valley of the Nantahalas or Snowbirds. If so, it will mark the spot to which an ancient Cherokee medicine man had transplanted the plant for ceremonial use.

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 story of the fiddlehead

Fiddleheads are emerging from the leaf litter in our forests. Almost everyone, even those not especially interested in plants, has heard of fiddleheads and knows that they’re supposedly edible. Whenever I teach a plant identification workshop for the Smoky Mountain Field School or the North Carolina Arboretum or elsewhere, someone inevitably brings up the topic.

When leading field trips, my first response to fiddlehead queries is the obvious one. I point out that fiddleheads aren’t a species of fern but a growth form. Most fern species — to a greater or lesser degree — display the characteristic fiddlehead shape when they arise from the plant’s underground rhizomes. The “fern leaf” differs from the “true leaf” of the flowering plants in its vernation, or manner of expanding from the bud. In the ferns, vernation is circinate; that is, the leaf unrolls from the tip, with the appearance of a fiddlehead, rather than expanding from a folded condition.

This unfurling strategy helps the immature frond make its way upward through the soil and leaf litter. It also protects the developing leaflets (pinna) that will comprise the leafy portion of the mature frond. The first fronds to appear in a new season’s growth are purely vegetative; fronds unfurling later bear the spore capsules (sporangia).

The technical name for a fiddlehead is crozier (also spelled crosier). This is derived from the crooked end of a bishop’s staff, which is sometimes referred to as a pastoral staff. Such a staff has a curved top symbolic of the Good Shepherd and is carried by bishops of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and some European Lutheran churches and by abbots and abbesses as an insignia of their ecclesiastical office and, in former times, of temporal power.

In addition to being highly functional, the emerging fiddleheads of some fern species are quite beautiful. Those of cinnamon fern (Osmundia cinnamomea) are a pale lime green and can stand a two feet or more high before unfurling. Species in the wood fern group (Dryopteris species) often display wooly greenish-brown fiddleheads.

But now we get to the heart of the matter. When most people bring up fiddleheads, they do so because they’ve heard they’re edible. They want to know which ones can be harvested for consumption. My answer is that few of the ferns in the southeastern United States where I live and work are edible. And the one that’s said be particularly tasty is also thought to be dangerous.

Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) is distributed world wide, being commonly found along roadsides and in disturbed areas with poor soil. They display exquisite silvery-gray fiddleheads shaped like an eagle’s claw. My wife and I have never eaten them, but they are reputed to be delicious. I doubt that light consumption of boiled bracken fiddleheads would be harmful to anyone; nevertheless, scientific research indicates the plant contains a number of toxic substances that readily kill livestock and might cause stomach cancers in human populations (as in Japan and China) that eat substantial amounts of the rootstock or fiddleheads.

Unfortunately for us, the North American fern species bearing fiddleheads that’s reputed to be the most delicious and absolutely safe to eat doesn’t grow wild in our region. That’s the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris). Its distribution range has been described as Alaska to Newfoundland, south to British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia in North American; Scandinavia, Central Europe, Russia, and Asia; with significant naturalization in Ireland and Great Britain.

This species is described as displaying emerald-green fiddleheads and, when mature, having clumping leaflets (somewhat like cinnamon fern) that taper all the way down to ground level. In this latter regard it resembles the well-known New York fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis), which is common throughout eastern North America as far south as Georgia. Although edible, I can attest that New York fern is not tasty, unless you like boiled cardboard.

The solution to the fiddlehead dilemma for persons living outside of the ostrich fern distribution area might be relatively simple. Ostrich fern is readily available from nursery sources listed on the Internet. It’s advertised as establishing “vigorous” stands rather quickly in damp, partially shaded situations. One Internet source that I located offers a “Pkg. of 2 - $5.75.”

Why not purchase, say, 8 plants from a reputable grower (i.e., one not harvesting them in the wild) and propagate them for home consumption (as with asparagus) once a stand is established? My wife and I have decided to do just that. We would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience growing ostrich fern for consumption outside of its natural range.

There is an informative Internet site devoted to fiddleheads at, you guessed it, www.fiddle-heads.com.

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..

A haven of nectar and beauty

The irises my wife, Elizabeth, cultivates in our yard are coming into full bloom as I write this. Their shapes and colors and fragrances are almost too intricate to describe.

The name iris, meaning rainbow, was given to the group of flowers so-called because of their varied and subtle colors. Some also know them as “fleur-de-lis” (flower-of-Louis) because the crusader Louis VII selected an iris as his family emblem. And many also know them as “blue flags” for the obvious reason that the blue varieties seemingly hold forth their stately blooms like flags in a parade. By any name, the irises we encounter here in the southern mountains are among our most showy and interesting wildflowers.

To my knowledge, five iris species have been reported from the Smokies region: dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), slender blue flag (I. prismatica), yellow flag (I. pseudacorus), dwarf iris (I. verna), and southern blue flag (I. virginica). Northern blue flag — the largest of the blue-colored species (I. veriscolor) — grows wild only as far south as Virginia in the mountains.

Three of these species are commonly encountered. Dwarf-crested iris, which grows in rich woodlands, is no doubt the most common. The four-inch high plants literally carpet the ground in places from April into May, and can be observed flowering on into June in the higher elevations. Dwarf iris resembles dwarf- crested iris but is slightly taller, has a less conspicuous crest on its sepals and narrower leaves, and favors dry, rocky woodlands. My favorite species is southern blue flag, which grows about two feet high and displays a yellow blotch at the base of each sepal. It appears in marshes and along stream banks.

The next time you encounter an iris growing in the wild, take time to observe the plant closely. You’ll find that it has devised an ingenious floral architecture that virtually prohibits self-pollination, thereby insuring a more vigorous and robust population.

Bumblebees are the primary iris pollinators. They can land only on the outer tip of the horizontal sepals. The colorful lines, crests, or blotches on the inner part of the sepal are called “nectar guides.” They have the same purpose as the lights on an airplane runway; that is, they guide the insect toward the nectar located at the base of the flower.

To get there, a bumblebee must first push under the upturned female parts. If there is pollen on the insect’s back from another iris, it will be deposited on this stigma and the setting of fruit will occur via cross-fertilization. Once past the female part, a bumblebee must rub its back against the pollen-bearing male part before reaching the nectar source.

After feeding on iris nectar, bumblebees normally slip out of the side of the flower through special openings. But even if the insect exited the way it entered, its back won’t touched the upturned female part because of the way it’s tilted. But the stigma of the next iris it enters from the front will be dusted with the pollen on its back. Any opportunity for self-fertilization is virtually eliminated.

The wildflower colors and shapes and fragrances we seek out and admire for their aesthetic values are in every instance the result of long-term relationships with various pollinators: beetles, flies, bumblebees, hummingbirds, gnats, etc. The old adage that “form follows function” is nowhere more true. It follows that the more closely we observe the specific interrelationships wildflowers have with pollinators, the more fully we can appreciate floral architecture.

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..

Carden’s views on Kephart have softened

As a struggling albeit brilliant writer, Gary Carden never turns down money.

So when an out-of-town man in a rental car appeared on Carden’s front porch offering a $1,000 down payment on the spot to write a play about Horace Kephart, Carden wasn’t about to say no. Carden was curious, however, what led the man to Sylva.

“He said ‘I’m told you are a remarkable playwright.’ Right away I was suspicious,” Carden recounted. When the man went so far as to call Carden “well-thought of,” it sealed that suspicion.

“I knew he was doing a snow job. I am not well thought of. I am eccentric and peculiar, so I said ‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’” Carden said.

The man on his porch, Daniel Gore, was part of a growing cult of Kephart followers who have elevated the famed writer to folk hero status for his chronicles of early mountain culture. Gore, a musician, had written a collection of songs, called “Ways That Are Dark,” to accompany Kephart’s popular book, Our Southern Highlanders. Gore thought his CD would be the perfect soundtrack for a play, and he wanted Carden to write it.

Carden — who said he “owed everybody in the county” — took the man’s money and promptly went to town and paid bills and bought groceries. That night, he got to work on the play. An obsessive and incessant writer, Carden quickly churned out an opening scene. He cast aside the idea of fitting the play to the CD, but instead began writing a play about Kephart’s life.

Carden was no stranger to Kephart. As an authentic keeper of mountain culture, Carden has studied Kephart extensively. He finds fault in some of Kephart’s portrayals of mountain people. Carden sees Kephart as an “outlander” — someone who isn’t from the mountains but lays claims as an expert anyway — and proceeded to make that the name of his play.

Carden emailed the opening scene of Outlander to Gore, who soon reappeared on Carden’s porch. The scene simply wouldn’t do, Gore said.

Rather than a hero, Carden’s play portrayed Kephart as a drunken, broken man seeking a refuge from society in the Smoky Mountains, a “back of beyond,” as Kephart himself called in. By all accounts, Carden’s scene is exactly how Kephart arrived in the region. Kephart was famous among locals not for his writing that earned him so many accolades on the national stage, but for being a drunk. Gore wanted no part of that in his play, however.

“I told him ‘You can’t write about Horace Kephart without mentioning he drinks.’ It is the flaw that makes the man admirable. If he was perfect he would be boring as hell,” Carden said. “He was flawed, and it’s what makes people identify with him.”

Gore stood his ground.

“He said, ‘Try again,’ and left another check for $1,000,” Carden said.

After another trip to town for groceries — and a spending spree at the book store — Carden came home and got to work on the next scene. He emailed it to Gore, who once again balked.

“He said Kephart in the play has too many flaws,” Carden said. “I said ‘I am the playwright, you are the musician. I say this is a good play.’”

Carden told Gore if he was looking for was a “candy box” to wrap around the 12 songs of his CD, then Carden wasn’t his man. But Carden didn’t give up on the idea of a play on Kephart.

“I thought. ‘Hell I am going to write that play he didn’t want,’” Carden said.

As Carden toiled over the play, a strange thing happened. He started to like Kephart more and more. Carden once held Kephart in mild disdain. When Kephart fled his former life in St. Louis to hide out in the Smokies, he left a wife and six children behind. Throw in alcoholism and exploiting mountain people for book material, and Carden had plenty to hold against Kephart.

But Carden’s thoughts on Kephart softened as he climbed inside Kephart’s head to write the play.

“I will, just like any true native who lives here, grudgingly give Kephart his due,” Carden said.

Kephart’s tireless fight for the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is ultimately what won Carden’s respect. The park’s creation was a long uphill battle, and Kephart’s role as an advocate was integral to its success. Kephart loved the mountains and was willing to fight for them, and Carden saw that.

“He was a catalyst that made things happen. That stubborn persistence that he would get up and go on, get up and go on,” Carden said.

Many people around Bryson City were against a national park that would claim their homes and land. They didn’t take kindly to Kephart’s advocacy for such a thing.

“Common sense tells you it must have hurt him deeply when people turned against him,” Carden said.

Half way through the play, Carden quit writing, however. It wasn’t unusual.

“I have a house full of plays I never finished,” Carden said.

In this case, Carden realized people might not want to face a humanized Kephart, a Kephart who wasn’t a folk hero but a just a man with his share of flaws.

“I realized, ‘Hell people would not let me do this play.’ So I shelved it,” Carden said.

But a couple years ago, Carden decided to resuscitate it.

“The hardest part was the last two pages. They took me six months,” Carden said. As Carden recited the ending from memory — a moving soliloquy beside Kephart’s grave on the hillside above Bryson City — Carden’s eyes misted up a bit.

Carden is still hunting for a home for his Kephart play. He has approached the Smoky Mountain Community Theater in Bryson City and Western Carolina University theater department, as well as several others, but so far has not found any firm takers.

Ellison came to WNC as a ‘Kephart pilgrim’

While George and Elizabeth Ellison are fixtures in Bryson City today — Elizabeth as a renowned artist and George as a writer and naturalist — their journey to the region 30 years ago was little more than happenstance.

The Ellisons rode in on the back-to-the-land movement, setting up house and raising a family in a rural cabin lacking running water or electricity. While it was ultimately a lifestyle that fit them perfectly, they landed here initially while on a quest of a different sort.

George Ellison first set foot in Bryson City in 1976, partly on a writing assignment and partly on a personal pilgrimage to the old stomping grounds of Horace Kephart, a famed writer who immersed himself in the culture of backwoods mountaineers a century ago. Kephart’s writing chronicled the distinct mountain culture and dialect and described the wilderness landscape — a rich subject matter than catapulted him onto the national stage as an outdoors adventure writer.

Ellison was commissioned to research the life of Kephart and write an introduction for a reprint of Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. While Ellison had long been enamored with Kephart’s writing, he landed the assignment somewhat by luck. Ellison was teaching at Mississippi State University in the mid-19070s when small talk at an English Association meeting arrived on the subject of Kephart.

A visiting scholar from the University of Tennessee Press was in the room, and like Ellison, was a Kephart follower. A reissue of Our Southern Highlanders had been percolating in the background, but hinged on finding someone to write an introduction that would set the stage for the new printing.

“We got to talking and he said, ‘Gosh, I found someone with an interest in Kephart. Can you do the introduction?’” Ellison recalled.

Ellison gladly, but skeptically, accepted. Kephart’s life had largely been an enigma. Little was known about the man before he abruptly appeared in Swain County and settled amongst the people there. Kephart had left few clues of his own.

“I thought it would be a situation where I couldn’t find enough to write an introduction. All I’d found before was a couple book reviews and a little sketch of his life,” Ellison said. “No one had done a coherent depiction of his life before he came here.”

Kephart was a major player in the movement to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so one of Ellison’s first moves was to seek out the park’s historian and archivist, Don DeFoe.

“I walked in and said ‘Does anyone here know anything about Horace Kephart?’ and his eyes lit up. It was like he’d been waiting for me for years,” Ellison said.

DeFoe led Ellison downstairs to the basement of park headquarters outside Gatlinburg, Tenn., and opened the door of a damp storage room.

“There were boxes of Kephart stuff molding away, all this stuff was sitting there rotting away,” Ellison said of the room, which had visible water leaks.

Along with boxes of Kephart’s prized journals, containing meticulous notes on everything from local dialect to plant uses, were many of Kephart’s personal items.

Ellison’s quest to piece together Kephart’s life soon led him to a host of closet Kephart fans, each eager to share what they could.

“I felt like a little Dutch boy running around sticking my finger in the dike,” Ellison said. “It was overwhelming, because I had a project where I didn’t know what I was going to write about and suddenly I had more than enough.”

Ellison’s research ultimately revealed the life and times of Kephart and postulates on the motives that precipitated his move to live among the mountaineers.

“No one knew his story until I put it together, not in that kind of detail and context,” Ellison said.

Ellison’s own writing career was launched on the coattails of Kephart. The introduction earned him instant recognition and esteem with exactly the audience that Ellison was suited for, an audience as enthralled with the mountain landscape and cultural history as Ellison was.

In recent years, Kephart has been transformed from a nearly forgotten historical figure to a folk hero of sorts.

Ellison helped facilitate a transfer of the national park’s Kephart materials to Western Carolina University, which provided a proper archival repository for the valuable historical collection both in the Hunter Library Special Collections and Mountain Heritage Center.

Ellison spent a lot of time in Bryson City researching Kephart, enough to realize the town could give him and his wife, Elizabeth, the lifestyle they were looking for.

“She wanted to paint full time and not be pigeon-holed as a professor’s wife. I always wanted to be a writer,” Ellison said. “I said ‘Bryson City is really a nice little town. Let’s give it a shot.’”

Ellison denies that he set out to be a modern-day Kephart.

“I didn’t come here because I fell in love with Kephart. I came here because I fell in love with the region,” Ellison said.

Wild mountain boars

Numerous non-native plants have been introduced into the southern mountains during the last century or so. Many of these are now classified by wildlife biologists as “exotic pests.” Few would argue that kudzu does not fall into that category. And without doubt, the most notable alien mammal ever introduced here was the European wild boar.

There are friends of the wild boar — mostly hunters — who believe that the animal’s outstanding qualities as a game animal outweigh its negative qualities. Then there are those who have observed its capacity to devastate large areas that think otherwise.

I used to be a friend of the wild boar. Its survival instincts and ability to adapt to truly rugged backcountry seemed to me to be admirable traits in any animal. In recent years, however, after some up close and personal encounters, I’ve changed my mind.

A 29-page pamphlet by Perry Jones entitled “The European Wild Boar in North Carolina” (North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, 1959) tells the story of how the animal arrived and subsequently flourished in this region of the world. In 1908, the Whiting Manufacturing Co., an English concern, purchased Hooper Bald and adjoining lands near Robbinsville in Graham County. George Gordon Moore, an adviser to English investors, was allowed to establish a 1,600-acre game preserve on Hooper Bald in return for assisting the company with floating a loan of two million dollars.

Beginning in 1912, the preserve was stocked with eight buffaloes, 14 elk, 6 Colorado mule deer, 34 bears (9 of which were Russian brown bears), 200 wild turkeys, 10,000 English ring-neck pheasant eggs, and 13 wild boars. Area residents have long referred to the wild boar as the Russian (or “Roossian”) wild boar, but Jones speculates that they actually came from Germany. At any rate, they were the only ones to escape from the preserve and survive in the surrounding mountains.

“One source states that the wild boar were capable of sticking their legs between the rails of their pen and actually climbing over the fence,” Jones reported. “It seems likely, however, that the majority of them chose to remain within the enclosure where they were allowed to reproduce unmolested for a period of eight to ten years. The first time Moore and his guests set dogs on the animals, the boar leaped over low places in the fence rail, and took off for the horizon.”

Established in 1934, the 520,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become their prime sanctuary despite extended shooting and trapping campaigns by the park service to eradicate them because of their destructive habits. A mature animal can attain a height of over three feet at the shoulder and a weight of over 400 pounds. The average weight, however, is probably less than half that.

They vary in color from pale gray to brown to black. The most striking one I’ve ever seen was a young charcoal black sow weighing perhaps 170 pounds that broke into my wife’s fenced garden plot last summer. When Elizabeth started shouting at the beast to go away, the startled sow spooked and commenced bouncing off of the hog wire fencing like a billiard ball before finally escaping. The fence was a wreck. It looked like a small tank had hit into it on all four sides.

Roaming widely in herds, they are omnivorous, feeding on plant matter and small animals like salamanders. The head of the wild boar is wedge shaped with a pointed snout, which enables it to root up the ground seeking underground tubers in search of food.

Troy Hyde, a veteran Graham County hunter, told Jones that one could “root up concrete, if he put his mind to it.”

That sounds like exaggeration until you see areas where they have been rooting. The first time I encountered such an area I momentarily wondered what fool had been rototilling a mountainside. Then the hog smell betrayed the culprits’ identities. I was astonished at the extent of damage. But just how destructive they are didn’t really hit home until several years ago when they came onto our property — which adjoins the national park several miles west Bryson City — and went to work digging up the richest wildflower area we have. (They especially love the tubers of the showy spring species: bloodroot, trillium, rue anemone, blue cohosh, trout lily, etc.) When we returned home after a two-week absence, my first thought again was that some fool had rototilled the slope behind the house. Then I smelled that smell and saw the hog tracks.

At that time we had to temporarily discontinue using our gravity-flow water system because the critters decided to root and wallow in the watershed up on the ridge above the house. North Carolina wildlife officers issued us an out-of-season hunting permit to help remedy the problem — but I didn’t have enough firepower to make a stand. The pellets from my 12-gauge shotgun would have only tickled a boar’s funny bone. I never even fired a shot. After awhile, they upped and left on their own. Good riddance, we thought.

But alas, they returned again while Elizabeth and I were away teaching for a week. That time they attacked a partly buried rock wall above our house. The 60-foot long wall had been built in the early part of the 20th century by a farmer clearing the land to plant corn. We suppose there was something living in or under the wall that the wild boar craved. The hillside looked like several grenades had been detonated under the wall, throwing rock debris helter-skelter.

Wild boars are independent cusses that have made the transition from one continent to another with admirable ease. They didn’t asked to be hauled from Europe to Graham County, but they’ve made a go of it without any whining. But you can’t really be the friend of an animal that pollutes your water supply, uproots rock walls on your property, and decimates the fencing around your wife’s vegetable garden. Even kudzu doesn’t do that.

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..

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