Saturday morning … sitting alone at the kitchen table … nothing much going on … looking out the window … watching the bend in the creek and the bend in the path that leads up to the bend in the ridge I can’t see but know is there … opening my composition book to a blank space I scribble: “creeks-paths-ridges bend with natural grace.”

Composition books are therapeutic … especially those with inside back covers featuring the multiplication table and conversion tables for length, capacity and weight ... 9-by-7 is always tricky and I never did comprehend liters … my composition book is one of those manufactured by Mead Corporation in Dayton, Ohio … 100 sheets … 9 ¾ x 7 ½ in … wide ruled … the blackish-green and silver model (#09918) designed by Jackson Pollock (just kidding — but the cover does look like it was splatter painted) ... not a journal … not a diary … no dates … no themes … mostly illegible … the sort used by grade school kids … just right … I write (scribble) down whatever comes to mind … something I’ve read or might write about … anything that’s brief ... incomplete sentences & ampersands are encouraged …continuity is discouraged … pages should be decorated with mustard stains & beer bottle rings.   

Composition books are an appropriate venue in which to compose haiku … about which I am very conservative … any deviation from the traditional five-seven-five syllable format will be ridiculed ... here’s a “Mystery Haiku” for you … see if you can guess which critter this one is about:

weathered-board-monarch

frozen sky-tailed in the sun

dark-crack-slither-gone

Take your time … the answer is at the end of the column ... meanwhile here’s maybe the best haiku ever written (on lower Lands Creek) … Daisy Ellison (my 11-year-old granddaughter, who also likes to scribble) & I co-authored it in about eight minutes … I wanted the middle line to read “high above the wind & the rain” but was overruled:

sunshine a-glitter

days & years a-spinning round

starlight a-twinkling

Billie Joe Shaver was just now singing on Outlaw Country (XM radio): “Gonna die with my boots on … gonna go out in style … when I get my wings I’m gonna fly away fly … gonna fly away singing” … or something like that …at the top of a blank page I wrote in my Lilliputian-sized scribble what came to mind:

Billie Joe … the 75-year old problem child

who is not unfamiliar with Texas jails …

claims he’s gonna die & then fly away.

Well now…that’s the good news …

‘cause if Billie Joe’s gonna fly away fly

there’s a good chance so can I.

It’s so nice supposing that

each ending is a new beginning

& that me & Billie Joe

are gonna sprout wings

& fly away singing.

That’s maybe the worst poem ever written (on lower Lands Creek) but it was a pleasant enough diversion from doing nothing ... Billie Joe can’t bitch … he’s in good company ... just above his poem is one of the finest short poems in any language ... it was written 1,600 or so years ago by T’ao Ch’ien:

I built this hut not far from others –

still, I don’t ever hear horse or wagon.

How? Solitude is here in the heart.

Seeking chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge

The southern hills rise quietly before me.

At sunset the mountain air is fine

& the birds always wing home in flocks.

In all this there is something –

but not in these words.

Random notes to myself scattered throughout: pale ales to try (100s) … books to read (Gilchrist’s “Life of William Blake”) … musicians to catch up with (Levon Helm) … words to look up (growler) … people to think about (so many) … can salamanders sing?      

For less than $2 you, too, can own a magic composition book … if it doesn’t save your life it will give you something to do of a Saturday morning when you’re all alone just looking out the kitchen window.

[The “sky-tailed” critter in the “Mystery  Haiku” is a skink.]

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..

Monday morning … 9:15 or so … suddenly the coyote was there … as if from out of nowhere … a shadow moving in the pasture across the creek.  

I had glanced out of my workroom window moments before and nothing was there. The next time I looked up he (or she) had probably come out of dense tangle of rhododendron, laurel, and grapevine that cloaks the mountainside bordering the far side of the pasture. The animal was 35 to 40 yards away.

He was gray-brown with reddish highlights around his face and neck and down the spine. The underside was a lighter color. He looked as if he might weigh 50 pounds, but I have read that coyotes look larger than they are. It’s likely that he weighed 25 to 30 pounds and was maybe three feet long, including the long bushy tail.  

The coyote circled a post in the pasture on which a bluebird box was mounted. Apparently sensing (correctly) that it was empty this year, he moved out of sight under grapevines, perhaps checking to see if they were ripe. When he reappeared, he surprised me — instead of crossing the creek by wading, he crossed it on our new footbridge (built this year), as if he had crossed it many times before. Maybe he has.

I suspect he knew four of our five German shorthaired pointers were penned up and that the fifth (Zeke, who is 15 years old) was likely to be asleep (which he was). And I’d guess that the critter was headed for the far side of the house — where fallen apples from my wife’s trees litter the ground — when he sensed my presence and drifted around the other side, up a trail, and out of sight.

The last I saw of him, he was moving in a quick-footed dogtrot. Not dainty-footed or nimble like a fox, he nevertheless moved gracefully. He certainly didn’t “slink” in the manner usually ascribed to coyotes. My visitor was, in fact, a pretty animal. I had no desire to harm him, even though he and his extended family are a negative factor where we live.

In A Natural History Guide to Great Smoky Mountains National Park (2008), Donald W. Linzey noted that, “Coyotes originally inhabited portions of western North America. As forests were cleared, however, their range in the United States expanded eastward … Many coyotes were liberated by fox hunters in the southern states who had similar-appearing coyote pups shipped to them instead of fox pups. In addition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has documented 20 different points in the southeastern United States where coyotes were released by people who planned to run them with hounds … Coyotes were first observed in the park in Cades Cove by Charles Remus on June 6, 1982, and now occur throughout the park” They also occur throughout Western North Carolina in backcountry, rural and urban areas. They’re everywhere and, like it or not, they’re here to stay.

Andy Russell, a professional trapper in Alberta, Canada, wrote a nice book based on a lifetime of personal experiences titled Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer (1970). Russell concluded that, “Of all the animals a trapper encounters, the coyote is by far the most cunning and intelligent. I have trapped foxes, which have a reputation for being difficult to take, but compared to a coyote the fox is a dunce.”

The pack of between five and 10 coyotes that patrols the area where we live west of Bryson City has decimated the small-game population on our property. Ground-nesting birds like towhees and ovenbirds have moved on. There are reports of missing cats and small dogs from neighbors. The pack likes to serenade us late at night with ongoing choruses of short yaps, long whines and loud barks. And now they are crossing our new footbridge into the yard looking for my wife’s apples in broad daylight.

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..

Many characters surface in stories related to Horace Kephart, regional author and one of the founders of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. F.A. Behymer, a journalist from St. Louis who would have been aware of the basic story behind Horace Kephart’s dismissal as a head librarian, separation from wife and family, and subsequent breakdown in March 1904 — is one of the more colorful. Behymer’s article, based on an interview with Kephart in Bryson City in 1926, appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was reprinted on Dec. 12 of the same year in the Asheville Citizen-Times as “Horace Kephart, Driven from Library by Broken Health, Reborn in Woods.”

An editorial note prefacing the reprinted text reads: “The following interesting article about one of the most interesting characters in Western North Carolina, Horace Kephart of Bryson City, was written for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by F.A. Behymer, one of the star men of that newspaper.” Behymer was easily as much of a “character” as Kephart ever dreamed of being.

It must have surprised him that a journalist from St. Louis would journey to Bryson City to write a lengthy article 20 years after he had departed the city in trying circumstances. But Behymer wasn’t your run-of-the-mill journalist. Driving to remote places to look around, get the lay of the land, conduct an interview, take a few photographs and drive back home to write it up was the way he had operated for more than a quarter of a century. Behymer is a minor character in the overall story, but his descriptions and conclusions are often shrewdly phrased and insightful.

Francis Albert Behymer (1870-1956) was born in Ohio, quit school at the age of 12, joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a proofreader, started his writing career as a “suburban correspondent,” and by 1900 was writing “a chain of bright stories of rural life ... that lasted half a century.” His friends called him “Bee.” He was short, weighed 125 pounds, had a big nose and gray hair that was unruly, wore a small mustache and always carried a battered briefcase. In his Chevrolet sedan, he traveled thousands of backcountry miles each year covering his beat, which consisted of the rural portions of three states: Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas, with emphasis on the Ozarks. His rambling columns have been described as “homey tales of people, horses, auctions and little girls who liked rabbits” — but he also enjoyed covering the occasional “cornfield murder.” The Post-Dispatch made him a Sunday editor, but he promptly “resigned” and went back to traveling and writing.

Kephart was precisely the sort of personality, with the sort of lifestyle and background, that would have attracted a journalist like Behymer, and Kephart himself gravitated toward “original characters” — as personalities like Quill Rose, Mark Cathey, Bob Barnett and “Bee” Behymer were known. Kephart would have appreciated the fact that the journalist had done his homework — having read Kephart’s books and the autobiographical essay — and that he pieced the overall story together in a lively but unobtrusive fashion. When asked by Behymer why he had chosen the Smokies as his destination, Kephart’s response was more specific than usual:

Resting awhile at his father’s home at Dayton [he] took a map and a compass and with Dayton as the center drew circles, seeking the nearest wilderness, in any direction, where he might cast himself away. The region of the Big Smoky Mountains in Western North Carolina seemed to meet the requirements. A topographic map showed him, by means of the contour lines and the blank spaces, where nature was wildest and where there were no settlements. These were the highest mountains east of the Rockies. It was a primitive hinterland without a history. It would be a good place to begin again, he thought.

Kephart’s materials were always categorized, alphabetized and indexed, often more than once. Relevant items that might be of use were cross-referenced in the outlines and drafts of specific articles and books he was working on at the time. Although no longer a librarian, he retained a librarian’s instinct for classification — or as Behymer described the situation: “The librarian’s ruling passion was still strong amid the bears and owls.”

Behymer was uncanny when it came to unraveling Kephart’s convoluted motives. He did so via a complexity of language and images never encountered in modern day journalism. For instance, he reached this carefully phrased (and in my opinion accurate) conclusion regarding Kephart’s “crash” after interviewing him in his office overlooking the Tuckaseigee River in 1926.

Horace Kephart won high position in the busy world as a librarian. He was a front-rank man. For 13 years he was at the head of the St. Louis Mercantile Library. Success was his. ... Then in 1904 — “crash.” The man broke down. To another man it would have been tragedy. To Horace Kephart it was blessed release. ... Ambition had beckoned, and duty had driven. His heart’s deepest longing had been denied. Always he had waited for a more convenient season. Greater ambition called for greater devotion. But for this chance, which another would have called mischance, he would have gone to the end denying himself his dearest wish, winning much but losing more.

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..

Like dimly-lit rhododendron tunnels or ancient sphagnum-layered bogs, creek bends are special places that invariably precipitate beauty.

Sitting in the blue-gray shadows of my porch, I watch lower Lands Creek flow by on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Down past the old outhouse, the creek bends southeastwardly and with mindless precision slices like a blade into a bluff of hornblende gneiss. Random glints of low-slanted evening light trace the graceful arc of the bend.

Horneblende is an aluminum silicate of iron and magnesium that may contain potassium. On slopes and in creek bends where flora is especially varied and lush, horneblende gneiss is often the key ingredient.

The bluff Lands Creek has been sculpting for thousands of years is shaded by a dense canopy composed of basswood, slippery elm, various white and red oak species, butternut, beech, striped and red maple, silverbell, serviceberry, black cherry, dogwood, ironwood, and various species of hickory. The under story is composed of rosebay rhododendron, mountain laurel, and dog-hobble. There are grape vines and tangles of greenbrier. Ferns that come to mind are cinnamon, Christmas, New York, glade, lady, hay-scented, ebony spleenwort, winged beech, and maidenhair. There are mosses, liverworts, sedges, ground pine, and grasses. The spring wildflowers are prolific.

In other words, the factors that created a bend in a creek exposed various levels of a mountainside containing horneblende gneiss and, in the process, also created a small natural garden of great beauty, without any “help” whatsoever from any person.

My favorite tree in the bend is a good-sized butternut ... the perfect tree for this setting. The butternut walnut (Juglans cinerea), which some people call white walnut, is surrounded by several of its close cousins, the ever-present black walnuts (J. nigra). But you can distinguish the smaller butternut walnut in a heartbeat.

Butternut has a large terminal leaflet, whereas black walnut has either a small terminal leaflet or no terminal leaflet at all. The bark of mature butternut walnut trees is gray-white and divided into deep furrows that form a characteristic rough diamond-shaped pattern. Its leaves and fruit drop early revealing conspicuous, 3-lobed (inversely triangular) leaf scars on twigs, each of which is surrounded by a raised, downy, gray pad or “eyebrow.” These scars make the leaf scars look for all the world like a ram’s face.

Unlike black walnut — which bears dark-green rounded fruits that turn dark black-brown — butternut walnut displays oblong fleshy light-green fruits that turn a light-brown buttery color with maturity.

Cherokees traditionally used the inner bark as a carthartic and harvested the nuts as food. To this day, they make a black dye to color basket splints from butternut roots and carve the soft wood for masks and other items. Mountaineers used the inner bark and fruit husks to obtain a yellow or orange agent to dye homespuns; hence, during the Civil War backwoods Confederate troops dressed in homespun “uniforms” of butternut-dyed cloth became known as “Butternuts.” In country churches here in the mountains, an altar carved of a satiny light-brown wood and displaying bands of paler sapwood might well be made of butternut.

Unfortunately, butternut walnut — like so many tree species — is being infested by a killing agent. In the butternut’s instance, the agent is a fungus first identified during the late 1960s in eastern North America. This canker has now spread throughout the entire range of the tree from Minnesota south to Arkansas and from New England south into Georgia.

In Charles E. Little’s The Dying of the Trees: The Pandemic in America’s Forests (Viking, 1995), the lens-shaped cankers that are formed when a tiny fungus spore enters the tree through an injured limb or trunk are described as “necrotic lesions of the bark and cambium layer” that “spread throughout the tree, even to the nut husks, eventually girdling the main limbs and trunk and causing the tree to die. The death is slow, taking several years, but certain.”

For the time being, however, the evening light that glints off the arc of water below our place is still refracted by the patterns in the bark of the butternut tree … diamonds in a near-perfect creek bend.

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..

High-elevation overlooks are one of our finest natural resources. These vantage points allow us to rise above our everyday humdrum existence and see the world with fresh eyes. Many of the finest overlooks along the Blue Ridge Parkway, in the Great Smokies, and elsewhere can be reached directly via motor vehicles.

Instant access is just fine when we don’t have a lot of time to devote to getting there. But it always adds a bit of resonance to the experience if we have to walk a ways before reaching our destination. It doesn’t have to be a long walk. Many of the most satisfying overlooks require relatively little time or effort to reach. Two of my favorites through the years have been Pickens Nose and Salt Rock.

Pickens Nose is located at the southern end of the Nantahala Mountains within the Nantahala National Forest. From the backcountry information center at the Standing Indian Campground, continue on FR-67/2 along the headwaters of the Nantahala River. Eight miles from the information center, this maintained road passes through Mooney Gap where the Appalachian Trail (marked with white blazes) makes a crossing. Continue another 0.7 mile along FR-67/2 to the trailhead for Pickens Nose, which is situated in a gap at 4,680 feet.

The trail leads south along the crest of a ridge through a rhododendron tunnel. At about a half-mile, there is a side-trail leading a few yards to the east (left) to a small outcrop providing a view out over the Coweeta Creek watershed and the Little Tennessee River Valley to the Balsam Mountain Range. You can spot Highlands in the distance.

At 0.7 miles, you reach Pickens Nose at 4,900 feet, a sloping, multi-level granite outcrop on the southwest end of the ridge. It’s maybe 45-feet-long and 20-feet-wide. The vertical drop of the rock face is 50 or so feet, while the almost sheer descent into the Bettys Creek valley below is 2,230 feet.

The views west and north are into the high Nantahalas. Standing Indian looms at 5,499 feet due west. It’s four miles away but seems as if you could reach out and touch it. To the east the Balsams swing back in an arc toward the Smokies. And to the south you will look out over an endless blue expanse of mountains into Georgia and the upper headwaters of the Savannah. Here you are on the edge of the contorted Appalachian drainage system, with waters flowing on the one hand directly to the Atlantic and on the other through the vast heartland of the nation to the Gulf of Mexico.

Why Pickens Nose? In profile the outcrop resembles a huge nose.

All the evidence indicates that it was so-named in honor of Gen. Andrew Pickens of South Carolina, a soldier in the Revolutionary War who subsequently initiated prohibited sales of Cherokee lands during the 1780s and helped lay out Indian boundary lines during the 1790s.

Salt Rock is located in Panthertown Valley, which is administered by the Highlands Ranger District of the Nantahala National Forest. Inquire at the Highlands Ranger District office regarding trail maps and additional information.

To reach Salt Rock turn east (towards Brevard) at the crossroads in Cashiers on U.S. 64 and proceed 1.8 miles before turning left onto Cedar Creek Road. At 2.1 miles, turn right onto Breedlove Road and proceed 3.3 miles to the gated trailhead. A short walk down the roadway and around the first bend leads to Salt Rock, one of the most delightful overlooks in the southern highlands.

From this vantage point on the southwest rim of the Panthertown watershed (headwaters of the Tucksegee River) a series of extensive rock outcrops that rise from 200 to 300 feet above the valley can be observed. The broad valley floor and almost vertical rock-face terrain has led some to describe the area as “The Yosemite of the East.” Retired Western Carolina University biologist Dan Pittillo has observed that Panthertown Valley resembles what the Yosemite Valley of California “might look like following several million years of erosion.”

It’s a region of flat, meandering tannin-darkened streams often bordered by white sand banks, extensive waterfall systems that form grottoes in which rare ferns reside, large pools several hundred feet in length, high country bogs and seeps that harbor vegetation not often encountered elsewhere in the mountains, upland “hanging” valleys on the sides of the tract, and rocky outcrops where ravens nest.

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..

Like most commonly observed objects, crows flit across our field of vision unheeded. Caw-caw-cawing unmusically … flap-flap-flapping over the fields … dressed as if for a funeral … iridescent pieces of black flannel waving in the breeze. We hear and see them … but we don’t really pay attention. We rarely think about them … we never ask ourselves: “What are these birds up to?”

Within the last decade, however, crows have decided to relocate into the valley we live in west of Bryson City. This flock is composed of perhaps 30 individuals ... maybe more … maybe less. Counting crows can be a problem.

They all look alike … and no crow stays in one place for very long. But I’d say we’ve got about 30 crows … more than enough.

They primarily feed around the barn on whatever chicken, rabbit, and horse feed gets scattered on the ground. But they will eat almost anything. They are, I have observed, fond of apples … especially golden Grimes apples. I have seen them pecking at tomatoes and squash. But I have never observed a crow eating a green bean.

They apparently roost and nest in a thicket of scrub pine on a ridge above the valley. Being crows they are, of course, secretive about where they roost. They are secretive about everything. But I have watched them through binoculars late in the evening. They fly in every direction as a diversion but eventually they slip away … one by one … into the pine grove on that ridge.

Of late, they have become rather tame and often come down to feed and mess around in the garden ornamental shrubs next to our home, when they think no one is around; that is, when both of our vehicles are gone. You did know that crows can count, didn’t you?

Well-funded high-caliber scientific research has established that all crows can count to three ... not a few can count to four ... and the occasional crow can get to five. The North American record for counting by a crow is eight. It was set by a crow residing in Ithaca, N.Y. There is suspicion that the crow was tutored at the Cornell University Lab. Be that as it may, crows are good counters.

When they think no one is home, I sit by my window and listen to the crows talking things over. I have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t caw when there’re discussing things. At this time, their vocalizations consist primarily of low rattling and gurgling sounds. One will rattle for a while, then another one will gurgle for awhile in response. I keep asking myself, “What are these birds up to?”

I have never observed a large roost of crows, which is properly referred to not as a flock but as a “congress of crows,” but in some places they form winter enclaves that number into the thousands. One standard source reports winter flocks of up to 200,000 birds.

I have an AP wire service clip in my “Crow” file dated Jan. 6, 1987, and titled “Crows Decide Illinois Town Is For The Birds.” The town in question was Danville, Ill., which had suffered a crow inundation that broke branches, pulled down power lines, and bombarded streets and houses with droppings.

From the article: “‘It’s like an Alfred Hitchcock movie over here. These birds are driving us all crazy,’ said Irene Hall, who lives on Oak Street, one of the crows’ favorite spots.”

The first naturalists in our part of the world were the ancient Cherokees. They didn’t miss a trick in regard to the intricacies of plant and animal life. They liked to closely observe the mundane, and then make it a part of their oral traditions.

The Cherokee word for crow is “Koga.” According to one of their stories, Koga acquired its black color in a futile attempt to obtain the first fire. In another story, two crows were selected to be the guards of a gambler named Brass. Anthropologist James Mooney collected this story in the late 1880s while living among the Cherokees in the Big Cove section of the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina.

“They tied his hands and feet with a grapevine and drove a long stake through his breast, and planted it far out in the deep water,” Mooney recorded in Myths of the Cherokee (1900). “They set two crows on the end of the pole to guard it and called the place Ka-gun-yi: ‘Crow place.’ But Brass never died, and cannot die until the end of the world, but lies there always with his face up. Sometimes he struggles under the water to get free, and sometimes the beavers, who are his friends, come and gnaw at the grapevine to release him. Then the pole shakes and the crows at the top cry ‘Ka! Ka! Ka!’ and scare the beavers away.”

What better lookouts than a pair of crows?

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..

I had my first introduction to plants in the Hibiscus genus when I was a boy. Rose-of-Sharon was a common dooryard shrub in the piedmont region of Virginia where I grew up, just as it is here in Western North Carolina.

In mid-summer, my cousins and I would amuse ourselves by trapping large bumblebees in the flowers. No problem: just wait for a bee to penetrate the back part of the blossom and then seal the petals shut with your fingertips. We must not have had a lot amusement options back then, since we spent a lot of our time harassing bumblebees in this manner.

Even then, I noticed the peculiar structure of the rose-of-Sharon blossoms, but it wasn’t until later on that I bothered to find out more about them and the other members of the Hibiscus genus, which belong to the mallow family of plants.

All mallows display five petals, within which the male stamen parts are united to form a long tube (or “staminal column”) that surrounds the female parts. Nectar is produced at the base of the petals that attracts pollinators deep into the flower and thereby into contact with the sexual parts.

Rose-of-Sharon is the only shrub in the Hibiscus genus that’s hardy in our region. Sometimes called Althaea by gardeners, the plant is native to Asia but was introduced into the British Isles over 250 years ago; indeed, it has been a part of our floral heritage for so long that it no longer seems “foreign” at all. It’s not uncommon to spot naturalized plants growing near old home sites that have “escaped” and made themselves at home with the rest of our native plants.

Which common garden plant displays the most striking blossoms? To my eye okra is the hands-down winner. The plant is a Hibiscus genus member native to the Old World tropics.

Another Hibiscus genus plants that has come to live with us — this time from Europe — is flower-of-an-hour (H. trionum), which has lovely sulphur-yellow petals and a purplish-black “eye.” As the common name indicates, the flowers last only a few hours. Unfortunately, it is more common in the Piedmont region of the state than here in the Smokies region, being reported from only Jackson and Watauga counties in Western North Carolina.

That brings us to the lone native Hibiscus species found in the Smokies region. But if we have to just have one Hibiscus of our very own, few wildflower enthusiasts would choose another in its stead.

That species is the swamp rose mallow (H. moshcheutos), which grows in moist woods, meadows, and marshes. Some authorities treat the pink-flowered variety and the white-flowered variety as separate species, but the current thought is that they are subspecies.

Here in the westernmost counties of North Carolina swamp rose mallow has been reported from Cherokee, Swain, Macon, and Haywood counties. To my knowledge, all of these represent reports of the whitish subspecies. No plant is more stunning when encountered in the wild. They lend a sub-tropical touch to our upland landscape.

The large deep-red rose mallows that put on late summer and early fall shows in yards throughout the region are derived from horticultural strains such as the “Hibiscus Southern Belle” types offered by many seed companies.

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..

Each July since 1991, I’ve led field trips along the Blue Ridge Parkway offered as part of the Native Plants Conference sponsored by Western Carolina University. This year’s outings (July 25) will have taken place by the time you read this.

Between Waterrock Knob and Mt. Pisgah, the eight participants in my group will identify perhaps eight fern species, several grasses, a few lichens, maybe a mushroom or two, and more than 100 wildflower species, including wild quinine, large-flowered leafcup, bush honeysuckle, green wood orchis, starry campion, Indian paintbrush, enchanter’s nightshade, Small’s beardtongue, downy skullcap, tall delphenium, pale Indian plantain, tall bellflower, southern harebell, horsebalm, round-leaved sundew, Blue Ridge St. Johnswort and false asphodel.

No group of flowering plants along the Parkway, however, will be of more interest to participants than the “Monardas,” a genus in the mint family that includes the ever-popular bee balm. There are two other distinct “Monarda” species — wild bergamot and basil balm — that appear in this section of the Southern Blue Ridge Province in addition to a hybrid backcross called purple bergamont.

“Monardas” are sometimes called horsemints because “horse” signifies “large” or “coarse,” and the members of this genus are generally larger, coarser plants than many other members of the mint family.  In this instance “coarse is beautiful.” Most of the horsemints have quite appropriately been introduced into cultivation.

Here’s a checklist of those three horsemint species and the hybrid found in the Western North Carolina mountains. All flower from mid-June into September and can be readily located along the parkway, especially in the areas of the Grassy Ridge Mine (milepost 436.8) and Standing Rock Overlook (milepost 441.4).

• Bee balm, also called crimson bee balm or Oswego tea (Monarda didyma): occasional in moist, shaded situations; adapted by scarlet color long tubular shape of flowers for pollination by hummingbirds, but often “robbed” by bees and other insects that bore “bungholes” at the base of the corolla tube; note the reddish leaf-like bracts just below the flowers; called “bee balm” because it made a poultice that soothed stings; sometimes called Oswego tea because of its use as a steeped medicinal by the Oswego Indians of New York; generic name honors an European botanist, Nicholas Monarda, who had an interest in medically useful plants from the New World. No red flower — save, of course, cardinal flower — is more resplendent. And like cardinal flower, this member of the mint family often haunts a lush and dark setting so that when it catches slanting light the flaming crimson gleams like a beacon.

• Wild bergamot (M. fistulosa): common but variable species flowering in open fields, meadows, and on dry wooded slopes; petals are usually lilac or pinkish-purple (rarely white) with the upper lip bearded at the apex; bracts often pink-tinged; frequently visited by butterflies; oil with an odor resembling essence of bergamot was once extracted from the plant to treat respiratory ailments; brewed as tea by the Cherokee for many ailments, including flatulence and hysterics.

• Basil balm (M. clinopodia): occasional in both moist and dry woods and thickets; similar to wild bergamot but with paler pink or white flowers that have purple spots on lower lip and whitish bracts; common name indicates that it was used like bee balm as a poultice. Wild bergamot and basil balm often interbreed along the parkway.

• Purple bergamot (M. media): an infrequently encountered natural hybrid backcross of the above species displaying deep reddish-purple flowers and dark purple bracts; habitat about the same as bee balm, so look for color differences between scarlet of that species and deep purple for the hybrid; despite the hybrid status it’s reliably distinctive and exciting to encounter.

Note: Excellent colored illustrations of each of these horsemints appear opposite p. 92 of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1977).  Dotted horsemint (M. punctata), which has purple-spotted yellow flowers, is primarily a species of the piedmont and coastal plain that does not — to my knowledge — appear in the Southern Blue Ridge Province.

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 upland waterways of the southern highlands provide one of the region’s most interesting natural areas. Unlike most upland habitats — which generally occur as blocks or patches — streams form long corridors that afford rich and varied niches for  plants and animals that have adapted their lifestyles accordingly.

Within the water there’s a variety of animal life, ranging from native brook trout to grotesque hellbenders to water shrews equipped with hairy feet that allow them to hunt underwater. In quiet nooks of pools and eddies, waterstriders skate on film provided by the surface tension of the water.

Over the water corridor, kingfishers, dragonflies and other species establish linear territories. Along the edges, Louisana waterthrushes hunt for worms and snails that they take to their young hatched in nests built back under the banks.

Within the spray zones of waterfalls and cascades, there’s the shimmering emerald world of the mosses, liverworts, ferns and other moisture-loving plants. Then, somewhat farther back — in the miniature flood plains or wash zones created by periodic overflows — a variety of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants form thick walls of undergrowth and overhanging canopy that define the outer edges (or walls) of the corridor.

Shrub yellowroot (Xanthoriza simplicissima), one of the most distinctive and important plants found here in the Blue Ridge, occurs along the banks of most streams. Yellowroot is distinctive because of the handsome tassel of flowers that sometimes appear as early as February and the strategies it has devised for growth and seed dispersal in areas often invaded by raging currents. The plant is also economically and socially important because of its medicinal use and the yellow dye Cherokee women extract from the plant’s inner pulp for tinting basket splints.

If you’re not familiar with yellowroot, look for a woody plant about 8- to 24-inches high that looks to me like a miniature palm tree; that is, all the leafy green growth is at the top of the stem. A participant in one of my plant identification workshops disagreed, saying that it looked like carrot tops.

The flowers emerge on graceful drooping racemes about 3-inches in length. These flowers consist of five purplish-brown sepals (no petals) about a half inch in diameter. The most distinctive feature of the flower is the bright yellow dot in its center — the pollen used to attract pollinators.

The yellowish follicles or fruits produced in summer disperse seeds that float away on inflated capsules.  That makes wonderful sense of why the plant favors a streamside habitat and of how it becomes distributed downstream.

The tissue under the bark is a bright yellow hue that rivals the color of fine butter. The slender roots have long been used for medicinal purposes. Doug Elliott, in his neglected little book Roots (The Chatham Press, 1976), advises that “many people who do use it, including myself, chew a section of the bitter root regularly as a general tonic with an especially beneficial effect on the gastric system.”

Many years ago, Martha Ross, a resident of the Big Cove Community on the Qualla Boundary and a member of family well known for their basketry, told me that her mother, Charlotte Lossiah, “didn’t use yellowroot as a dye too much except with honeysuckle. She liked to use bloodroot. But I like yellowroot. We also use butternut and walnut and bloodroot. You can gather yellowroot anytime, but it’s best in spring when you get a brighter color. It’s a little dull in winter. The roots can be used if you beat them with a hammer, but I like the stems to get the prettiest yellow. You scrape the pulp into a kettle of boiling water on the stove. Pull the splints out to the edge so that the yellow fills up a little hole in the center. After 30 or 40 minutes it’s ready. I never dye a big batch at once, just enough to make a few baskets.”

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 sweltering heat this summer is restricting some outdoor activities, but it’s a prime time for lizard watching. Lizards don’t mind the heat; indeed, many of them are highly adapted to dry climatic conditions. Lizard watching can be done from your front porch, along fencerows, in dry pine or oak woods, and in rocky areas.

The “spring lizards” used for fish bait are actually salamanders, which (like frogs and toads) are amphibians. True lizards are reptiles (like snakes and turtles) and have scaly, dry skins, as well as claws.

In A Field Guide to Your Own Back Yard (1985), John Hanson Mitchell gives readers his “golden rule” for distinguishing salamanders from lizards: “If you can catch it, it is a salamander, if you can’t, it is a lizard.”

It never even occurred to me that I might be able to catch a fence lizard, which are aptly called “fence swifts” by many country boys. For several summers, however, I did try from time to time to capture one of the numerous skinks that live on our property. Spotting one with its pretty lines and luminescent blue tail perched on the side of the barn or outhouse, I’d attempt to ease up and grab it with my hand or encompass the critter with my cap. No such luck. They were much too quick for me.

In his introduction to A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians (1975), Roger Conant advises the would-be lizard catcher to stalk the quarry by not looking directly at it. “Move in at an angle, watching it out of the corner of your eye.” A prize fighter or major league infielder might apply that technique with success, but my hand-eye coordination wasn’t up to lizard-catching standards.

What I do plan to try, however, the next time my lizard-catching granddaughter comes to visit, is one of the nifty lizard nooses Conant describes and diagrams. It’s not complicated. You simply “attach a small noose of horsehair or fine thread or wire to the end of a pole measuring a few feet in length ... Slip the noose over the lizard’s head and let it come to rest around the neck. Jerk the pole quickly upward and the lizard is yours! This method requires practice, but it is quite efficient.”

The eastern fence lizard is gray or brown above. Their scales are ridged so that they have a rough appearance. Females have conspicuously patterned backs, while the backs of males tend to be brownish with less pattern. Mature males have very apparent greenish-blue markings on each side of the belly. As the lizard raises and lowers itself in pushup fashion, the markings are flashed to warn off other males.

While basking in the sun, a fence lizard alternately puffs out and draws in its throat as if it were sucking on something. Ever alert to the peculiarities of each animal and plant, the ancient Cherokees invoked the fence lizard in their formulas used for drawing out the poison from snake bites. They also believed that scratching one’s legs with the claws of the first fence lizard caught each spring would result in no dangerous snakes being encountered for the remainder of the year.

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..