Biologist and ecologist Robert Zahner (1923-2007) was born in Summerville, S.C., and grew up in Atlanta. But his adopted “spiritual home” was the elevated plateau on the southeastern cusp of the Blue Ridge where Highlands is situated.

Through the years, the Highlands Plateau has attracted some of this nation’s finest naturalists, biologists, ornithologists and ecologists, starting with the French botanical explorer Andre Michaux during the late 18th century. But the name attached to the region today as much as any other is Bob Zahner’s. Unlike most of the others, he didn’t just pass through or come for a season of field studies. Along with his wife, fellow biologist and constant companion, Glenda, he came to stay.

Even in condensed summary, Zahner’s professional career was distinguished. After serving in the U.S. Army air corps during World War II, he received his bachelor’s (botany), master’s (forestry) and Ph.D. (Ecology) degrees from Duke University. From 1953-1959, he was a research scientist for the U.S. Forest Service. From 1959-1974, he was a professor of forest botany and ecology at the University of Michigan. From 1974-1979, he was a self-employed consultant in conservation biology in Highlands. From 1980-1990, he was a professor of forest ecology at Clemson University. And from 1990-1999, he was again a self-employed consultant in conservation biology based in Highlands.

Bob Zahner was fun to be with. He was a ready source of precise information imparted in a low-key manner, but he was also a good listener. He saw the natural world through scientifically trained eyes and the eyes of a nature enthusiast.

Requested to do so, Glenda Zahner provided these “Biographical Notes on Bob Zahner”:

“Bob grew up as a rich kid in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. His family spent summers in Highlands, at their cabin on Lake Sequoia, and, later on, on Billy Cabin Mountain. Bob considered Highlands his true home; his spiritual home; a refuge from Atlanta society; with freedom to be himself and be close to nature. He loved hiking in the mountains and the forests. This is where he got his inspiration to become a forest ecologist.

“For as long as I can remember, Bob always said he wanted to retire to Highlands; to the little cabin he built after being discharged from the army air corps while awaiting admission to Duke University on the G.I. Bill.

“Bob’s ‘retirement’ came much sooner than either of us expected. In 1973 his parents decided to give the Highlands property to Bob and his brother, since they felt we were already ‘buying’ his inheritance by paying the taxes and making the mortgage payments.

“Bob was at the peak of his academic career: chairman of the forestry department, with a very productive teaching and research program and a possible candidate for dean of the School of Natural Resources. However, he was unhappy about having more and more administrative duties leaving him less time for the research and teaching that he loved and did so well.

“Within a week after we became owners of the property in Highlands, Bob resigned his position at the University of Michigan and we prepared to make Highlands our full-time residence. Friends, family and colleagues were stunned by our decision. We, ourselves, never struggled with the decision. It was as though we were ‘called’ there, but didn’t yet know why or for what purpose.

“Soon after we arrived we discovered that destructive forces were at work in the forests that Bob loved. Fifty years after the Weeks Act was passed, our National Forest was ripe again for cutting, and the clear-cuts were enormous. (It seems the timber industry was telling Congress and the forest service how much timber it wanted and that, rather than “best management practices” determined the quota.) It was totally unsustainable, and for Bob, it was heartbreaking to see what was happening in the Nantahala National Forest surrounding Highlands. From every mountaintop huge clear-cuts could be seen like pockmarks on the landscape throughout the national forest. On the ground it was devastating ....

“We decided to form a local ‘watchdog’ group to monitor forest service publication of planned timber sales on the Highlands district. This group became the Highlands Chapter of the Western North Carolina Alliance, and worked diligently on the ‘Cut the Clear-cutting’ campaign.

“Bob eschewed confrontation, but he excelled in diplomacy and had a real talent for finding common ground. He was effective in dealing with the forest service because he treated everyone with respect, including those with whom he disagreed, and he had the weight of good sound science behind him. He pointed out that to the timber industry, the term ‘sustainability’ meant sustainable timber harvest, while, to the environmental community, it refers to sustainable forest ecosystems . . .

“Bob introduced the term ‘benign neglect’ as a forest management tool, arguing that the value of a live tree on the stump continues to increase with age as it functions within the ecosystem, providing habitat, sequestering carbon and adding biomass. And he wrote a significant paper defining the characteristics of ‘old growth,’ which has been of immense help in determining stands that are in need of protection.

“Bob’s love for the land was not limited to the forest. He loved Highlands like he was a native son, which motivated him to write a book, The Mountain At The End Of The Trail, about the relationship between the town of Highlands and the iconic mountain that figures so prominently in the town’s history.

“The book is also about Bob’s own relationship with the mountain. Bob was a scientist of international repute, with scores of scientific peer-reviewed research publications to his credit. His first attempt at writing was dry, and empirical in style. I advised him to start all over and write from his heart, and the next draft was heartfelt and personal, even passionate.”

The Mountain at the End of the Trail: A History of Whiteside Mountain is both scientific and personal, a graceful blend of restrained yet “heartfelt” nature writing.

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..

Naturalist, photographer and writer Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980) was born in Joliet, Ill.

American nature writing in descriptive prose inevitably flows from Henry David Thoreau, that insistent observer of the commonplace. John Burroughs, his 19th century follower, was the first professional nature writer in America, and he remains one of the most pleasurable to read. Then there is that forgotten gem of outdoor ruminations, Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days. By the end of the century, John Muir had introduced a sense of urgency concerning the need for preservation. Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edwin Way Teale, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard and a few others extended that major tradition of American nature writing into the twentieth century.

Somewhat overlooked in recent years in favor of those writers whose primary interest lies in rendering their psychological reactions, Teale was one of the most gifted and influential nature writers of his era. Always methodical in regard to preparation, he was consistently able to locate significant interactions as they were occurring in the natural world and record what he was seeing in his notebooks. In his books, these events were set forth in an unvarnished yet memorable style that appealed to the common reader and the specialist alike. He intuited that experiencing nature either firsthand or via the written word was essential — that it filled “a deep need of the human heart.”

The son of a railroad mechanic and a school teacher who had emigrated from England, Teale dated his interest in nature to summer vacations at his maternal grandfather’s farm, “Lone Oak,” in the dune country of northern Indiana. In 1918, he entered Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, Ind., and studied English literature. After graduating in 1922, he married an Earlham classmate, Nellie Donovan, who became his constant companion as they crisscrossed the United States and Great Britain.

Near Horizons won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing in 1943. His memoirs Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist (1943); The Lost Woods (1945), Days without Time (1948) and A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (1974) have become natural history classics. Springtime in Britain (1970) is an absorbing account of his travels with Nellie through England, Scotland and Wales that covered 11,000 miles to places associated with the great figures in English nature writing: Gilbert White, William Cobbett, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, and others.

Teale’s most famous books consist of a quartet on the four seasons that he and Nellie traveled throughout the United States for nearly 20 years to research: North With Spring: A Naturalist’s Record of a 17,000 Mile Journey with the North American Spring (1951); Autumn Across America: A Naturalist’s Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Autumn (1956); Journey Into Summer: A Naturalist’s Record of a 19,000 Mile Journey Through the North American Summer (1960) and Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist’s Record of a 20,000 Mile Journey Through the North American Winter (1965).

Wandering Through Winter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1966 — but, in reality, the award recognized the literary accomplishment the entire series represented.

The spring journey from the Everglades to Maine took place in 1948. It carried the Teales through Western North Carolina from Pearson’s Falls Glen near Tryon to Highlands and up into the Great Smokies to Silers Bald and Mt. LeConte. Teale explained in the opening pages that they had been planning such a journey — “seeing, firsthand, the long upward northward flow of the season” — for many years:

“But obligations and responsibilities pushed the dream unrealized before us. Season followed season and year followed year. And while we waited, the world changed and we changed with it. The spring trip was something we looked forward to during the terrible years of World War II, during the strain and grief of losing David, our only son, in battle. [All of the books in the quartet are ‘Dedicated to / DAVID / who traveled with / Us in Our Hearts.’] When we talked over our plans with friends we discovered that our dream was a universal dream. They, too, had beguiled themselves, on days when winter seemed invincible, with thoughts of lifting anchor and, leaving everyday responsibilities behind, drifting north with the spring.”

Anyone interested in this region’s natural history will want to read North With Spring.

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..

Radical ecologist and writer Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was born in Home, Penn., the son of a hardscrabble farmer and a schoolteacher. Hitchhiking as an adolescent through the western United States initiated a lifelong identity with that region. After being discharged from the U.S. Army in 1947, Abbey worked at various marginal jobs while studying philosophy at the University of New Mexico, from which he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees. The title of his master’s thesis was “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.”

Abbey worked in the western states, intermittently, as a U.S. Forest Service fire-lookout and for the National Park Service as a ranger. He also, without success, tried his hand at being a social caseworker and technical writer in New York City. He wrote eight novels, seven collections of non-fiction prose, a gathering of aphorisms, the texts for five collections of photographs, and — for just for good measure — he self-edited The Best of Edward Abbey. Later in life, he taught writing at the University of Arizona. He was married three times.

According to Kingsley Widmer’s biographical sketch in American National Biography Online, “Abbey held that his main vocation was as iconoclastic literateur defending natural wilderness and freedom. [His] best-known novel, and intended handbook of troublemaking, The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975), along with its posthumously published continuation Hayduke Lives! (1990), is dedicated to the “Luddite anarchism of sabotaging American technocracy in the remaining open West.”

Abbey’s best writing occurs in his non-fictional prose narratives and essays. The most famous of these is Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968). Widmer notes that it “centers with tough candor on his times as a fire-lookout and park ranger. Here, and increasingly in later essays ... he revived anarchist Propaganda of the Deed (destroying surveyors’ markers, burning billboards, disabling diesels, protectively tree-spiking in old-growth forests, satiric sloganeering, and other measures) .... But in fact Abbey was more of a sardonic commentator than a political activist. [His] self-conscious role was to combine, in both person and writings, the ecologically sensitive wilderness westerner with the Enlightenment rebel-skeptic in a post-World War II he-man manner (he had trouble with “new feminism” and other “chicken-xxxx liberalism”).

“In spite of his considerable macho western mode — including boots and vest over flannel shirt, six-pack of beer and cigar, pickup and .357 magnum, full beard and fully scornful tongue — he was also attempting a libertarian revision of western mythology.”

Be that as it may, when he got around to doing so, Abbey could write with beautiful insight about the landscapes and entities in the natural world that he encountered. Some of his finest nature writing appears in an essay titled “Natural and Human History,” which served as the text for Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains — a coffee-table size book published in 1970 that featured the photographs of Eliot Porter.

Abbey was chosen to prepare this text because he had proven his ability as a writer of descriptive prose with Desert Solitaire. And he could also point out that he had resided within 30 miles of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a short while in 1968. As he was departing from the Great Smokies after completing his writing-assignment visit in 1969, he noted, in passing, that, “We come next to Sylva, where I had lived the year before while teaching at nearby University of Western North Carolina.” That’s the short version of an interesting interlude in Abbey’s career.

A fuller version is provided in James M. Cahalan’s Edward Abbey: A Life (2001). Abbey felt the need for a full-time job after his wife, Judy, had given birth to their daughter, Susannah. So, he accepted a position in the English Department at Western Carolina University, where a friend, Al Sarvis, was teaching in the Art Department.

According to Callahan, “Ed, Judy, and baby Susie lived in the nearby town of Sylva, in the basement of the rambling home of Marcellus Buchanan, a colorful local politician ... Abbey hated this area and his job. He noted on Oct. 8, 1968, that ‘like a bloody idiot,’ he had accepted a teaching job ‘here at Redneck U. All for monetary greed ... $7,800, or almost $1,000 per working month, good wages for me.’ He dreaded the ‘horror the tedium the drudgery of academic life. ‘How I loathe it. All those pink faces in the classroom three xxxxxxx hours, five xxxxxxx days per week .... always there’s tomorrow’s xxxx to prepare, to read, to grade’ ... [His] first term as a full-time instructor of record was not an auspicious one ... His English Department colleague D. Newton Smith explained that Abbey was ‘very shy about that process. He didn’t know what to do, pretty much.’ Smith added that Abbey’s training in philosophy, ‘a very contemplative kind of thing,’ was certainly ‘not the same thing as teaching English.’

“On wild drunken, reckless drives through the countryside, Abbey threw his homebrew bottles out the window and raged against the ugly billboards defacing the landscape ... When Abbey got the word that he could return to Organ Pipe [Cactus National Monument] for a second full season, he was so eager to flee the classroom and the coming Appalachian winter for the Arizona desert that he quit his teaching job before the end of the quarter ... Newt Smith clarified that ‘he simply gave everybody in his class a B and left. It was not well received!’”

Edward Abbey couldn’t (or wouldn’t) teach English, but he could write it. A year later he described this moment during a wintertime journey to Clingmans Dome:

“Higher and higher we rise toward the clouds, the cloud forest. We reach a certain elevation, about 4,500 feet, where all of the trees are covered with a delicate, brilliant, impeccable snowy lace. Not snow, not ice, but frozen fog, that’s what it is ... Brittle and fragile crystals of frost. Apparently the needles act as condensation nuclei, around which the cloud vapors gather and freeze. The effect is stranger than that of snow or ice; each tree, seen against the sun, seems to glow, to radiate an aura of intense white light.”

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..

Anthropologist James Mooney (1861-1921) devoted his life to detailing various aspects of the history, material culture, oral tradition, language, arts, and religion of the Eastern Cherokee, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa, and other tribes, adding a new dimension to the writing of Indian history by combining various methods of research and utilizing sources from the Indians themselves.

He is most widely remembered for his research and writing on the Ghost Dance Religion. But some of his most inspired work took place in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where he lived among the remnant Eastern Band of Cherokees [now officially designated as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians] for parts of four years from 1887 through 1890 and for interim periods thereafter through 1916. He was the first serious student of that then neglected tribe and probably the most influential. According to University of Georgia anthropologist Charles Hudson, States, Mooney “possessed just the right combination of persistence and tact to do superb fieldwork,” allowing him to publish works on the Cherokee without which readers “would know next to nothing about the world view of the southeastern Indians.”

The major works dealing with the Eastern Band that Mooney saw through the press during his lifetime were Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891) and Myths of the Cherokee (1900). Both appeared as Bureau of American Ethnology publications. They provide insights into the interrelated themes of tribal history, lore, and ritual Mooney sought to explore and correlate throughout his career.

In 1885, Mooney was working for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. That summer he met Nimrod Jarrett Smith, principal chief of the Eastern Band, who was often in Washington lobbying for official recognition of the tribe in North Carolina as a legal entity or for responsible use of tribal resources. He warmed to Mooney and invited him to visit Cherokee.

The 26-year-old budding ethnologist who disembarked at the rail and telegraph station at present day Whittier, on the Tuckasegee River about six miles south of Yellow Hill (as Cherokee was then known), was “a small, agile man with long dark-brown hair and large gray eyes,” about five feet, four inches in height. He wore a mustache and sometimes kept his hair shoulder-length. Not physically imposing, Mooney’s greatest asset, as one of his co-workers noted much later, was an “intense emotional attitude.”

Mooney credits “nearly three-fourths” of the stories related in Myths of the Cherokees to a shaman named Swimmer, who lived in the traditional Big Cove community (which remains a bastion of Cherokee traditionalism to this day). Once the ethnologist gained Swimmer’s trust they spent “day and night, talking and writing” about “the whole range of Indian life and thought.” Shortly after the great medicine man’s death, Mooney penned an elegiac tribute to his friend: “He died in March, 1899, aged about sixty-five, and was buried like a true Cherokee on the slope of a forest-clad mountain. Peace be to his ashes and sorrow for his going, for with him go about half the traditions of his people.”

The 576-page Myths of the Cherokees consists of seven parts: “Introduction,” “Historical Sketch of the Cherokee,” “Notes to the Historical Sketch,” “Stories and Storytellers,” “The Myths,” “Notes and Parallels,” and “Glossary.” The mythic materials are further subdivided into seven groupings: “Cosmogonic Myths” pertaining to the origins of the universe and man; “Quadruped Myths:” “Bird Myths:”; “Snake, Fish, and Insect Myths:”; “Wonder Stories” pertaining to supernatural beings and places; “Historical Traditions:” and “Miscellaneous Myths and Legends.”

The Cherokees were exceptional observers of bird life long before the first Europeans arrived and began to survey the avifauna of North America. Mooney discovered that their stories and legends were saturated with bird imagery. These selections concerning eagle lore are from a general overview of “The Bird Tribes” (Bird Myth 35) and “The Eagle’s Revenge” (Bird Myth 47).

The eagle is the great sacred bird of the Cherokee, as of nearly all our native tribes, and figures prominently in their ceremonial ritual, especially in all things relating to war ... The eagle must be killed only in the winter or late fall after the crops were gathered and the snakes had retired to their dens. If killed in the summertime a frost would come to destroy the corn, while the songs of the Eagle dance, when the feathers were brought home, would so anger the snakes that they would become doubly dangerous. Consequently the Eagle songs were never sung until after the snakes had gone to sleep for the winter ....

When the people of a town had decided upon an Eagle dance the eagle killer was called in, frequently from a distant settlement, to procure the feathers for the occasion. He was paid for his services from offerings made later at the dance, and as the few professionals guarded their secrets carefully from outsiders their business was a quite profitable one. After some preliminary preparation the eagle killer sets out alone for the mountains, taking with him his gun or bow and arrows. Having reached the mountains, he goes through a vigil of prayer and fasting, possibly lasting four days, after which he hunts until he succeeds in killing a deer. Then, placing the body in a convenient exposed situation upon one of the highest cliffs, he conceals himself near by and begins to sing in a low undertone the songs to call down the eagles from the sky. When the eagle alights upon the carcass, which will be almost immediately if the singer understands his business, he shoots it, and then standing over the dead bird, he addresses to it a prayer in which he begs it not to seek vengeance upon his tribe .... On reaching the settlement, the feathers ... are hung up in a small, round hut built for this special purpose near the edge of the dance ground ... and known as the place “where the feathers are kept,” or feather house .... The eagle being regarded as a great ada’wehi [i.e., magician or supernatural being], only the greatest warriors and those versed in the sacred ordinances would dare to wear the feathers or to carry them in the dance.”

And further on in the book:

Once a hunter in the mountains heard a noise at night like a rushing wind outside the cabin, and on going out he found that an eagle had just alighted on the drying pole and was tearing at the body of a deer hanging there. Without thinking of the danger, he shot the eagle. In the morning he took the deer and started back to the settlement, where he told what he had done, and the chief sent out some men to bring in the eagle and arrange for an Eagle dance. They brought back the dead eagle, everything was made ready, and that night they started the dance in the townhouse.

About midnight there was a whoop outside and a strange warrior came into the circle and began to recite his exploits. No one knew him, but they thought he had come from one of the farther Cherokee towns. He told how he had killed a man, and at the end of the story he gave a hoarse yell, Hi!, that startled the whole company, and one of the seven men with the rattles fell over dead. He sang of another deed, and at the end straightened up with another loud yell. A second rattler fell dead, and the people were so full of fear that they could not stir from their places. Still he kept on, and at every pause there came again that terrible scream, until the last of the seven rattlers fell dead, and then the stranger went out into the darkness. Long afterward they learned from the eagle killer that it was the brother of the eagle shot by the hunter.

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..

Jewelweed, or “touch-me-not,” is one of the most appealing wildflowers commonly encountered throughout Western North Carolina. Many recognize the plant from the time it appears in early spring as a pale green seedling, on through the long and showy summertime blossoming period, and into fall — when its pods become explosive mechanisms triggered by the slightest touch.

Two species are native to the southern highlands: spotted jewelweed (Impatiens carpensis), which has orange flowers with reddish-brown spots, and a nectar spur bent underneath and parallel to the flower; and pale jewelweed (I. pallida), which has lemon-yellow flowers only sparingly dotted with red markings, and a nectar spur bent at a right angle to the flower. Both flourish in moist woodland areas or alongside streams.

Thirty years ago, I didn’t see too much pale jewelweed. But in recent years it seems to be dominating its cousin, spotted jewelweed. Extensive segments of the roadside embankments along the Blue Ridge Parkway are now swathed in the yellow-flowered species. I don’t know why this change has occurred. I doubt that it’s global warming.

The common name jewelweed probably refers to the way water beads up on its leaves. Some maintain, however, that this designation refers to the plant’s robin-egg blue seeds.

The common name touch-me-not undoubtedly refers to the plant’s method of seed dispersal. The seeds mature inside a tightly coiled capsule. This capsule “explodes” when fully ripe or when activated by human touch.

Spotted jewelweed flowers have small openings that favor pollination by hummingbirds and insects that can hover. The small opening forces pollinators to push past either the mature male stamens (which cover them with pollen) or past small green pistils (which receive pollen). To negate the possibility of self-pollination, a given flower is initially male before transforming into a female.

Pale jewelweed has a much larger opening that favors insects like bumblebees. It is found in the lower elevations alongside spotted jewelweed. But in my experiencethe pale jewelweed is more prevalent in higher elevations. (My wife disagrees, maintaining that elevation has nothing whatsoever to do with species frequency.) There is an infrequently encountered cream-colored variant of pale jewelweed that sometimes occurs on cold, north-facing slopes at high elevations.

Various American Indian tribes, including the Cherokees, have put this plant to use as a skin salve. And many people to this day maintain that the sap from its succulent leaves and stems will cure or at least ease poison ivy itch. Others stoutly maintain that this medicinal application is a hoax. “Scientific” studies have supported both sides.

Dr. James A. Duke is one of this country’s most respected authorities in regard to botanical medicines. In The Green Pharmacy (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), Duke made the following observations:

“I’m not the only fan of jewelweed for preventing the unpleasant symptoms that develop following exposure to poisonous plants ... whenever I teach a three-day class on medicinal herbs, I treat my students to a dramatic little demonstration. I find a poisonous plant, usually poison ivy [and] apply its juice to the sensitive undersides of both of my wrists. A minute or two later, I wipe one wrist with a ball of crushed jewelweed leaves and stems. Three days later, the wrist that I didn’t treat with jewelweed shows the typical itchy, blistery poison-plant rash. The wrist rubbed with jewelweed invariably shows much less of a rash, and sometimes none at all.”

Duke noted that Dr. Robert Rosen at Rutgers University isolated “the active ingredient in jewelweed” that “binds to the same molecular sites on the skin as urushiol,” the active poisonous agent in poison ivy.

I have, in the past, used jewelweed as an antidote for poison ivy. And I have found that it provides some relief. But the very best antidote, for me, is one that I only discovered within recent years. That’s Dawn dish detergent. Something in that brand of detergent, which is also a degreaser, seems to completely neutralize the effects of urushiol on my skin. I apply the detergent liberally to the irritated area and let it dry. After just a few minutes, there is almost immediate relief. And after an hour or so, the irritation is pretty much eradicated.

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..

Horace Kephart is best known for Our Southern Highlanders (first published in 1913, with an expanded edition in 1922) and his role in helping to found the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But he also published a book that is now recognized as one of the cornerstones of American outdoor literature, Camping and Woodcraft.

After moving to the Great Smokies, 20 years before the national park was founded, Kephart lived in a cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek from 1904 until 1907. From 1910 until his death in 1931, he resided in Bryson City.

During those years on Hazel Creek, he became preoccupied with living as efficiently as possible in a somewhat remote setting. Despite outdoor experiences dating back to childhood, he discovered that he now “had to make shift in a different way . . . seeking not novelties but practical results.” These “results” he published in outdoor magazines.

By 1906, he had compiled enough material to put together the first edition of The Book of Camping and Woodcraft; A Guidebook for Those Who Travel in the Wilderness, published by the Outing Publishing Company in New York. An expanded edition published in two separate volumes appeared in 1916 and 1917, respectively; and in 1921 it came out in a hefty “two volumes in one” format as Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness.

In the process of expansion and revision, the book became a compendium of anecdotes, recipes, adventures, and practical advice on tent camping, path finding, route sketching, bark utensils, knot tying, backcountry exploration, bee hunting, and more. It remains remarkably useful and is great fun to rummage around in on a rainy day.

I was recently doing just that when I happened upon a section that focused my attention. It is headed “Nature’s Guide-Posts.” Therein, Kephart notes that, “There are two questions that woodsmen will argue, I suppose, until doomsday. Having given my views on one of them I may as well tackle the other, and then have done with controversy. Are there any natural signs of direction that will give a man his bearings when the sky is obscured? . . . I shall endeavor to show that there is more in this matter than is generally credited.”

After a lengthy digression regarding the pros and cons of the old notion that moss always on the north side of trees, Kephart turns his attention to “Tips of Conifers,” noting that, “A rule that holds good in the main, wherever I have had a chance to study it, that the feathery tip, the topmost little branch, of a towering pine or hemlock, points toward the rising sun, that is to say, a little south of east. There are exceptions, of course, but I have generally found this to be the case in three-fourths of the trees examined.” I suspect that the direction of the bend is random and that it is caused by perching birds more often than “the rising sun.”

About “Bark and Annual Rings,” he notes that, “The bark of old trees is generally thicker on the north and northeast sides than on the other sides. A more reliable indicator of direction, though one that a traveler seldom has opportunity to test, is the thickness of annual rings of wood growth, which is more pronounced on the north than on the south side of a tree.

The part that interests me concerns “Compass-Plants.” In that section he first notes that, “Some plants show a decided polarity in their habit of growth,” citing “compass-plant or rosin-weed” as his prime example.

“I have often used the compass-plant as a guide,” he recalls, “and never was led astray by it; in fact, the old settlers on the prairies, if they chanced to get lost on a dark night, would get their bearings by feeling the leaves of the compass-plant.

Now we get to Kephart’s (and my) mystery plant. I would very much like to hear from anyone who can identify the “north-and-south plant” he describes:

“But what think you of plant roots that persistently grow north and south? The woodsmen of the Great Smoky Mountains declare that there is a ‘north-and-south plant,’ as they call it, with two long roots that grow respectively north and south. Doctor

Davis of Ware’s [Wear’s] Valley, on the Tennessee side described it to me as follows: ‘It resembles wild verbena, grows thigh-high, is a rare plant, and generally is found in hollows on the south side of mountains in rocky neighborhoods, near trickling streams. Its leaf is serrated, 1.5 by 1 inch, or larger, with purple heart, yellow edges, and the rest a bright red. Its roots usually do grow north and south. The plant is one of the most valuable medicinally that I know of, particularly for syphilitic affections. I do not know it by any other name than the native one of North-and-South. I gather it when I can find it, and use it in my practice.’

“Many others have given me similar reports,” Kephart concludes. “I do not know the plant; have never hunted systematically for it.”

Any ideas?

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..

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received in regard to learning wildflowers was to “concentrate on one family at a time.” The person advising me didn’t, of course, intend that I should devote my attention exclusively to the species in a given family and ignore any plants outside that group. But she rightly intuited that making real progress in a systematic manner required some sort of focus.

My choice was the Lily Family (Liliaceae). In retrospect, I realize that picking this family was a rather grand first choice since it includes many genera and an array of species. I could have started with a less complicated group. But I was attracted by the showy — sometimes even gaudy — species represented in the Liliaceae: fly poison, wild hyacinth, lily-of-the-valley, trout lily, swamp pink, Indian cucumber root, grape hyacinth, bog asphodel, star-of-Bethlehem, Solomon’s and false Solomon’s seal, featherbells, rosy twisted stalk, the numerous trillium species, the bellworts, turkey beard, etc.

The centerpiece genus of the Liliaceae is, of course, Lilium or the so-called true lilies. Here in the southern mountains this genus is comprised of five quite distinctive species: turk’s-cap lily (Lilium superbum), Canada lily (L. canadense), wood lily (L. philadelphicum), Michaux’s or Carolina lily (L. michauxii), and Gray’s lily (L. grayi).

Of these, only the turk’s-cap and Michaux’s lilies are, in my experience, commonly encountered. The rarest species is Gray’s lily, also known as bell lily, orange-bell lily, roan lily, and roan mountain lily. It is, for me, not only the most beautiful species in the Liliaceae but also the most beautiful wildflower I have encountered in North America.

The species is named for Asa Gray, America’s first great formal botanist. In 1840, Gray and several companions explored the high mountains of North Carolina. Among the many exciting plants they located was the spectacular red and purple-spotted lily that would, in 1879, be described as a new species and named in Gray’s honor.

Gray’s lily is a perennial, standing from two to four feet tall, with a smooth stem that bears three to eight whorls of narrow leaves. From June into early August, it displays from one to 10 bell shaped, slightly flared flowers on long stalks. The flowers are poised in an almost horizontal position. Each flower head is dark red or reddish-orange outside. Inside it is somewhat lighter in color and distinctively marked with numerous purple spots. It is a stately, almost regal plant.

This rare and endangered species is limited in its natural state to high-elevation, moist, grassy open areas and woodland thickets. Its distribution is restricted to a handful of counties in western Virginia, east Tennessee, and western North Carolina.

In an open, grassy plot alongside the creek on our property, Elizabeth and I once attempted as part of a horticultural experiment to grow several seedlings of Gray’s lily originally propagated from seeds by Kim Hawks, who was at that time the owner of Niche Wildflower Gardens near Chapel Hill. They flowered sparsely for several years and then disappeared. If we ever try to raise Gray’s lily again, we’ll create and place the plants in a moist peat bed in wooded shade.

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..

Interesting wildflowers appear throughout Western North Carolina from late February into early November. Most wildflower identification and observation takes place during the spring. All too often the subsequent seasons are ignored.

The three peak periods are from late April into mid-May, early July into early August, and mid-September into mid-October. In my opinion, the mid-summer peak provides the most spectacular displays of truly showy wildflowers that are readily accessible.

For this reason, in part, the annual Native Plant Conference at Western Carolina University is always held during the third or fourth week in July. Participants come from across North America to take part in various symposiums and field trips. Since the early 1990s, I’ve lead an all-day, plant identification outing for the NPC along the Blue Ridge Parkway. These excursions have made me keenly aware of the floral riches that can be found in the middle to higher elevations along the parkway this time of the year.

My wife, Elizabeth, and I checked out this past Sunday some of the stops I’ll be making this year on Wednesday, July 22. As you read this, both sides of the parkway are quite literally lined with showy wildflowers for mile upon mile: turk’s-cap lily and black cohosh are prolific.

You don’t need to be part of a formal outing to get up there and appreciate what’s going on. Indeed, you’ll have just as much or more fun by yourself or with a friend. If you’re only free on weekends, then that’s when you’ll have to go. If you can, however, get away on a weekday, especially Tuesday through Thursday. The experience will be more pleasurable as traffic will then be less congested. Always be aware of traffic dangers when plant hunting near roadside edges.

Scout out seepage areas, the bases of damp cliffs, woodland edges, and open meadow-like situations. Hiking a shady trail through dense woodlands will be much less productive.

Some of the uncommon to rare species we encountered Sunday were tall delphinium, little green orchis, leather flower (a “Clematis” species), false bugbane, mountain krigia, Blue Ridge St. John’s-wort, round-leaved sundew, oxeye sunflower, and sticky tofeldia (false asphodel). There are countless stands of three of the “Monarda” species — bee balm, basil balm, and wild bergamot — but we weren’t able to locate any purple bergamot.

Curiously, there seems to be very little spotted touch-me-not (orange colored) this year, while entire slopes are covered with pale touch-me-not (yellow). Rosebay rhododendron is still flowering profusely, but Carolina and purple rhododendron are about done for the year.

If you only have a few hours to spare, the single most productive site along the parkway between Asheville and Cherokee (the section I know best) may well be the meadows and woodland edges at Deep Gap, which is situated adjacent to the Glassy Mine Overlook near milepost 437.

There, in mid-July, you won’t, to my knowledge, encounter any rare or endangered plants. But you can anticipate locating, among others, spiderwort, fire pink, sleepy catchfly, forked catchfly, Small’s ragwort, Deptford pink, black-eyed Susan, green-headed coneflower, cinquefoil, gray beardtongue, wood betony, southern harebell, wild quinine, sundrops, evening primrose, whorled loosestrife, wild lettuce, tall blue lettuce, dwarf dandelion, mouse ear, wild geranium, daisy fleabane, Indian paintbrush, several aster species, several sunflower species, several St. John’s-wort species, poke milkweed, thimbleweed, great angelica, mountain laurel, rosebay rhododendron, wild hydrangea, bush honeysuckle, heal-all, Queen-Anne’s-lace, Joe Pye weed, white snakeroot (milksick plant), Turk’s-cap lily, yarrow, houstonia, both touch-me-not species, pale Indian plantain, Carolina phlox, tall coreopsis, starry campion, common hedgenettle, flowering spurge, and all three species, already mentioned, in the “Monarda” genus: bee balm, basil balm, and wild bergamot.

Note that at Deep Gap the stands of basil balm (usually snow white petals with black spots) are interbreeding with adjacent stands of wild bergamot (usually lilac-colored petals without spots) and producing intermediate forms.

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..

(Editors Note: George Ellison is on leave this week. But he says that his pawpaw trees have even more fruit on them this year than they did when he wrote this about them last year.)

Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch

Where, oh where, is dear little Nellie?

Where, oh where, is dear little Nellie?

Where, oh where, is dear little Nellie?

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Come on, boys, let’s go find her.

Come on, boys, let’s go find her.

Come on, boys, let’s go find her.

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ `em in your pocket.

Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ `em in your pocket.

Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ `em in your pocket.

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Have you ever happened upon pawpaw growing in the wild? One fine spring day many years ago I was exploring a steep ridge above our house. As I was pulling myself up with the aid of overhanging saplings, I was suddenly face-to-face with a cluster of some of the most curious and lovely flowers I’ve even seen. Although my only previous exposure had been via picture books, I knew for sure that these were pawpaw flowers. I’ve traversed that ridge many times since looking for that pawpaw with no luck.

The small tree or shrub known as common pawpaw, American pawpaw, tall pawpaw, or wild banana tree (Asimina triloba), has been reported from numerous counties throughout Western North Carolina. It is of interest that it was first recorded by the Hernando De Soto expedition in 1540.

Found in rich soils at elevations up to about 2,500 feet, a pawpaw tree rarely exceeds 25 feet in height and is normally more like a shrub. A smaller species known as dwarf pawpaw (A. parviflora) grows primarily to the east and south of WNC.

From early April into early May, the plant displays distinctive purple-brown flowers that have two circles of three petals which are arranged one inside the other. The broad lustrous green leaves are frequently a foot in length, somewhat resembling those of an umbrella-leaf magnolia. The greenish-gray fruits (which turn yellow and then black with ripening) develop in late summer.

The pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to America. Individual fruits weigh five to 16 ounces and are 3 to 6 inches in length. The larger sizes will appear plump, similar to the mango. The fruit usually has 10 to 14 seeds in two rows. These brownish to blackish seeds are shaped like lima beans. Pawpaw fruits often occur as clusters of up to nine individual fruits. When ripe they are soft and thin-skinned.

About eight years ago Elizabeth planted two pawpaws about 20 feet apart on our property. Pawpaw flowers are “perfect,” in that they have both male and female reproduction parts. But they are not self-pollinating because the female stigma matures and is no longer receptive when the male pollen is shed. Accordingly, they require cross-pollination from another unrelated pawpaw tree.

For several years, we had no pawpaw fruits at all. After about four years, we started harvesting several pawpaw fruits per season — just enough for a taste. This year we have pawpaws galore! Every morning for the past week, we’ve been eating pawpaw slices for breakfast.

The sweet pulp is custard-like with a strawberry-banana taste. You can cut a fruit in half, scoop out the flesh with a spoon, and then eat it like you would watermelon; that is, you simply spit out the seeds as you go. The flesh is also used to make pies and other desserts. It was once rated by a panel of connoisseurs as the sixth most delicious fruit in the world.

Container grown pawpaws obtained from commercial nurseries provide the best opportunity for success. It can also be propagated from seeds or seedlings (not root suckers). Be forewarned, however, that the root suckers and seedlings can form dense thickets if not periodically controlled.

The natural history of a region consists of the plants, animals, and landscapes we can see and explore any given day. But no full comprehension of any region can be had without coming to some understanding of its spiritual terrain. When we consider this aspect here in the Smokies region, we necessarily enter the realm of Cherokee sensibility.

There are various examples. My favorite is the uktena, a monstrous serpent, because it persists as an informing presence in Cherokee lore. When anthropologist James Mooney visited the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Western North Carolina during the late 1880s, he collected uktena data subsequently published as part of his classic study Myths of the Cherokee (1900). In the 1960s, Indian historians Jack and Anna Kilpatrick found that the Cherokees removed to Oklahoma in 1838 vividly retained in their collective memory stories of the serpent, which they called the uk’ten. To this day, in my experience, a conversation about them can be conducted with many traditional Cherokees.

According to Mooney’s informants, the uktena — born of envy and anger — was a representative of the Under World: the realm of darkness and decay. They were, he was advised, “as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, a bright blazing crest like a diamond upon its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire. It has rings or spots of color along its whole length and cannot be wounded except by shooting in the seventh spot from the head, because under this spot are its heart and life.”

Aside from the horns that resembled those of a buck deer, the most compelling feature of the uktena was the diamond-shaped crest on its forehead (the ulunsuti) that emitted flashes of light like a blazing star. Those encountering the serpent — especially little children — were doomed, moth-like, to become so dazzled by this light that they ran toward it and sure death.

But in Cherokee spiritual life there was always a balance between good and evil. The danger of the uktena was counterbalanced by the potential power of the burning stone. If an individual was brave enough to confront the serpent, he could evoke the Mythic Hawk, which represented the forces of the Upper World: peace and light. Together, they would be able to venture into the recesses of the Under World, slay the serpent, and bring the ulunsuti crystal back to the Middle World: the mundane realm of human existence.

University of Georgia anthropologist Charles Hudson has made these observations in an essay titled “Uktena: A Cherokee Anomalous Monster” published in the Journal of Cherokee Studies (Spring 1978):

“The Cherokees believed that their priests or medicine men were able to gaze into certain crystals and thereby foresee the future ... The Cherokees told James Mooney that according to their traditions only one man — Groundhog’s mother, a Shawnee medicine man and a great worker of wonders — was able to get possession of an ulunsunti. A great hunter among the eastern Cherokees still had possession of it in 1890, but he kept it hidden in a cave and would not show it to Mooney, but he did describe it in this manner: ‘It is like a large transparent crystal, nearly the shape of a cartridge bullet, with a blood-red streak running through the center from top to bottom. The owner keeps it wrapped in a whole deer skin, inside an earthen jar hidden away in a secret cave in the mountains.’

From this description Mooney concluded that the ulunsuti might be an unusual crystal of rutile quartz with metallic streaks running through it ... Of all the anomalous monsters of the old world, the one that comes closest to the uketna is the dragon, a monster which existed at one time in the belief of people in most parts of Europe and Asia ... The dragon had no ulunsuti on its forehead, but it did have a lump on its head, called by the Chinese chi’h muh, which enabled the dragon to fly, and it had a pearl of great value and power which dangled from its neck. Also, the traditional Chinese used ‘dragon bones,’ the fossilized bones of extinct animals, for all sorts of religious purposes ... We are reasonably sure that the Cherokees, and other American Indians, are descended from people who came from Siberia, across the Bering Strait land bridge at the close of the Pleistocene. Therefore it is probable that these ancestors of the American Indians categorized the universe in a way similar to that of the Asian people who were ancestors of the Chinese. It is possible, in fact, that the people who came across the land bridge 15,000 years ago believed in the existence of a dragon-like monster.”

According to ancient sources, uktenas lived in caves, gorges, or lonely passes in the high mountains. Such places were carefully designated as “where the uktena stays” from generation to generation. They resided on the margins of the Cherokee universe like dark shadows in a dream.

Such places were obviously touchstones for the collective imagination of the Cherokees from one generation to the next for hundreds of years. They were constant reminders of the angry and envious serpents in their lives and hearts. To ignore these reminders was to follow the pathway into chaos and darkness; to come to terms with them was the pathway into a bright future.