Outdoors
The Joyful Botanist: On the mend
I have been thinking a lot about healing lately. How it happens, how long it can take and the differences between healing emotional wounds and physical wounds, not to mention psychic and spiritual wounds. And to no one’s surprise, I’ve been thinking about plants: how they heal themselves, how they help heal the land, and how they help us in our own healing of body and spirit.
Up Moses Creek: Head on a swivel!
It was the yard birds that alerted Becky, “a crowd of them,” as she put it; chickadees, titmice and wrens all scolding their heads off at something under the fringe tree. And when she looked out the back door, there the thing was.
The Joyful Botanist: I am Ironflower
There is almost no flower in the Southern Mountains deeper in purple color than the ironflowers (Vernonia spp.) blooming now in unmown ditches and fallow fields all around Western North Carolina and across the Southeast.
The Sorrowful Botanist: Dr. J Dan Pittillo (1938-2025)
On Monday, Aug. 11, J. Dan Pittillo died. The world has lost an amazing person, a gifted and kind educator, a dedicated father and husband, and one of the top botanists in the Southern Appalachian Mountains and the Southeastern United States.
Up Moses Creek: Oil Change
There’s a mountain world up Moses Creek, and I don’t love to leave it. Outdoors, steep wild ridgelines form the horizon, with deep forests, clean air and clear streams tumbling down the slopes. Close to the house are Becky’s beds of flowers, all a-flutter with butterflies, birds and bees.
The fruits of summer’s labor
Among my favorite things is to be walking in the woods and come across a patch of wild edible fruits. How quickly a leisurely stroll or difficult hike in the woods can offer a refreshing trailside treat or even enough abundance to make pies and jam just from noticing ripe fruits and knowing that they are edible and delicious.
Snakes in the grass
Snakes tend to scare people. Believe me, I get it. Being named Adam and being an avid gardener, stories of snakes and apples and Eve have followed me my whole life. Snakes have been demonized by biblical references and the general fear of wild things. This fear tends to keep many people from exploring the woods and meadows around them, unfortunately.
Up Moses Creek: Kneel!
Thunderstorms were crossing the mountains in waves one morning in the spring, and while trying to get in my morning hike up the ridge after one passed, I got caught in the next. I knew the danger. Lightning strikes around 300 people a year in the United States, injuring most, killing one out of 10.
The Joyful Botanist: With flowers like these, who needs an enemy?
The full light of the summer solstice arrives and aligns with the vegetative growth period of mid-summer. Spring wildflowers have passed at all but the highest elevations, and only the earliest summer flowers have started to bloom.
