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586 Search Results for "george ellison"
Plant gall formation is somewhat of a mystery
Published: 2015-07-29 16:18:37When it rains it pours. Within the past week or so, I received two emails about plant galls. That’s two more than I’ve received in the past 15 years of writing this column. Here goes. . Galls are timorous growths on leaves, stems, branches, trunks an...
Read MoreGetting to the bottom of the ‘The Spittlebug Story’
Published: 2015-07-15 18:21:30When my son, now grown, was about 9 or 10, he queried me one summer day about the foamy bubbles in the tall grass of a meadow above the house. . “Why’s that snot in the weeds?” he asked. “Frog spit,” I said, exhausting my knowledge of the subje...
Read MoreOld-time mountain hogs were essential livestock
Published: 2015-07-01 15:04:07Hog Holler, Hog Branch, Hog Camp Branch, Hog Cane Branch, Hog-eye Branch, Hogback Gap, Hogback Holler, Hogback Knob, Hogback Ridge, Hogback Township, and Hogback Valley in addition to six sites in Western North Carolina named Hogback Mountain. Proof enou...
Read MoreTrumpet vine is tenacious and beautiful
Published: 2015-06-17 15:43:56It’s mid-June again … the time of the year when certain plants can be relied upon to do their thing in our yard and on the decks that enclose the house on three sides. Yuccas, oak-leaf hydrangeas, spiderworts, coral vines, various ornamental lilies a...
Read MoreUnveiling Horace Kephart
Published: 2015-06-17 15:28:57A pair of programs about Horace Kephart, an adopted son of the Smokies who captured the culture of mountaineers in the early 1900s in writing and championed the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, will explore the life of this giant...
Read MoreThere is hemlock, and then there is poison hemlock
Published: 2015-06-03 16:54:58Certain questions inevitably pop up during plant identification outings. One has to do with whether or not eastern hemlock trees are poisonous. . Upon encountering our first eastern hemlock, I’m now disappointed if someone in the group doesn’t ask: ...
Read MoreEpp’s Springs were once Bryson City’s calling card
Published: 2015-05-20 15:27:03A friend of mine who is a veteran backcountry explorer in the Smokies sent a recent email to me and others in which he noted that various lodges and hotels associated with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park “would make a good topic for a book … ...
Read MoreAvian adventures
Published: 2015-05-13 15:31:54What better way to spring into the season than chasing migrants across Western North Carolina? I was with the Franklin Bird Club at Kituwah on April 27 and we had beautiful weather and good birding. I had teased that trip by noting that Kituwah is one of...
Read MoreShelving books is a very personal task
Published: 2015-05-06 17:18:47For awhile everything was in control. But that didn’t last. It never does. Once again my books are in total disarray. I can spend hours looking for a book I should find in a few minutes. The only good thing about this situation is that it provides an o...
Read MoreDevil’s Walkingstick is known as The Toothache Tree
Published: 2015-04-22 16:21:16“The cascading, four foot, doubly-compound leaves of devil’s walking stick, bunched near the end of long crooked thorny stems reaching as tall as 20 feet, give this plant a decidedly tropical look — it’s a plant that might fit in nicely on the se...
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