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Time to think about gardening in ‘06
Published: 2014-08-15 18:09:27Have you started making your 2006 gardening plans yet? It’s time. The garden catalogs started arriving in the mail several weeks ago: Johnny’s, Burpee’s, Pine Tree, Park’s, Shumway’s, Seeds of Change, etc. Folks have been studying these sorts o...
Read MoreThe grumpy traveler department
Published: 2014-08-14 13:24:30From time to time, I’ve contemplated compiling an anthology of travel writing from Western North Carolina. Such a volume would commence with the descriptions of the region compiled by the Moravian explorer Bishop Augustus Gottlieb Spangenberg in the ea...
Read MoreA locust by any other name
Published: 2014-08-13 16:59:26I’m fairly good at the identification of deciduous trees during the flowering and fruiting seasons, when one can observe bark, leaves, general growth habit, and flowers or fruit. I’m less adept during the winter months, when one can observe just bark...
Read MoreThe Golden Mouse: A Children’s Poem for Adults
Published: 2014-08-13 14:37:29Editor’s note: George Ellison’s column this week is a sort of fable based on one of the seldom-seen (almost mythical) rodent species found in the Smokies region that climbs trees with acrobatic ease and builds platforms from twigs that it rests on wh...
Read MoreThe thrill of the chase lives on
Published: 2014-08-06 15:28:03Through the years, I’ve written at every opportunity about Aquilla (Quill) Rose — Civil War veteran, fiddle player, storyteller, moonshiner, and hunter — who was surely one of the more picturesque characters ever produced in the Smokies region. As ...
Read MoreMystery of the coveted mad stone
Published: 2014-07-30 16:23:53Last week’s Back Then column described a deer hunt conducted by Quill Rose and his relatives and neighbors in the Great Smokies during the very early 1880s. My source for that event was the long-neglected and exceedingly rare book by Wilbur Zeigler and...
Read MoreCivil War in the Smokies
Published: 2014-07-30 15:35:04The war in the Smokies proved to be an intensely personal conflict. A curious conjunction of terrain, history, politics and culture bred in the Smokies ... a tragic division of loyalties and a brutal partisan conflict between supporters of secession and ...
Read MoreLooking back at strawberry wine, Kephart and Calhoun
Published: 2014-07-30 14:01:57In a letter to the editor of the Smoky Mountain News published several weeks ago, Gwen Franks Breese took exception to a Back Then column of mine originally published in SMN in November 2013. That column went into considerable detail as to Horace Kephart...
Read MoreLyon was among WNC’s notable botanist
Published: 2014-07-23 16:50:01Andre and Francois Michaux, and John Fraser, and soon to be followed by Thomas Nuttall, Asa Gray, and Moses Ashley Curtis, among others, John Lyon was among the intrepid plant collectors who first penetrated the mountains of Western North Carolina in the...
Read MoreGilfillan’s Burnt House to Paw Paw
Published: 2014-07-23 16:12:28Several weeks ago I was perusing the used bookstores in Asheville, where there are, somewhat surprisingly, at least four excellent establishments in the immediate downtown area. I always check out the sections featuring Western North Carolina and souther...
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