Brown Dog and Yellow Dog in some red pine needles:
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 April 2012.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms.
And the reason why they're red:
Continue reading "Pine beetles, Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 April 2012" »
Back in December
we burned some planted longleaf.
Six weeks later, they're greening up and candling.
I couldn't find a single longleaf that didn't survive.
Even ones that a few weeks ago you would have thought
were burnt sticks now have green leaves or white candles
or both.
Here's a slideshow.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman 29 February 2012.
-jsq
Gelsemium sempervirens has been blooming around here since January
Aunt Elsie gets mentioned again for her pioneering career in plant ecology.
According to the Nature Conservancy (undated), Tennessee Coneflower — No Longer Endangered
After years of hard work and the support of many dedicated individuals, an iconic flower is once again thriving in Tennessee. On August 4, 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the removal of the Tennessee coneflower from the Endangered Species List, marking an extraordinary recovery from the brink of extinction. The story of the coneflower exemplifies the power of conservation.Her nephew Patrick found this.In 1968, Vanderbilt biology professor Elsie Quarterman and graduate student Barbara Turner accidentally discovered the fuschia-colored coneflowers at Mount View Cedar Glade. The plant had been thought extinct until the rediscovery. In time, three other coneflower sites were discovered in Davidson and Wilson counties. In 1979, the Tennessee coneflower became one of the first plants to be recorded on the Endangered Species List.
Quarterman subsequently became a trustee of the Tennesee Chapter of The Nature Conservancy and urged the protection of the cedar glade habitats where the Tennessee coneflower and other rare plants have adapted to live in harsh, stony conditions.
-jsq
WSMV in Nashville reports that
the Tennessee purple coneflower, which grows only in cedar glades,
and only in three counties in the world,
is being taken off the endangered species list:
Less than one percent of endangered species ever get taken off the list.
The
Tennessean reports:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to officially remove the wildflower by Sept. 2, from its list of plants that are near extinction.“The Tennessee coneflower’s recovery is an example of what can be achieved through the combined efforts of dedicated partners,” said Cindy Dohner, the Service’s Southeast Regional Director, in an emailed announcement.
Echinacea tennesseensis was thought extinct until Dr. Elsie Quarterman rediscovered it in 1969 in the cedar glades which are her academic specialty. She was 59 then.
Now she is 100, and still being honored
by her students
and by her state.
Aunt Elsie
was born in Valdosta and played basketball for Hahira High School,
before she started her very long career in botany and plant ecology.
As aye, Elsie!
-jsq
PS: This post owed to Patrick Quarterman.
a high-climbing, woody vine that is known by several names, including Carolina jessamine, poor man's rope, or yellow jasmin.It smells good. It's native to the U.S. southeast.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 February 2011.
-jsq
Further, William Bartram did mention it in his Travels of 1791, as
French mulberry.
Curiously, even though Google books does have Bartram's book,
ngrams doesn't seem to show French mulberry for that date,
but does show American mulberry.
Even more curious, William Bartram's father, John Bartram,
corresponded with Linnaeus, the founder of modern
botanical terminology.
The currently most popular name is beautyberry, which turns out to be related to the scientific genus name, Callicarpa: Greek kalli means beautiful, and Karpos means fruit.
The plant has all sorts of uses:
Continue reading "French mulberry, or dwarf mulberry, becomes beautyberry" »
The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel.
Here's a very interesting biography of this very influential
pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including
many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida
life and politics:
The Art of Managing Longleaf:Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard, who was originally hired by quail plantation owners around Thomasville to figure out why their quail populations were decreasing. The answer included a need to thin and especially to burn their longleaf pine tree forests. Stoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century between them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing timber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees to pay for the whole thing. Their Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks. In this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically different from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut "efficient" timbering cycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel's youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail:
Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty talks about a tree from Peru,
"huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years":
"At the bottom of the profile, I found lots of huarango pollen. This indicates that large forests were originally growing in that area.Hm, around here we've only seen a 700-year flood last year. When it happens again in a year or so, what will we call it?Subsequently, I saw cotton pollen and other weeds, but still a lot of huarango pollen. It seems at this stage farming was in balance with the environment," Chepstow-Lusty said.
Then, about 400 A.D., the Nazca apparently stopped growing cotton, switching to large crops of maize.
The researchers found a major reduction of huarango pollen, indicating that people started clearing the forests to plant more crops.
But the agricultural gain from clearing forests was short-lived. When a mega El Nino event hit the south coast of Peru in about 500 A.D., there were no huarango roots to anchor the landscape.
The fields and canal systems were washed away, leaving a desert environment. Today, only pollen from plants adapted to salty and arid conditions can be found, Chepstow-Lusty said.
"The bottom line is that the Nazca could have survived the devastating El Nino floods had they kept their forests alive. Basically, the huarango trees would have cushioned that major event," Beresford-Jones said.
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest,
by Lawrence S. Earley
The tallest and strongest of pine trees, longleaf made great sailing ship masts , tar for caulking ships, and of course saw timber. How the early settlers cut down trees for houses and to clear land to farm. Their hogs and cows running loose in the woods ate the young longleaf, suppressing new trees for a hundred years. Then professional forestry took over, trying to suppress the fire that destroyed northern white pine forests, yet which preserves southern longleaf pine forests. The sad story of turpentine: we knew better, but we did it anyway.
The peculiar life cycle of a tree that starts out looking like a clump of grass, and can stay that way for decades, yet promotes and survives fire and can grow more than 100 feet tall and live for centuries. The thousands of species of plants, animals, and fungi the forest protects, many of them, like wiregrass, also adapted to fire.
How tuberculosis and quail led to new understandings of longleaf and fire, and the people who discovered those things. We do know how to grow these trees now, and lots of people are doing it: for jobs, for sawtimber, for the beauty of the forest.
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