Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Native plants in your yard for native wildlife

Nature is not something out there, apart from people. It never was, and nowadays people have built and farmed and clearcut so much that wildlife species from insects to birds are in trouble. In south Georgia people may think that our trees make a lot of wildlife habitat. Actually, most of those trees are planted pine plantations with very limited undergrowth, and in town many yards are deserts of grass plus exotic species that don't support native birds. Douglas Tallamy offers one solution: turn yards into wildlife habitat by growing native species. Since we are as always remodeling nature, we might as well do it so as to feed the rest of nature and ourselves, and by the way get flood prevention and possibly cleaner water as well, oh, and fewer pesticides to poison ourselves.

Douglas Tallamy makes a clear and compelling case in Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants

...it is not yet too late to save most of the plants and animals that sustain the ecosystems on which we ourselves depend. Second, restoring native plants to most human-dominated landscapes is relatively easy to do.

Some of you may wonder why native species are so important? Don't we have more deer than we can shoot? Maybe so, but we have far fewer birds of almost every species than we did decades and only a few years ago.

Some may wonder: aren't exotic species just as good as native ones, if deer and birds can eat them? Actually, no, because many exotic species are poisonous to native wildlife, and because invasive exotics crowd out natives and reduce species diversity. From kudzu to Japanese climbing fern, exotic invasives are bad for wildlife and may also promote erosion and flooding by strangling native vegetation.

All plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife. Most of our native plant-eaters are not able to eat alien plants, and we are replacing native plants with alien species at an alarming rate, especially in the suburban gardens on which our wildlife increasingly depends. My central message is that unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.

Tallamy had an epiphany when he and his wife moved to 10 acres in Pennsylvania in 2000:

French mulberry, or dwarf mulberry, becomes beautyberry

Due to discussion on facebook with Rihard Sexton after the previous post, I dug around a bit, and discovered that beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is also known as dwarf mulberry, French mulberry, and Spanish mulberry, sow berry, and sour berry. That last is especially a misnomer, because its berries are not sour, they taste like flowers. And it turns out that beautyberry was mentioned in books before 1800, it was just mentioned as dwarf mulberry:

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:

The Art of Managing Longleaf

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:
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.

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.

It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel's youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail:

Looking for Longleaf

So you've read Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and you want to know more.

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.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

The other day somebody asked me to recommend some books about longleaf forests, how they used to be, what happened to them, what can be done now.

I was going to start by posting a short list, but each item was turning into a review, so I'll just post them one by one as reviews.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home), by Janisse Ray.

How dirt poor crackers and corporate greed destroyed most of the most diverse ecosystem in North America; yet these same people are the tragic heroes of the book. Half autobiography, half ecology, this book will either get you with Janisse's "stunning voice" or you won't get it. If you're from around here, you'll hear the wind in the pines, feel the breeze, and see the summer tanagers yellow in the sun. If you're not, here's your chance to meet a "heraldry of longleaf" up close and personal.

"I will rise from my grave with the hunger of wildcat, wings of kestrel...."

See Janisse read in Moultrie. "More precious than handfuls of money." See her wikipedia page for a pretty good bio.

But read the book. If nothing else, you'll never think the same again about Amazon deforestation once you realize we already did that to ourselves, and in the south we live in the devastated remnants of what was one of the most extensive forests on earth, with longleaf pine trees 100 feet tall and 500 years old, maintained by fire, protecting everything from the Lord God bird to the lowly Bachman's sparrow, from the rattlesnake-eating indigo snake to the beetles that live in gopher tortoise burrows. The forest can return, because reforestation can pay. Meanwhile, there are still places where you can see how it used to be. Janisse Ray had a lot to do with preserving Moody Forest, too, but that's another story.

-jsq

Janisse Ray in Moultrie, 26 Jan 2010

Janisse Ray spoke and read from her books in Moultrie last night. The place was packed with a wide variety of people:

Here's her opening poem:

Janisse Ray in Moultrie next week

Janisse Ray plans to speak in Moultrie and sign books.

The Georgia Center for the Book, with the support of the Georgia Humanities Council, is working with the Moultrie-Colquitt County Library System and the Moultrie Chapter of the Georgia Conservancy to present a free public lecture and book-signing by Ray on Tuesday, Jan. 26, at 7 p.m., in the library auditorium.

Ray was born in Baxley, Ga., and is an environmentalist activist, poet, a memoirist and the award-winning author of “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.” This book, a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast, was published by Milkweed Editions in 1999.

Why should you care?

Ray has won a Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999, an American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000. “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” was a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as the Book All Georgians Should Read.

As an organizer and activist, she works to create sustainable communities, local food systems, a stable global climate, intact ecosystems, clean rivers, life-enhancing economies, and participatory democracy. She is a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper and is on the board of the Environmental Leadership Center of Warren Wilson College and Satilla Riverkeeper.

Are you tired of development trumps all? Do you like trees and home-grown vegetables? Come hear Janisse Ray!