Oh this is so lovely and wonderful in all the best feeling ways. What a special treat to walk alongside you through this beautiful sacred place. I can feel how much the energy shifts beyond the gates you have discovered. The spring is dear and feels so completely pure. The bear hug between tree and stone! My smile grew the more I read. I love the path you created via the notch in the log!
I like the ending contemplation, and it is something I will bring with me into this next moment after I am finished writing here. To consider myself or the flow of my life like these waters with their convergences…and to see what has joined my stream.
Markael ~ it's simply a joy to bear witness to your morning path and meditation. I will be re-reading :) and it's also an invitation to revisit my nearby creek trail with new eyes. I do live on Native lands and often ponder the feet that have gone before me. Thank you.
That's interesting. It isn't so much that I expect the rhododendrons to colonize blowdowns where they aren't already present. I'm thinking more about places where a rhododendron thicket was already present underneath a taller canopy, and wondering if that taller canopy was blown down, would new trees have trouble establishing themselves and thus lead to a rhododendron thicket without any overstory trees above it?
My initial thoughts would be that 1) rhodies don't really like full sun, so they will start to struggle, and 2) the extra light from the blowdown plus scorching of the rhodie leaves will allow enough light to the ground that new trees can sprout.
There are rhododendron thickets on some ridgetops without an overstory, where the soil is too thin to support trees - I think this is a different species than the one along streams. But the tulip poplars and other fast growing trees seem pretty adept at colonizing any gaps and shooting up past rhododendron height at lower elevations.
I was so convinced that you were in Vermont until I saw the part about the Blue Ridge Mountains and Knoxville. It is amazing how similar the ecosystems are (until the rhododendrons and other shrubs I couldn’t identify).
I've walked trails in southern Appalachia where there was a mile or more stretch of dense rhododendron thickets. I always noted how the biodiversity under these thickets was substantially less than in areas without them. A few plants like galax like to grow around rhododendrons, but they are the exception. Often there are plenty of taller trees among the rhododendrons, but I never saw young trees making it through a thicket with the exception of the occasional hemlock tree.
This makes me think that there were fewer rhododendrons in the past when the other trees were getting started. If the thickets remain this dense, will there eventually be few trees above them as the existing ones die and no new saplings make it through? I haven't been that way since Helene, I wonder how many blowdiwn areas are in that situation now? I know there have always been a good deal of rhododendron in that region. I remember reading accounts from early explorers that noted the rhododendrons. However, even a tenth as many rhododendrons as there are today would have been notable.
If rhododendron density has increased considerably, I wonder what factors are involved? Fire suppression? Acid rain tipping the balance toward acid loving species? I even remember reading a study that showed American Chestnut has a suppressive effect on rhododendron, so the demise of the chestnuts could have led to more rhododendrons.
Those hemlocks are super shade tolerant and can occasionally make it through the rhododendron thickets, but I wonder how many of them are left out there now that the adelgid has been there for over twenty years? I was in Damascus, VA for a few days in spring 2024 (just a few months before Helene) and noticed that some hemlocks were still hanging on. I remember reading speculation that air pollution depositing extra nitrogen could have contributed to the proliferation of the hemlock adelgid. A study was done that showed the hemlocks concentrate the extra nitrogen into their needles and the adelgids thrive on that. The adelgids were in a small part of Virginia for several decades, not doing much, until they started spreading all over the place in the 1980s.
One tree that I'm particularly fond of in that area are the yellow buckeyes. Buckeyes in most places are crooked understory trees, but in southern Appalachia the yellow buckeyes are tall and straight. They are only native to a pretty limited range.
Lastly, have you heard of the torreya guardians at all? They are a project focusing on the Florida Torreya, a tree that's native range is a small part of the Florida Panhandle, but it turns out it grows better in southern Appalachia than in Florida. It was pushed down to Florida during the ice age and never was able to migrate northward on its own. So people are planting it further north, with southern Appalachia being a focus of the efforts. Their website is https://torreyaguardians.org/
I contacted them a while back about possibly trying some where I'm at in the Ozarks and described my ecosystem, but they replied that the Oak-Hickory dominated forest that I live in is too droughty to be optimal for torreyas.
I'm fairly new to the unique ecology of this region, and I've never encountered a Torreya tree or its guardians.
That's an interesting perspective on the rhododendrons. In this valley they are not at all dominant - I consider it a special part of the trail where it goes through the rhododendron thicket. And I don't (yet) see them spreading into the blowdown gaps, except where they already exist. All kinds of saplings are getting started there.
I'm told that 90+% of these forests were clear-cut from the 1800s through the early 1900s, and indeed it is hard to find trees more than a century old in a lot of places. So I wonder if that alone might have given the rhodies a big leg up in terms of expanding.
I have noticed that the ground is mostly bare under the rhodies - too dark for saplings and ephemerals. I would suspect that there is a sort of longer-term balance in play. Perhaps after 50-100 years as a rhododendron thicket, the soil begins to be exhausted of what they need, and so they die back.
Oh this is so lovely and wonderful in all the best feeling ways. What a special treat to walk alongside you through this beautiful sacred place. I can feel how much the energy shifts beyond the gates you have discovered. The spring is dear and feels so completely pure. The bear hug between tree and stone! My smile grew the more I read. I love the path you created via the notch in the log!
I like the ending contemplation, and it is something I will bring with me into this next moment after I am finished writing here. To consider myself or the flow of my life like these waters with their convergences…and to see what has joined my stream.
Happy Beltane! 🌞🌿🌸
Many thanks Emma! And Happy Beltane to you!
"to stop hiking and to start visiting, wandering, belonging" :)
Markael ~ it's simply a joy to bear witness to your morning path and meditation. I will be re-reading :) and it's also an invitation to revisit my nearby creek trail with new eyes. I do live on Native lands and often ponder the feet that have gone before me. Thank you.
Thanks Carol!
That's interesting. It isn't so much that I expect the rhododendrons to colonize blowdowns where they aren't already present. I'm thinking more about places where a rhododendron thicket was already present underneath a taller canopy, and wondering if that taller canopy was blown down, would new trees have trouble establishing themselves and thus lead to a rhododendron thicket without any overstory trees above it?
Curious questions...
My initial thoughts would be that 1) rhodies don't really like full sun, so they will start to struggle, and 2) the extra light from the blowdown plus scorching of the rhodie leaves will allow enough light to the ground that new trees can sprout.
There are rhododendron thickets on some ridgetops without an overstory, where the soil is too thin to support trees - I think this is a different species than the one along streams. But the tulip poplars and other fast growing trees seem pretty adept at colonizing any gaps and shooting up past rhododendron height at lower elevations.
I was so convinced that you were in Vermont until I saw the part about the Blue Ridge Mountains and Knoxville. It is amazing how similar the ecosystems are (until the rhododendrons and other shrubs I couldn’t identify).
Markael, mountain, muse...
metamorphic metaphors
in leaf, feather, stone.
I've walked trails in southern Appalachia where there was a mile or more stretch of dense rhododendron thickets. I always noted how the biodiversity under these thickets was substantially less than in areas without them. A few plants like galax like to grow around rhododendrons, but they are the exception. Often there are plenty of taller trees among the rhododendrons, but I never saw young trees making it through a thicket with the exception of the occasional hemlock tree.
This makes me think that there were fewer rhododendrons in the past when the other trees were getting started. If the thickets remain this dense, will there eventually be few trees above them as the existing ones die and no new saplings make it through? I haven't been that way since Helene, I wonder how many blowdiwn areas are in that situation now? I know there have always been a good deal of rhododendron in that region. I remember reading accounts from early explorers that noted the rhododendrons. However, even a tenth as many rhododendrons as there are today would have been notable.
If rhododendron density has increased considerably, I wonder what factors are involved? Fire suppression? Acid rain tipping the balance toward acid loving species? I even remember reading a study that showed American Chestnut has a suppressive effect on rhododendron, so the demise of the chestnuts could have led to more rhododendrons.
Those hemlocks are super shade tolerant and can occasionally make it through the rhododendron thickets, but I wonder how many of them are left out there now that the adelgid has been there for over twenty years? I was in Damascus, VA for a few days in spring 2024 (just a few months before Helene) and noticed that some hemlocks were still hanging on. I remember reading speculation that air pollution depositing extra nitrogen could have contributed to the proliferation of the hemlock adelgid. A study was done that showed the hemlocks concentrate the extra nitrogen into their needles and the adelgids thrive on that. The adelgids were in a small part of Virginia for several decades, not doing much, until they started spreading all over the place in the 1980s.
One tree that I'm particularly fond of in that area are the yellow buckeyes. Buckeyes in most places are crooked understory trees, but in southern Appalachia the yellow buckeyes are tall and straight. They are only native to a pretty limited range.
Lastly, have you heard of the torreya guardians at all? They are a project focusing on the Florida Torreya, a tree that's native range is a small part of the Florida Panhandle, but it turns out it grows better in southern Appalachia than in Florida. It was pushed down to Florida during the ice age and never was able to migrate northward on its own. So people are planting it further north, with southern Appalachia being a focus of the efforts. Their website is https://torreyaguardians.org/
I contacted them a while back about possibly trying some where I'm at in the Ozarks and described my ecosystem, but they replied that the Oak-Hickory dominated forest that I live in is too droughty to be optimal for torreyas.
I'm fairly new to the unique ecology of this region, and I've never encountered a Torreya tree or its guardians.
That's an interesting perspective on the rhododendrons. In this valley they are not at all dominant - I consider it a special part of the trail where it goes through the rhododendron thicket. And I don't (yet) see them spreading into the blowdown gaps, except where they already exist. All kinds of saplings are getting started there.
I'm told that 90+% of these forests were clear-cut from the 1800s through the early 1900s, and indeed it is hard to find trees more than a century old in a lot of places. So I wonder if that alone might have given the rhodies a big leg up in terms of expanding.
I have noticed that the ground is mostly bare under the rhodies - too dark for saplings and ephemerals. I would suspect that there is a sort of longer-term balance in play. Perhaps after 50-100 years as a rhododendron thicket, the soil begins to be exhausted of what they need, and so they die back.