The land – Into the Woods

Photos before the frost

Deciduous magnolia. Click here for high-resolution version.

Deciduous magnolia blooms are very susceptible to frostbite. In many years, frost gets my deciduous magnolia trees before they reach full bloom. There may be frost tonight. But at least the magnolias were able to fully bloom.

As far as I know, even the summer-blooming and evergreen magnolia grandiflora, also called Southern magnolia, grows well farther north, including in the United Kingdom. To my lights, every landscape (or garden, if you’re in the U.K.) needs magnolias. The deciduous magnolias have very little scent. Whereas Southern magnolias can be smelled a mile away (I’m exaggerating) on a hot summer night.

The apple trees are not yet blooming.

⬆︎ Deciduous magnolia. Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ Plum. Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ Peach. Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ Periwinkle. Earlier I had identified this as bluets, but the PlantNet app seems pretty certain that it’s periwinkle. Click here for high-resolution version.

Three generations of white deer?

A neighbor shot this photo of the youngest white deer, now two years old. She is muscular and remarkably healthy.

It was more than ten years ago that I first saw a white deer in the woods here. Sometimes I was able to get a photo, and comparison of the photos from year to year led to a strong suspicion that there were two white deer, almost certainly of two generations. Then, in the spring of 2023, a baby white deer appeared. That would make three, all part of the local deer herd, whose range includes my woods, the opposite ridge to the south, a lot of creek bottom, and a field or two along the ridge north of the creek.

Fortunately their range is not crossed by a paved road, and as far as I know the local herd has not had any car fatalities. The deer are often in my yard. They’re hard on my day lilies, but they’re welcome to the clover. After I stopped keeping chickens, I opened the gates to the orchard. The deer now do a fine job of keeping the undergrowth (mostly honeysuckle) out of the orchard.

My nearest neighbor keeps a close watch on the local deer herd. He puts out corn for them as well as mineral salt. He is a longtime hunter, but as far as I know he has never shot a deer from our local herd. Rather, he sees his job as keeping poachers out and letting it be known that anyone who shoots a white deer — or for that matter any deer from the local herd — just might get shot, if caught. There are plenty of hunters who would like to have a white deer as a trophy.

I asked my neighbor, in a text message, if the youngest white deer has a white mother. He replied:

“Not sure which doe it was. There are genes in this area to produce the white deer. I’ve heard that there are several between here and the river.”

There is a lot of wild bottom land between here and the Dan River, which is less than two miles away. Bears are seen in that area pretty often. There is a pack of coyotes, though I rarely hear them. They must have a pretty large range.

There are places in North Carolina with white squirrels. The commonly heard explanation, probably false, is that they escaped from a P.T. Barnum circus truck after a truck wreck. If Brevard is still having its white squirrel festivals, I wonder if there are any for sale on the black market. Woods with white deer ought to have some white squirrels.

Helene, mother of mushrooms

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It has been a week since Hurricane Helene brought such destruction to the Appalachian Mountains. Here in the foothills there wasn’t much damage. But the tropical weather than brought Helene has lingered, with warm days, humid nights, and some showers. It’s the perfect weather for mushrooms.

An online site that attempts to identify mushrooms from a photo thinks that the orange mushroom above probably is Amanita jacksonii. If that’s what it is, it’s edible, though I would never eat a wild mushroom. Mushrooms from the amanita family are common here, including Amanita muscaria, which is a hallucinogenic (though toxic) mushroom.

Probably a Chlorophyllum molybdites, a poisonous mushroom. The mushroom in the photo is just a youngster. A day later its cap was eight inches in diameter.

That yellow-flower time of year

Tickseed sunflower

I call September that yellow-flower time of year. As soon as September arrives, yellow flowers appear all along the roadsides here in the Blue Ridge foothills.

And there’s another thing that arrives in September — bread season. The kitchen, at last, is cool enough to want to use the oven. My first loaf of the season was barley bread. It’s about ten parts barley flour to one part gluten flour, plus salt, a teaspoon of yeast, and water. As long as you add gluten flour to the barley and keep the dough warm, it will rise, even though barley flour is a little harder to work with than wheat. I grind my own barley flour from organic hulled barley. You can get the barley — and grain grinders! — on Amazon. My grinder, though, is a classic Champion juicer with a mill attachment.

Barley bread with fixin’s

If I only had a field…

From my morning walk. Click here for high-resolution version.

There are many beautiful hayfields in this area. I covet them. I have only woods. I’ve often talked about how much I’d like to have a pasture, or a field. Then again, maybe not. A hayfield is not a hayfield unless there also is a tractor with a mower and a baling machine. I don’t have such things, nor do I have the farmerly skill to use them.

Hay is a major crop in this area. Sadly, though, most of the hay goes to feed beef cattle. This is not horse country, though there are some. Country people love their beef. I can say this for their local beef, though. It’s all grass fed. The beef cattle all live in excellent pastures, and they winter over with local hay.

The political situation

I haven’t posted lately about the political situation. The changes have been dramatic, but everything is going well, and I have little to add. I would like to mention a piece in The New Republic today that detests the political punditry as much as I do. It’s “Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention.”

When a political event is on live television — for example, a president’s state of the union speech before a joint session of Congress — the brainlessness of the punditry is on full display. C-SPAN, if you can get it, may televise such events with no pundit “analysis.” But if you watch it anywhere else, you’ll have to listen to the inane and endless yipyap from witless talking heads that passes as analysis. I have not been watching the Democratic convention live. I do watch some of the speeches the day after, and, if there is yipyap, I skip over it.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ The road past my house. The house is hidden behind the trees on the lower right. Click here for high-resolution version.

This hayfield plant has remarkably beautiful powers, but I well remember it from my rural Southern childhood and what its briars can do to children’s bare feet. I believe this is Carolina horsenettle, Solanum carolinense. Click here for high-resolution version.

A baby rabbit, and baby figs

I see the baby rabbit every day. It likes to hang out near the front steps and eat clover. Each year the fig crop gets better and better. I have to fight the squirrels for the apples, but it’s the birds that I have to fight for the figs. I have three Rose of Sharon trees. Each is a different color and blooms at a different time. This one grows at the edge of the woods in the backyard and seems to like it there.

Click here for high-resolution version

A lightning bug

A firely on a basil leaf

It has taken more than ten years for the abbey’s one-acre clearing in the woods to become a suitable habitat for lightning bugs. There are far fewer fireflies than there used to be because of pesticides and loss of habitat. When I was a child, there were fireflies virtually everywhere in rural places. That is no longer the case.

One of the things I have learned about fireflies is that even an acre of suitable habitat helps them to thrive. As I read up on fireflies, I was not surprised to learn that light pollution is a part of what threatens them. That makes sense. Through the 1950s, rural areas were actually dark at night. Now those horrible so-called security lights blare their ugly light all night long and cannot be turned off.

Firefly larvae (glow worms!) like to live in moist (but well drained) grassland and leaf litter. The abbey yard with its surrounding woods is the perfect environment for the larval stage. As for light pollution, the fact that the yard is 98 percent surrounded by tall trees means that light pollution from the horizon is blocked. The only light comes from directly overhead — the stars and the moon.

There are many species of fireflies, but the lightning bugs we have here in the North Carolina Piedmont and Appalachian foothills are easily recognized because of their black wing covers and the orange carapace at their heads. Starting in May, when I close my book and turn off the reading light in the bedroom, I can see the lightning bugs blinking through the bedroom window. What a privilege, to have lightning bugs in the yard!

Not exactly the High Hay

The entrance into the woods in the abbey’s front yard. The deer use it as a doorway. Click here for high-resolution version.

One of the most memorable bits of landscape in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is The Hedge, or “High Hay,” that protected the Hobbits of Buckland from the scary creatures of the Old Forest. The Hedge was very dense, and to get into the forest there was a tunnel lined with brick under the hedge, blocked with iron bars.

Fifteen years ago, I made a rough trail into the woods that leads to a huge rock that overhangs a small stream — a picturesque and magical spot where a huge beech tree grows amongst the other hardwoods, with its roots near the stream and its upper branches at the top of the canopy. I planted small arbor vitae trees on either side of the opening to decorate the trailhead, though the arbor vitaes are now being overcome by woodsy things.

The woods that adjoin the abbey are very dark, dense, moist, and cool, a place where hardly a single photon of sunlight goes to waste. Where there’s light, a leaf will grow to try to catch it. I’ve learned that, left alone, the edges of a woods are a special kind of ecosystem. At the edges of a woods, light comes from the side as well as above, so growth is exuberant. There are certain species of trees that particularly like to grow at the edge of a woods, wild persimmon trees in particular … not to mention poison oak. The edge of a woods can be very dense. Birds love it there. Here at the abbey, the deer have a door into the woods in the backyard as well as the front.

The critter birth rate is high this spring

Click here for larger version.

Mama Deer was having lunch on my day lilies while Baby Deer was having lunch on Mama. The baby’s walk was very wobbly. I’d guess that the baby is not many days old.

I’m seeing lots of wildlife babies this year. There are a great many baby rabbits, baby birds, and young squirrels to be seen in the yard. A turtle comes each morning and hides at the bottom of the front steps hoping to catch a porch lizard warming itself on the steps in the morning sun. This morning, during a walk in the woods, I saw a tiny black snake no more than four inches long. I have not seen any baby foxes or baby possums, but they’ve got to be around somewhere. A neighbor says that Mama Bear up on the ridge has some cubs. I don’t think I’ll go up there to look.

The first box of 2024 produce

Bok choi, snap peas, green onions, cone cabbage, lettuce, and broccolini

It’s only the 3rd of May, and I just picked up my first box of 2024 vegetables. Again this year, I’m outsourcing the gardening. A young couple who live about two miles away, who moved here from Chicago, are making a living from their little farm. This year they’ll have three seasons of community sourced agriculture boxes each week — spring, summer, and fall.

They are superb gardeners. Over the winter they added a second greenhouse (for starting their vegetables from seeds). They do organic, no-till gardening on remarkably little land. None of the space they have is wasted, with some room left over for blooming things that feed the birds and bees. They sell most of their produce at a high-end farmer’s market in Greensboro, which is open on Saturday mornings. I believe I’m their only local customer who picks up at the farm, which is a bit sad. Most rural people just don’t care about fresh vegetables anymore. Very few people garden, and based on what I see local people buying in the grocery store, their diets are terrible. As much as rural people complain about grocery prices, you’d think they’d get a clue.

I have a standing appointment for pickups on Fridays at 11. They pick my things early in the morning, wash it, and put it in their chiller. When I pick it up it’s fresh from their garden.

Again this year I’ll grow tomatoes and herbs (especially basil) in my own garden plot. But I’ll get everything else from Brittany and Richard.