Treasures Of The North And Winter: American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana)

Most conversations I have had with people about my northern (i.e. pine tree and really cold winter country) heritage usually include discussions on what exactly grows up in the land of frigid winters and gentle summers.  Many people assume that the farther north one travels, the more one runs into coniferous needle-leaved trees, and that the horizon is nothing but spruce after spruce.  Just as residents of the lower north (southern Great Lakes, Midwest, Northeast) assume that Florida is one giant palm plantation, or that the desert west is nothing but sand dunes devoid of life, residents from said lower north down to the the rest of the continent picture the Boreal north as a land of excellent Christmas trees and the odd moose or bear bursting through the needles.  In truth, spruce are the most northerly occurring trees, right on into the tundra in fact (albeit as a very small form that takes centuries to hit an inch tall).  They are very quickly joined by willows, birch, aspen, and best of all, by something that looks like it should not grow in this land of the anti-leaf, the American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana).

Clingmans Dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  North Carolina, with some Tennessee in the background.

 On the upper slopes of Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina.

 As you can see, our friend the grand Mountain Ash looks, like the northern growing sumacs, to be a palm tree that got lost along the way.  Despite growing in an otherwise rugged setting, the tree (others insist it is a tree-like shrub) has delicate looking foliage and a branching structure that looks like it would get absolutely broken apart in heavy snow and ice.  Believe what you want, however, because this fine specimen of a plant really only grows where things get somewhat brutal:

Thanks, USDA!

Most of my pictures of them come from North Carolina, despite the fact that this is indeed a tree I have grown up with for a long time.  The good olf Sorbus is indeed a tree of eastern Boreal Canada, growing right on up to James Bay.  Not until I was specifically plant hunting and noticed it stood out among the Spruce-Fir forests of the higher Appalachians did I really think it was anything unique!  Yes, it has the same good characteristics in both Ontario and North Carolina, and it stands out from the forests in the Laurentians:

Somewhere in the forest north of Brent, Ontario and south of Deux-Rivieres, Ontario.

As well as it does in the Blue Ridge and Smokies:

Off of the summit of Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina.  They really do look weird with the conifers.

Along the main road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, eastbound side, not exactly sure, but high enough to see the transition between coniferous and deciduous forests.  On the top right there is also a heath bald full of rhododendrons and kalmia!

Yet I always seemed to think of it as part of the scenery, taken for granted.  This is probably because it is not a "northern" looking thing; just as the kid who got excited over pine trees did, so do people who get excited over spruces and rhododendrons which happen to grow best where the Sorbuses do: 

They really do offer a nice foliage effect together.  I am sure by now that any gardeners reading the blog are getting some ideas!  This was taken on the road leading up to the summit of Mt. Mitchell.

Let's face it, you all looked at the flowering Catawba Rhododendron (Rhododendron Catawbiense), and why not?  The Sorbus looks like any old sumac (or worse, a Tree of Heaven [Ailanthus Altissima]) growing in an abandoned city lot might. This holds true until the winter comes, however, and the true glory of Sorbus Americana enters the landscape, it's berries:

Another fine tree from the Ontario Laurentians, probably about 6 or 7 miles from the other one pictured in this post.  Both were set in some fairly dark and lovely spruce-fir forests.

Somewhere in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, most likely on the path to Munising Falls near Munising, Michigan.

The berries, of course, are preceded by flowers, which truly makes this an all season interest tree:

Flower buds!  This was at Mt. Mitchell and taken mid June.

Clingmans Dome.  I arrived too early at the high elevations, and too late at the lower elevations, to get a full bloom.

I don't have any photos of the plant in full bloom or naked in the dead of winter with those bright red berries really standing out against the landscape, but it does not take too much imagination to realize that this is a tree which proves that noticeable seasonal changes are not a bad thing.  Indeed, this tree might have even given a bit of a boost to early colonists who had to deal with an actual winter or were heading into the dark and mysterious mountain or northern interior.  It was a welcome splash of color in the winter landscape, and would have reminded them of their own Sorbus back across the sea, the Rowan Tree (Sorbus Aucuparia), which people had considered to be good for everything from making jelly to fighting off witches.  That said, it seems that Aucuparia still gets more notice and stock in the nursery trade; in keeping with the current few posts and their theme on the blog, it is important to note that this is probably because the European version can be grown in warmer spots than the North American version.  Again, however, this is not say that our version is weak and tender, as it can grow out of some really difficult soil:

Somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway near north of Mt. Mitchell.

Somewhere on Mt. Mitchell.  As you can see, the soil is pretty shallow before bedrock is reached.  This particular Sorbus is joined by a nice blanket of blue alpine flowers, Mountain Bluets (Hedyotis Michauxii).

And of course, our version can also handle the colder end of the spectrum better than even some of the hardiest northern broadleaved trees.  This tree just happens to be hardy in the other direction, the one that no one claims to like!

By the way, if any Illinois people are reading this, I would love to hear/see anything on the wild population in your state, which is far more prairie than Boreal. 

Harriet Tubman And Johanna Dominguez

I'll probably get back to the real posting soon, but just two things for today to pass along to my readers:

1. Harriet Tubman is getting a shout out today on Google's front page.  She is extremely important not only for persons of color in this country (or the world in general) but also for women who long struggled for enfranchisement.  Like many other fine Black people of the 19th century, she also contributed to the development and enrichment of cultural and intellectual life in central New York, namely in Auburn.  She is honored in statues and memorials in many places, and at two National Park sites, one being Women's Rights National Historical Park in nearby Seneca Falls, NY, and the other in the newly created Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Church Creek, MD.  In nearby Cambridge, MA is a dedicated museum to Harriet run by the Harriet Tubman Organization.

The two areas offer the visitor a major contrast between the sides of the abolition struggle.  Safe, tranquil central New York is and was largely agrarian, domestically serene and proper, and somewhat removed from the rest of the major stress areas on the Underground Railroad.  It was close to the safety of Upper Canada in either Niagara or Kingston, and by and large the reception given to liberated Black people was much warmer than elsewhere in the North.  The eastern shore of Maryland, however, is and was still relatively wild and swampy, as well as deep enough into the Slave States to make this perhaps one of the most stressful parts of an escape to freedom further north.  I'll let such distinctions speak for themselves, with the mention that swamps are pretty amazing places when one is not running in terror.

2. A friend of mine has recently started diving into a blog project regarding human-induced climate change.  While I often teeter carefully on the political abyss here on American Voyages, I have not been shy to present blatantly obvious evidence, admittedly at face value, that something is going on with our planet.  I present her post and take on what is happening in the Albertan Boreal forest and Boreal-Prairie Interface because it is very scary.  Factually speaking, the Boreal forest is perhaps the last great wilderness remaining on the planet, doing all the wonderful things that forests do in a very vast scale.  In North America, the Boreal world connects the east and the west by means of the all-encompassing north in a series of ecosystems and biomes that bear similarities enough that one cannot otherwise tell the difference in some landscapes if they were standing in Alaska or Labrador.  I roughly consider the Boreal world here to be found wherever the shaggy but noble Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) can be found in the wild:

Yes, even down in the Poconos or in rare remnants in southern Michigan or nearby Southern Ontario.  Where one finds Black Spruce, one finds cool, damp conditions that even the hardiest temperate species can't tolerate.

That said, I do confess to another bias, notably that I am pretty much from this world of spruce, bogs, granite, sand, Ericaceae of extraordinary abundance, the Aurora Borealis, a lot of Cree, Moose, and tons of other amazing things.

Near Deux-Riviers, Ontario.  This is a more southerly example of the Boreal world.

Passions and home spirit aside, the boreal world is notable for not only still being generally unbroken by the hand of humans, but also packs in a ton of carbon and pretty much serves as one of the biggest positive storage spaces in the planetary carbon cycle.  Start digging up fossil fuel from and burning or otherwise destroying any part of the Boreal landscape and there are going to be very consequences for the rest of the world.  Natural consequences aside, the Cree are also fighting an uphill battle over the poisoning of their Albertan homelands.  While this would not be the first time a treaty has been broken or bended between the First and Second Born, uh, come on, we can surely do better by this stage in the game?

Anyway, I could go on for days about this subject, and I probably will as things get worse.  I consider the Tar Sands issue to be something to go to legitimate war over.  In the meantime, I'm passing a long Johanna's article because anything that exposes this travesty for what it is worth is definitely getting shared:

Click here for the blog!

I'm excited to see what she can do actually.  While I tend to try and link to other blogs with North American significance, and Johanna is definitely more of a citizen of the world, this piece is not only covering continental news but news with a global impact and is definitely worth broadening the horizons of our coverage here.

Roan Mountain

The highest peaks and ridges of the southern Appalachians are an incredible world set apart from their surrounding lower elevations.  Relatively little of the high ground was ever settled by either the first or second born of the area, and although the summits were logged in the early twentieth century and roads were later constructed for tourists to visit the highest reaches of mountain in eastern North America, the area by and large has remained a great frontier of the wild.  One such place is Roan Mountain.

Roan has your typical southern Appalachian high ground features; Red Spruce (Picea Rubens), Frasier Fir (Abies Fraseri), Catawba Rhododendron (Rhododendron Catawbiense), American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana), some nice open vistas set in a cold climate (things rarely heat up past 70 here), that sort of thing.  To someone just passing through from one high point to the next in the region, Roan might not seem to be anything special, but the truth of the matter is that it really does stand alone.  For one, Roan really is alone.  Most of the surrounding mountains are over a thousand feet lower, if not more than her misty reaches.  The result is that the feeling of being "on top of the world" is overwhelming here.

Wide open spaces dominate, with grassy balds affording incredible views of sky and distant land much more readily than places like Mt. Michell or Clingman's Dome, where the summits there actually require viewing platforms to see the forest in spite of the trees.  This is probably because Roan is less a true peak than a very high ridge, the end result of which is that even from the dense Spruce-Fir forests, the edge of the world is never far away:

Still, Roan does not attract the same level of attention that the other heights seem to get.  This is probably because it is a bit more isolated from the rest of the giant, set back in the backdrop of the Blue Ridge rather than directly along the highest reaches and its celebrated parkway.  Her high elevations are rather accessible, being both on the Appalachian Trail and not far from public highways, yet even in the peak of the touring season, my walks through Roan were largely done in solitude.  Yes, it was rather late in the day when I finally made my way there, but the crowd of people at the Appalachian trail parking lot 500 feet down from the higher ground indicated that this was not really stopping anyone from having a look at the place.  Perhaps part of what makes Roan so quiet, and then too so intimate, was the scale of presentation there.

While Roan is every bit as florid as the other flower hot spots in the region (and rightly so, for the Rhododendrons here are considered to be the finest "gardens" in the world), our friends from the Heath family seemed content to share space with the conifers and ashes.  If anything, the ferns give every bit as much of a show as the Catawbas did.

That said, one can not go a few steps in any direction without finding them.  They just tend to form a part of the scenery without dominating it:

This is not to say that Rhododendrons are far from being the stars of the show here!

As seen in yesterday's post, they can grow quite large and cover a bit of territory, enough so to contend with the spruces and firs, but like everything else here, they don't tend to dominate so much as they do, say, at Craggy Gardens, which is basically a giant forest of them.  You can still stand in a nice thick patch here, surrounded by branches with the flowers over top rather than on your same level, but here they are a part of something more, and more often than not they look as if they are a part of their greater forest portrait.  In short, if you want to see Catawba Rhododendrons in their natural setting, you can do so throughout the southern Appalachians, but by and large the best place to see them like this would be at Roan.  The Catawbas, you see, can easily make a forest in and of themselves, but they grow best as a friend to the spruces, firs, ashes, and the lovely grasses, sedges, and ferns.

Roan just has a very primordial feeling to it.  As I mentioned last post, it feels like a piece of Eden that got left behind for us.  Roan is a place of balance, a place of greatness, to be sure:

But also a place of balance, where the young are even more prevalent than the old, and where the attentive eye will notice that the more delicate creations have just as much of an allure to those who come to marvel at the beauty of the created world here:

Roan is very like a religious icon set in the natural world.  This place invites one to quiet rambling thoughts and instead look into a natural world that we so often ignore or expect to put on a show for us.  This place invites us in to a world that is our home, and yet one we still can be amazed by and curious about.  Roan is definitely a place I will explore again and again, as I wish to travel more through its sunny balds and deep spruce-fir forests.

A Beautiful Addiction And The Master Gardener.

I have to admit, whenever I see a rhododendron in a nursery, I beeline toward it.  I could pass hundreds of native treasures priced at less than a dollar and it would not matter, I would still toss over tables and knock down people to get to the rhododendron.  Of course, I do have standards even then.  It needs to be some sort of cultivar originating from a native species, preferably a Catawbiense cultivar.  Yes, the Asian stuff is gorgeous, but nothing beats a Catawba.  For me the attraction is probably both due to the fact that it is native, or at least continental, or even just a descendant of such a thing, and that it is broadleaved and evergreen in an otherwise halfway between the tropics and tundra deciduous Michigan. 

I started to green my winter landscape a little bit this year by introducing two Catawba cultivars and got excited beyond all measure when I backed them up with some rock and imagined myself on top of some Appalachian bald.  Of course, nothing beats an original, and this summer, finding that I needed some time to rejuvenate mind and body, well, I just had to make my way down to those balds and finally see Rhododendron Catawbiense with my own eyes.  I waited for a teacher friend to get off school to take a trip with me; he wanted to see mountains, and I wanted to see what grew on them.  I knew it might be hit or miss heading down to the southern Appalachians so late in June, and research indicated that such a time would be prime viewing atop the Roan Highlands.  Driving south from Roan Mountain, Tennessee, into the Unaka mountains, we climbed higher and higher and started seeing the odd Catawba clinging to life off of some rocks.  Here and there some Red Spruce (Picea Rubens) crept up and I felt like I was coming home; Reds grow up in the Ontarian Laurentians after all. 

We turned a corner and came across a bald full of them, right on the Appalachian trail, and the excitement went through the roof.  That is a post for another day, but I will set the scene just for this amazing picture (or two).  We traveled through the heath balds and cold spruce-fir forests, one foot in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina.  We came upon the legendary gardens on Roan Summit, with the plants so tall and full they might as well have been called trees.  Down tunnels of conifers we spied more bright purple-pink flowers waiting around every corner, and the place was probably the second most beautiful and sacred work of the Creator that I have seen anywhere.  Then one last trail beckoned even as the sun began to set and the "gardens" took on a celestial beauty beyond compare.  At the end of the trail was a boardwalk, which I figured would end in yet another amazing vista.  What I found instead...

Is beyond words.  Overlooking the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina was an expanse of them so thick and... well let's just say it was beautiful, peaceful, serene, etc.  There are many other balds of this sort just covered in our friends, but nothing prepared me for this spot.  There are places in this world that I personally believe are little remnants of Eden, and this is one such place where I have felt closer to the divine than anywhere outside of a place of constructed worship.  I make note of this reaction of mysticism because I encourage people to make a trip here to Roan sometime if they are able, to see what it does to them.  Non-spiritually, this is one of the places that most botanists past and present have come as sort of a botanical pilgrimage.  I know I want to make return visits myself, and see it in various degrees of daylight, maybe even during the winter. 

I know I promise quite a lot on this blog, and time and space usually conspire to keep me away from it, but a weekend of gardening and farming and contemplating things leaf and Maker of leaf have given me the inspiration to make this week on American Voyages the week of the Rhododendron.  Tomorrow we will visit Roan in more detail and give it the attention it deserves. 

Natural Patterned Wallpaper

Seemingly endless fir and spruce from the Rockies in central Colorado.  See you tomorrow!

Distant Cousins

While the corners of North America can often seem worlds apart in terms of climate and landscape, our continent is notable for having more similarities than differences between its distant ends.  White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) can be found both in Veracruz and central Quebec, various spruces and firs range from Alaska to the Appalachians, and even the rocks beneath us can remind the lonely traveler of a distant home.  Take a look at the scenes below:

Nope, that's not actually Canadian Shield!

While these might seem to have been taken in, say, Maine or Ontario, they were actually snapped (poorly, I know, I had yet to master the art of windshield photography) in central Utah.  The mountains of Utah and neighboring Colorado pull off Boreal artistry rather nicely despite being 1,000 miles south of the true Boreal forest.  Rather than Balsam Fir (Abies Balsamea) and White Spruce (Picea Glauca) we see spires of Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa) and Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii), and the granites, schists, and gabbros of these relatively young mountains are old, but only recently exposed and not nearly as old as the ancient outcrops of the Canadian Shield rocks of the same names.

The western mountains, you see, are youngsters that rose less than 80 million years ago.  The life which thrives on their slopes, however, probably shares common ancestry with lower elevation life in similar climactic areas much further north.  During the last major glaciation, when the Boreal forests were much further south, these forests interacted with the northern versions at much closer proximity.  These days they are a bit more isolated, but serve as a unique southern extension of the northern forests well into central Mexico.  We are blessed and cursed, in a way, to have such a unique continent that features north-south mountain ranges and winters and summers both that can move uncontested far beyond where they can in other parts of the world.  The two worlds of alpine and true Boreal meet in the Canadian Rockies in a strikingly subtle mingling of separately evolved worlds.  Though I have never been to this grand meeting place of north and west, I can imagine that the sensations would be nothing short of incredible and perhaps even something reminiscent of a more unified continent that had to face much colder conditions as a tighter biological entity.  Again though, the differences are not too far apart from one another.  Take a look at a similar stretch of forest:

Taken off of Michigan 35 halfway between Menominee and Escanaba, MI.  

The casual viewer might not even notice a difference, even though the Utah and Michigan scenes are 1,300 miles apart.  With the exception of some aspens, none of the trees are of the same species between the two scenes, and the air in both places has rather different qualities to it.  Still, there is a little bit of Utah in Michigan and a little bit of Michigan in Utah, relations which have common roots in a more severe past.