Treasures Of The North And Winter: Redtwig Dogwood (Cornus Sericea)

In addition to the birches, willows, and mountain ashes which make up the broadleaved gang of the Boreal north, one can also find a nice collection of dogwood, sometimes nearly to the Arctic treeline.  One in particular ranges even further north and bit further south than our Sorbus friend which we visited on ye olde blog yesterday, the magnificent Redtwig Dogwood (Cornus Sericea).

All but the last two of these pictures are taken from a tamarack swamp/fen (pretty sure it is actually a prairie fen) about two miles from your author's dwelling near South Lyon, Michigan.

While most winter interest deciduous plants try to fall back on great features like berries or persistent fall foliage, the Redtwig adds spice to the landscape with wood alone.

They like the same sort of cold winters that Sorbus seems to like, but because they like to get their feet good and soaked (or at least within root range of some plentiful water; I have seen them higher up on stream and pond banks), they don't range as far south into the Appalachians as the Mountain Ash or spruce and firs do.  There are some amazing cool, wet areas in West Virginia and Maryland where this dogwood and its best tree friend, the Tamarack (Larix Laricina) can be found at the far end of their eastern southerly range.  On the other hand, they extend well south into parts of Mexico where a combination of persistent water and artificial north provided by altitude allow them to thrive.  A subspecies is also found along the Pacific coast as far south as the mountains around Los Angeles, a rare find for a climate which does not have much in the way of eastern North American wetlands beyond its vernal pools (which does in fact have some populations of this remarkable plant).

USGS Geosciences, please never stop giving us awesome maps.  We love you.  Very much.

That said, they are indeed a northern plant, and I would definitely classify them even as a Boreal plant, and thus another gift of the winter lands.  Around here, they are a common feature of the swampier parts of the world, and they often form pretty amazing gatherings, as if nature did have some sort of aesthetic plans in mind and desired mass plantings.

Filling a swampy niche and having evolved within a balance, they never tend to completely form monocultures, even while they do dominate the scenery.  When the sun catches these things they turn an incredible bright ruby, but even in the dull overcast winter days they are far more brilliant than most cameras can even hope to demonstrate.

 

They grow slowly, and the old wood does turn brown even while the newer wood is the same amazing red:

Not the best image, but this old wood versus new wood is demonstrated by the emerging red stem from the central branch here.

In general, though, they tend to form an understory beneath taller wet foot trees like cottonwoods, the lovely Tamarack...

 ...and in a particular lovely combination of color and grace, the Black Willow (Salix Nigra):

Finally, they look amazing against the snow, almost as if to proclaim that not only is this winter and snow not so bad, it is positively enchanting.

Thankfully, Redtwig is pretty popular in the nursery trade, and even if Siberian Dogwood (Cornus Alba) seems to be flavor of the month lately, this is one case where even gardeners in its native land are falling head over heels for our friend.  Heck, there are even golden and green cultivars/selections out there!  Apparently you can plant all three as far south as the lowland Carolinas and parts of Georgia and Alabama, but I would imagine that like any northern plant, they probably do best in wet conditions with colder winters back home; they certainly do not naturally occur much farther south than the Great Lakes, at least at lower elevations. 

I do not know how the early colonists would have seen this plant and have yet to run into early botanical and garden literature regarding it, but the First Born absolutely loved it and used it in everything from smoking mixes to wound treatment.  Redtwig would make an excellent candidate for serious ethnobotanical study, and if this blog did not have a more general focus beyond ethnobotany (I know, I know, sometimes I get carried away with it) I would probably bore you all with a good solid set of posts on findings about good old red bark shrub. 

Oh, and this is just our friend in the winter.  In the spring it bears white flowers, in the summer these turn into white berries,and they all look great on those ribbed leaves.

Again as with our friend Sorbus, this apparently also occurs in northern Illinois, classic eastern Tallgrass Prairie country, a far cry from anything Boreal.  If anyone reading this knows more, by all means, share! 

Note: Cornus Sericea has also been known as Cornus Stolonifera. 

Sunday Afternoon Post: Mountain Gone?

Though I intend to revisit the subject a lot as often as I can, I figured on just briefly sharing a picture of mountaintop removal.

Somewhere along Kentucky 80 near Martin, Kentucky.

I did not take many pictures of the terrible scenes down in Kentucky, but the Earth down there is literally being blown up one piece at a time.  Here, have a second picture, just to see the object of the disfigurement:

Southbound along US 23 somewhere between Prestonburg and Staffordsville, Kentucky.

See that thin black line below that gray/black looking layer?  That would be coal.  That's right, this is going on just for a little line of the fossil fuel that we can't seem to get enough of in this country.  If you want to see more wasteland, take a look at Google Maps and center the view over the point where Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia meet.  Turn it onto satellite view and take a look at the area stretching from Hazard, Kentucky to about Summersville, West Virginia.  Those big gray blotches are basically mountains that have been shaved out of existence and often replaced by little more than a thin layer of dirt covered in Kentucky Blue Grass seed.  You can see "restoration" first hand by checking out the blotch when you search for Bolen Cemetery in Kentucky and open the streetview to the barren area.  I stopped the car there but did not manage a picture, being so much in disgust of what I saw.

Even if you don't care about the visual appeal of mountains, you probably figured correctly that this sort of thing has to be terrible for the local water supply.  Not only do the locals get poisoned by water that basically turns into sludge, but think about the fact that water from here can impact people all the way down the Cumberland River watershed (and beyond).  The scars are not only gross looking, they also ooze out some awful goo.

The Potomac Above Natural Navigation Limits

While searching for some topic photos for the blog tonight I came across this picture, which I think I took at Chain Bridge, which connects Washington with Virginia.

In an earlier post, we got to take a look at the Great Falls of the Potomac, another rocky, somewhat dramatic area for a river that is otherwise usually depicted as serene, flat, and just a nice scenic portion of a larger capital scene.  Like many east coast rivers, the Potomac is indeed a nice, flat, boat-worthy river until it hits the toes of the Appalachian rise.  Like the Nile pinching at its "cataracts", these rivers then narrow into rather rocky affairs that feature little rapids.

Yes, I know this is not the Potomac.  What we see here is the Susquehanna river just north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This was taken from US 22 northbound, looking west.  

As seen above, in places where the navigation head is closer to the first great ridges of the Appalachians, the whole affair gets pinched into this sort of scene framed by enclosing mountains.  These features are known as "water gaps".  For the Potomac, this occurs much further upstream than this scene in Washington at Harper's Ferry, where Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia converge.  Here we have a double gap, where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac.

US 340 looking north upstream the Shenandoah to its confluence, between the mountains, with the Potomac.  The white steeple rising from the left shore is the only sign of Harper's Ferry, WV, that can be seen through the rather dense riparian forests of cottonwoods, ashes, and willows.  

The water gaps and river-worn sections of the Appalachians are excellent places to see the exposed underbelly of eastern North America.  While our vegetated and softened landscape here has nothing on the "naked geology" of the western lands and Mexico, it is far from boring as far as geologists and rockhounds are concerned.  Yeah, we have the classic riverboat scenes, but we also have rougher and swifter patches like this right around the corner.  In some places, they have allowed for dams and mills to be constructed that were responsible for powering and watering the foundations of American industrialization.

Parks in the News: Covering West Virginia

Mountain top removal is an ongoing crisis that has devastated much of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.  Instead of digging shafts and galleries to extract coal and other mineral resources, mining companies have lately taken to literally shaving off the top of mountains to get at even small seams of the stuff.  The visual impact on the landscape is devastating, to say the least, but far more danger lies in the destructive aftermath of removal.  Entire forests are clear cut from the area, and the wood is often simply burned or used to fill holes left behind in the process.  Storms and existing streams are thus able to erode the land faster, bringing the by-products of this wasteful method of coal extraction with the run-off.  Entire watersheds are poisoned, and dramatic, unnatural flooding finishes off whatever has managed to survive thus far, including people.  This is destructive, disgusting, and economically damaging to all but the pocketbooks of the interests behind faster mineral extraction.  Think this is media hokum?  Take a look at this map below, or if you do not trust Google, any other satellite image:

The wider circle is where most of the removal takes place, with concentrations of wasteland found within the small the circles.  The area from about Hazard, Kentucky, to Webster Springs, West Virginia, is rapidly being turned into a landscape of desolation, with watersheds being impacted on both the Atlantic and Mississippi sides of the Appalachian crest.  So what can be done about this?  Well, for one, a national park could eliminate much of the problem, though questions have arisen about hunting, trapping, and fishing rights within park lands.  As a result, legislation that would have proposed a new park unit in the area has been put on hold, especially with elections on the line.  I suspect that political intimidation has been coming from the coal industry, however.  

As usual, decide for yourself.  The story can be found here:

http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/03/are-prospects-new-national-park-or-preserve-west-virginia-dead9610