The above photos are from my hike yesterday on the South Prong Trail in the Red Creek Plains, adjacent to the Dolly Sods Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest. These areas, along with Roaring Plains and Flatrock Plains, comprise the highest plateau in the eastern United States. They are places of otherwordly beauty, where the ancient bedrock has been heaved up in huge, stacked slabs, as if arranged by some primordial being into primitive temples of sandstone and shale. Around these ancient temples are gathered the artifacts of the last ice age: forests of red spruce and sphagnum bogs with plants more at home in Maine and Nova Scotia than in the Mid-Atlantic region. It’s easy to forget that the many treasures of the plains are part of a regenerating landscape. The plateau was scraped clean to the bone by reckless logging practices and subsequent man-made fires at the turn of the last century. Nature’s resiliency and will to endure never fail to amaze me.
Appalachian Summer/Fall, 2018, Volume Nine: Nodding Ladies’ Tresses Orchid. One of Appalachia’s most unusual orchids blooms in high mountain bogs, moist woods, and wet meadows from late summer through the first frost of fall. Nodding ladies’ tresses orchid (Spiranthes cernua) produces fragrant, downward-curved white flowers in double, intertwined rows at the top of a slender, slightly hairy stalk. The double spiral arrangement of the flowers gives this lovely and striking perennial herb its common name. The flowering stalk grows from a basal rosette of thin, grass-like leaves, which sometimes wither before the flowers bloom. Several species of bees, including bumblebees, are known to pollinate the flowers; they typically travel from the lowest flowers, which contain the most nectar, to the highest ones. The nodding ladies’ tresses orchid reproduces both by seed and by branching rhizomes, which explains why it appears in closely grouped clumps in the damp peat of sphagnum bogs. This orchid is easily propagated in wildflower gardens. The above photos were taken in the bog complex at Spruce Knob Lake.
Autumn Berries, Volume 4: Small Cranberry. In the cold sphagnum bogs of Appalachia’s higher mountains, small cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos) sends out delicate, vine-like stems with small, leathery leaves that root where they come into contact with the damp peat. A trailing perennial shrub in the heath (Ericaceae) family, the plant is found throughout the Northern Hemisphere and as far south as the mountain bogs of West Virginia and Virginia in Central Appalachia. Small cranberry forms fragile, drooping pink flowers in the spring. These flowers are replaced by lustrous red berries from late August through October; they contrast sharply with the dull-brown-red sphagnum of late autumn. The edible berries have a familiar, sweet-tart flavor and were once favored by Native Americans as an accompaniment to wild game. The above photos were taken along the South Prong Trail in the Red Creek Plains of the Monongahela National Forest and the Cranesville Swamp Preserve.
The above photos are from my hike yesterday on the South Prong Trail in the Red Creek Plains, adjacent to the Dolly Sods Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest. These areas, along with Roaring Plains and Flatrock Plains, comprise the highest plateau in the eastern United States. They are places of otherwordly beauty, where the ancient bedrock has been heaved up in huge, stacked slabs, as if arranged by some primordial being into primitive temples of sandstone and shale. Around these ancient temples are gathered the artifacts of the last ice age: forests of red spruce and sphagnum bogs with plants more at home in Maine and Nova Scotia than in the Mid-Atlantic region. It’s easy to forget that the many treasures of the plains are part of a regenerating landscape. The plateau was scraped clean to the bone by reckless logging practices and subsequent man-made fires at the turn of the last century. Nature’s resiliency and will to endure never fail to amaze me.
Appalachian Summer/Fall, 2018, Volume Eight: Zigzag Goldenrod. From mid-summer through the first frost of autumn, numerous species of goldenrod (Solidago) bloom in Appalachia’s meadows and open woods and along its roadsides and stream banks; by September and October, it is the dominant wildflower of the fall landscape, spreading in resplendent, golden waves over hill and hollow. Among the most unusual of the group is zigzag goldenrod (Solidago flexicaulis), whose composite flowerheads cluster along the stalk rather than forming a more typical terminal cluster at the end of the stalk. This perennial herb in the Asteraceae family gets its name from the change of angle of the stalk from one leaf node to the next, although the pattern is sometimes subtle and hard to notice. The flowerheads are composed of four yellow ray florets and as many or more disk florets. The lanceolate to ovate leaves are broader below the flower clusters, coarsely toothed, and arranged in an alternate pattern on the stalk.
Zigzag goldenrod is one of a few species of Solidago that prefers woodland habitats and adds a vibrant note of color to the forest’s green understory.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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