I have mentioned before that we have muscadine vines all over the mountain. They grow up in the tops of the pines, and they grow on the ground. They are also growing on a small oak tree just beside our driveway, where we put cat cages to acclimate our cats to their new home when we moved back in 2016.
They are small. Very small. Here is my hand to give some scale. My hands are appropriately sized for my height.
Muscadines provide food for birds and, I assume, squirrels, of which we have quite a few. I don’t know whether these will survive to maturity, and, if they do, how many might be available for us to eat. I doubt that all in the bunch will survive. I have never seen that many grapes in a bunch on any of the vines around here.
Muscadines are sweet, but the skins are thick and tough, and the seeds are large compared to the meat of the grape. All that makes it hard to eat a muscadine, especially wild muscadines. Apparently some varieties are grown commercially, but they are seldom at any of the grocery stores where we shop.
I’m not sure whether these will be the deep red, almost black grapes known as muscadines, or the green or bronze variety called scuppernongs. We’ll see around August or September, when they are supposed to be ripe.
Our lilies have come up and are in bloom. They seem bigger, healthier and more numerous this year. Here’s Leah, doing her Vanna White impression.
The tallest are over five feet.
We have a nice variety of colors.
Some of our other bulbs have bloomed and faded. The lilies and the other bulbs have multiplied. We’re going to have to thin them this fall and plant in some other places in the yard. Maybe where all the vinca that I planted last year showed that they were actually annuals in this climate.
The forest on Lavender Mountain is a mixed hardwood and pine. The hardwoods include lots of oak and maple, with a few poplars and others. I have been noticing this particular pair of trees for as long as I have been taking the dogs for their walks on Fouche Gap Road.
It’s a pine in the embrace of a maple.
It would be interesting to see this pair in 50 or 100 years, if they lived that long.
We have been losing dogwoods for several years. I remember seeing the side of a nearby hill on my way home from Huntsville in early spring a few years ago. It seemed like hundreds of dogwoods were blooming on the bare slopes. Around here, just a few miles away, I have been cutting and burning dead dogwoods for some time. I keep an eye on the remaining trees as I walk the dogs and note which seem be dead. This spring we have been pleasantly surprised to see quite a few dogwoods blooming.
When I look out the window where I’m sitting right now, I can see four, or possibly five trees in bloom. I may be misremembering, but it seems that in past years dogwoods bloomed before most of the surrounding trees began to leaf out. This year it seems to be happening simultaneously, which makes it harder to see the flowering trees.
I’m not positive of the cause of the dogwood deaths. We have had a couple of recent summers that were very hot and very dry. There is also a dogwood blight, dogwood anthracnose, that has wrought havoc on dogwoods from the northeast to the southeast, and on the west coast as well. Some forests in the northeast have had essentially all dogwoods infected, and infection of forest dogwoods almost always results in the death of the tree. There are some effects on the trees that are diagnostic. In reading about the blight I have found that some things I have noticed on trees that seem to be having problems are actually characteristic of infected trees. So it seems that the dogwood blight is infecting trees here on our mountain.
In the south, the trees that are most at risk are those at high elevations, those in moist conditions, and those that are in shaded forest areas. Our elevation is not as high as the sources I read worry about. Moisture has not been much of a problem here, either. Of course, most of the trees, except those that have been planted, are in the forest. Another condition that makes dogwoods more susceptible is drought and the resulting stress. I hope we don’t see that this summer.
Several sources indicated that climate change might be partially responsible for the increase in damage caused by dogwood anthracnose, and those sources were from more than 20 years ago.
We are also apparently in another kind of blight, one caused by pine beetles. I have written before about how many dead trees we have on our little five-acre tract. It’s getting worse here, and very noticeable along our dog walks.
Some of these trees that look alive are not. The three pines in the center of the image have lighter trucks because the bark has fallen off. What you can’t see in this image is the large number of trees that have fallen around these still-standing trees.
Pine beetle infestations apparently come in waves several years apart. There are several species of beetle that kill pines, and they can infect healthy trees, but trees that have been subjected to drought or other stresses are more susceptible. So, score another for our recent droughts.
I haven’t looked carefully at our dead pines to see whether there are signs of beetle infestations. However, I have noticed that it’s not just pines that are dying. I see a fair number of hardwoods that have died, as well. Probably not as many as the pines, but still, more than I would expect to result from simply aging. So I wonder whether we are seeing some effects on our forests from climate change.
And now from the large to the small. Here are some thyme-leaved bluets (Houstonia serpyllifolia).
I spied these beside the road on one of my dog walks.
These little tomatoes are growing at the base of our driveway.
I picked three, and ate one. It was the sweetest tomato I have ever had. Leah agreed. Sam did not.
This spindly tomato plant is a second-year volunteer. I noticed tomatoes growing at the same place late last summer. I noticed these a couple of days ago. The plant was hidden by tall weeds, so I didn’t realize it was there until the tomatoes ripened.
I am pretty sure these came from a neighbor just up the road. I think she probably pulled up some old tomato plants late one summer a few years ago and threw them across the road. The old fruit decayed and the seeds washed away, eventually finding a home at the base of our driveway. Then they germinated and grew last summer, dropping their fruit at their feet. That fruit rotted and released its seeds, which sprouted this year.
And then I picked some and ate them. We will probably eat a few more, but we’ll leave the rest to drop to the ground. Maybe we’ll have more next year.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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