By Steve Roark
Volunteer Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

With spring comes the urge to work in the yard and plant things. This often involves going to a garden center and buying plants alien to our area. Some of them can escape your yard through seed dispersal and grow where they are not wanted, negatively impacting local forest ecosystems. So if you get the itch to plant a tree, consider seeking out native plants to use in landscapes.

After a long bleak winter, it is wonderful to see wildflowers in the spring, foretelling of warmer weather and the return of color to the forest. The earliest wildflowers bloom, such as Hepatica, Trout-lily, Bloodroot, Spring-beauty, Toothwort, Mayapple, and Trillium, are called "ephemerals", meaning "lives for a day". They all bloom for a very short period when it's still cool weather. And because they are strictly insect pollinated this could be a problem, since insect activity is minimal in the early spring. Enter our hero: the Bumblebee.

A bonus for getting out into the woods in early spring is enjoying those wildflowers that bloom while everything else is still asleep and dead looking. There is a short period when the ground warms a little and the forest floor is still receiving full sun when these early flowers, called ephemerals, manage to grow, bloom, produce seeds, and then die back in a short timeframe. To pull this off they have a growth cycle backwards from most other plants.

If you paid attention in health class you know that our body needs to move materials around to function properly, such as oxygen. The transportation system is the bloodstream, which utilizes red blood cells as a bucket brigade, going to the lungs via veins to pick up oxygen, and carrying it to various body locations via arteries. A tree has similar needs and also uses a liquid transportation system.

While several hawk species migrate, the red-tailed hawk stays around all year and is the most common one seen. They prefer to hang out in open fields near woodland edges. Seeing a red tail gliding across the sky and hearing their high-pitched cry gives one a pleasing dose of wildness.

Arbor Day is approaching for our local states (TN March 6; KY April 3; VA April 24), and it’s a worthy recognition of the importance of trees in our lives. Here in the mountains, they are omnipresent, with every scenic vista tree laden. Every home is full of tree stuff, from bananas to the roof trusses, and every breath we take has some tree oxygen in it. What follows are some quotes and a little poetry spoken by wise people on the importance of trees.

By Steve Roark

Yard trees add a lot of personal enjoyment and equity to a home. They are a long-term investment and so maintenance to keep them healthy is well worth the time. What follows are a couple of tree care projects that I often see mishandled.

I’m sure you’ve been out hiking and noticed a live tree all hollowed out with a U-shaped hole at the base. This is a disease called Heartrot is pretty common in forest and yard trees, It is caused by a decay fungus that feeds on the wood in the center of the tree that is usually dark in color, called heartwood. That nice chocolate brown of black walnut furniture comes from the heartwood of that tree. The disease gets into the tree through a wound of some sort, and slowly over the years decays the heartwood out until it is hollow.

When we have a big snow, it typically creates the opportunistic combination of having time on your hands and a massive amount of the key ingredient for making snow cream, so why not? Besides being a nostalgic but tasty treat to make with the kids, snow cream is the venerable ancestor of our modern ice cream.

With the leaves off the hardwood trees, plants that remain green are more prominent and a handsome contrast to the “dead of winter”. Two that you are likely to see in the mountains on hikes are rhododendron and mountain laurel, which look similar and are often confused.