By Steve Roark
Volunteer Interpreter, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.
Confession time: I am not good at math. I use it, it’s great, we went to the moon with it, yada yada.
I don’t think well mathematically and must strive to understand it. But I was amazed to discover that trees use mathematics to arrange their leaves on a twig to optimize their collection of sunlight for the photosynthesis thing.
Leonardo da Vinci picked up on this long ago. The “impress your friends” word of the day is phyllotaxis: the arrangement of leaves on a stem in relation to each other.

When I ask kids why trees are important their number one answer is that they produce oxygen. Plant leaves are solar collectors that take sun energy to produce food through the miracle of photosynthesis, a complex chemical process where carbon dioxide and water are converted to a glucose sugar. This sugar is used for food energy or converted to a starch called cellulose for building the plant’s body (stem, limbs, etc.). In trees we call this wood, something we use a lot of.

When you watch the weather forecast you invariably see a listing of current conditions: temperature, wind speed, relatively humidity, and dew point. Like you or I use those readings to predict how the weather is going to impact my comfort if out in it. But why is dew point important enough to be listed, and how does it impact your day?

During August and September, it will be easy to spot Joe-Pye Weed along roadsides and woodland edges. I wondered how it got its name, so I looked it up and the answer follows.

Summer is my least favorite season with the bugs and all the heat and humidity. With winter when it’s cold you throw on another layer of clothes and your good, but with summer you can run around buck naked and still be miserably hot just standing around. And then there is all the sweating, a particular negative in public, with the B.O. and wet spots under your arms and the small of your back. Summer season is sweaty season, and something I do not like. However, some personal research has revealed that I need an attitude adjustment, for it turns out sweating does the body good.

By: Steve Roark
Volunteer Interpreter, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
Being outside is normally a lot of fun, but sometimes you pay a price when you run into a nest of chiggers. For their size, these little guys are a real pain in the belt line.
Chiggers are actually baby mites. They are almost too small to be seen with the naked eye, and are red with eight legs. The adults, which can be seen, feed only on plants and are not a problem for us, except for their laying eggs that make more baby chiggers.

I’d heard of Dog Days all my life, but only knew that it referred to the sweltering heat of late summer when dogs laid around more and were more prone to go mad (with rabies). I had a request from a reader to write on the subject in more depth, so if you’re curious as well, read on.

The blackberry (Rubus allegheniensis) is a plant known for its delicious fruit this time of year and nasty thorns any time of year that make walking through a colony of them difficult and painful. It is normally found on disturbed areas such as timber harvests and neglected farmland.

The canes grow up to 6 feet tall, are green to red in color depending on age, and have leaves that form in clusters of 3 to 5. The flowers are white with five petals, and bloom late spring, identifying one of the many cold snaps (blackberry winter) common during that time of year.

I really like learning about our local mountain culture and am blessed to have grown up in a family that has held onto that culture for generations. One example of an old cultural belief that has been around ever since it was brought over from Europe is charming warts off.

As an amateur naturalist I have a curiosity to know how things work. In college I once saw the chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis laid out on a large poster. This all-important method plants use to make food for themselves (and ultimately us) was incredibly complex and took up half the wall.