By Steve Roark
Volunteer, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
It’s nice to think that plants produce fruit for our pleasure and that of other creatures. They do want us to eat them, but they have an ulterior motive of coaxing us into dispersing their seeds to other places.

Back in my mom’s day folks only had access to a few flavored drinks, like milk, coffee, and water. To make things more interesting, they would seek and use native plants that provided a nice change of taste. The more common ones used were sassafras tea, teaberry, spicebush, and my topic today, Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum spp.). It’s easy to find along roadsides and woodland edges and makes a pretty tasty mint tea that also has medicinal value.

Solar power normally conjures up visuals of black panels that capture the sun’s energy to power a home or outdoor device. The truth is that almost every energy source we use began with solar power.

Humans and the animal kingdom in general eat food for energy. You may choose to get that energy by eating say a T-bone steak with a side salad. The steak came from a mammal that got its energy from grass, which got its energy from the sun through the miracle of photosynthesis. Same goes for the salad.

The mountains of our area contain one of the most diverse forests in the world. Over 170 woody species and close to 2000 herbaceous plants grow here, second only to tropical rain forests in variety. If you’re observant, you can find sites here that are the same as forests hundreds of miles away.

By Steve Roark
Volunteer, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
Chicory was a popular wild plant back in early settlement days when it was used to make a coffee-like beverage. Its blue flowers are easy to spot right now growing along roadsides.
Close up, these dandelion-like flowers have fringed, flat tipped petals, which can sometimes be white or pink. The flower will usually close in the late afternoon or on overcast days. The leaves at the base of the plant also remind you of dandelion, being in the same family, and will bleed a milky sap when broken off.

Snakes have fascinated and frightened people for centuries, which has led to some interesting stories about some of them. I did some research on some sayings about snakes I heard as a kid to see how they held up under the science of animal behavior. Here’s a rundown of what I found.

I may be writing this for myself because I am a bona fide Type A person. I’m always engaged in some activity, making lists to check off, with my mind constantly engaged in problem solving or accomplishing some goal. And worthy things do get done for church and family, it can come with the cost of exhaustion, burn out, and self-imposed stress. One way to improve things is to take time to get away to a quiet place and be still for a little while.

Light is something we don’t think about much, but almost everything that’s alive on the planet needs light for sight and energy. Human eats cow, cow eats grass, grass grows on light… you get the picture. Scientists have studied light for centuries, but still don’t fully understand it.

Right now if you’re outside much you are liable to catch a whiff of an almost overpowering flower smell, and if you investigate, you will likely find a bush loaded with small white flowers. This is Privet, a foreign shrub brought in as a landscape plant as early as the late 1700s. It has unfortunately gone Frankenstein and naturalized into the wild, where it is now very common to see along roadsides, woodland edges, and fencerows. It is bad news and a serious threat to our mountain farms and forests.

With living green becoming a worthy cause these days, you’ve probably heard the benefits of composting yard and kitchen waste. It’s good fertilizer, adds organic matter, improves soil moisture, and the environmental upshot is you’re sending less stuff to landfills and septic systems. Despite the positives, few people compost for various perceived negatives: no room, maintenance hassles, too complicated, bad smell, etc. As a composter, I would be considered a passive one, bordering on lazy.