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.

By Steve Roark
Volunteer, Cumberland Gap National Park

Anyone who has walked in the woods has seen areas of rock or soil covered with a thick, green carpet. Moss often just blends into the forest background and goes unnoticed, but it is an old and venerable life form unique to most plants you find.

If you drive down the road right now and see patches of blue in the spring green hayfields and pastures, it’s liable to be lyre-leaf sage. I have it in my fields, as do my neighbors. It’s always been around, but I normally only see it along roadsides and field edges. It is in the same family of plants as the herbal sage used as a condiment.

In simpler times people gathered their own fish bait, and a trip to the fishing hole started in the garden digging worms or walking grassy fields to catch grasshoppers.
These days most folks are too busy and just go to the bait shop. But particularly if you have kids, hunting for bait can be a fun and learning experience, putting them more in touch with the natural world.
Gathering your own also allows you access to bait not commercially available. Here is a short list of some bait you can find locally.

Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea) is a small plant that’s possibly in your yard but keeps a low profile so you may not know it. But if you’re ever mowing and suddenly pick up on a minty smell, then you for sure have it. The plant is worth a close look, for its petite bloom and leaves are striking. It has been given many names over the years, including Creeping Charlie, Crow-Victuals, and Gill-Over-The-Ground.

As a botany enthusiast and student of medicinal plants, I keep running across plants with recurring name components. The terms balm, bane, and wort come up often, so I decided to see why. Prepare to delve into the world of ethnobotany, the study of plants used by humans.

As you know, Easter Sunday is not locked down on the calendar. I knew it had something to do with astronomy, so I did some research to figure out the how and the why. My findings were complicated, but here is my best shot at it.
Easter is defined as a “moveable feast,” meaning it is not a fixed to a set calendar date.

Mulching around trees and flower beds offers several benefits, such as soil moisture retention, reduced weeding, and keeping yard equipment a safe distance away from plants. Shredded bark is a popular mulch to use, which requires periodic touch up as it gradually decomposes. However, I have seen landscapes where a lot of mulch was routinely added every year whether it was needed or not, creating an overly thick layer of mulch that can injure or even kill the plants you are trying to benefit.

By Steve Roark
Volunteer, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

One sure sign of Spring and warmer weather is to take a walk in the woods and see the first wildflowers popping up. One of the earlier blooming flowers in our area is Bloodroot.