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.

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.

On a cold January morning in 2007 the Washington Post conducted an experiment. They invited Joshua Bell, one of the most famous classical violinists of our time, to play music at the Washington DC Metro Train Station. No introductions, no fanfare, simply stand on a busy walkway and play. He did six famous pieces written by J.S. Bach on a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

The American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) is very common in our area and is to me one of the nobler trees in the forest. It has never been in high demand for timber, and so many beech trees have been left to grow large and majestic. The bark is silvery gray, smooth, and easy to identify even from a distance.

A pastor friend of mine was developing a sermon about being rooted in spiritual maturity and wanted to know about tree roots and their importance to the tree in order to make some analogies to emphasize his message. It was such a good idea that I thought I would do the same thing here.

Humans seem to have wanderlust hardwired into their psyche. Our ancestors from countless generations have always moved on to new places. Even in modern times we still yearn for new territory. An average American will live in five homes in a lifetime, and in between we take vacations to see new places. We have the advantage of road maps and high-tech toys like GPS that can tell us exactly where we are and show us how to get to anyw here we wish, but in earlier times direction had to be determined through observing nature.

With the bitter sub-zero weather we had a few weeks ago, I’ve kept my eye open for a type of tree damage called frost crack, a long vertical split in the tree trunk. I didn’t find a fresh one but did find one or two cracks that had healed over.

by Steve Roark
Groundhog Day is really another celebration of the birth of Christ, but few realize it because it has undergone a lot of change over the centuries.
February 2 used to be called Candlemas Day. a feast day commemorating when the Virgin Mary, in obedience to Jewish law, went to the Temple in Jerusalem both to be purified 40 days after the birth of her son, and to present her child to God as her firstborn. This is documented in Luke 2:22-38. It has been a celebration since the 4th century and was observed with lighted candles, hence the name “Candlemas.”

Before World War 2 there was a lot more cleared farmland than there is now. Before chemical fertilizer and lime was readily available, per acre yields for farm crops were much lower and so more land was needed to farm. This was not a problem, as most farms had large families with a built-in labor force. But over the years the land eroded, kids left the farm, and the farmer got older. So gradually the steeper, rougher fields or field edges were let go, and the forest reclaimed them. There are indicators you can look for to tell if a forest was once a field.

When the forest is laid bare each winter there is a tendency to think of it as a bleak and dreary place. But the basic structural skeleton of each tree can be seen at this time, with every branch, twig, and bud visible, thus revealing how it has grown in the past, and how it has prepared for the future. So put on a coat, go outside and go take a look.