OUTSIDE

Mountain Mint

Mountain Mint is easy to identify by its square stem, minty smell, and white dusty looking top leaves.

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.

A Solar Powered World

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.

A Mountain of Changes

Our mountains create a diversity of trees and plants second only to Tropical regions.

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.

Mountain Coffee

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.

Snake Lore Dispelled

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.

Seek the Stillness

Immersing yourself in a forest setting has proven health benefits.

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.

Let There Be Light

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.

Privet: A Pretty Bush You Don’t Want to See or Smell

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.

Lazy But Easy Composting

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.

Moss, Worth a Closer Look

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.

Lyre-leaf sage: the blue in the grass

Lyre-leaf sage is perfectly comfortable growing in grass fields and lawns. It's traditionally used as a medicinal plant.

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.

Gathering natural fish bait is part of the game

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, the Sneak in Your Yard

Ground Ivy can lie hidden in your yard, but you may catch its minty aroma while mowing.

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.

Balms, Banes, and Worts: Plant Name Curiosities

Liverwort has a leaf lobe shaped like a liver and was used to treat liver ailments.

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.

Why Easter Sunday moves around

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 Do’s and Don’ts

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.

What Are We Missing?

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.

American Beech

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.

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