I am glad to be alive. Really. To be able to walk outdoors into the heat of summer or the cold of winter and feel the air as if it, too, is a living thing. The cold pinch of frost and sharp tang when I breathe the icy air through my nose; the languid, limp, damp feel of a summer afternoon just before a thunderstorm when the air is almost thick enough to drink. To see the golden hues of fall, when whole coves resonate with color until the air itself takes on the tones of a glass of chardonnay. And spring, when the mornings are cool enough for a jacket, the grass shines with dewdrops that sometimes are frosty white, but by afternoon the heat of summer feels just around the corner. These are some of the joys of being in the southern Appalachians, and they change with the seasons.
One of the reasons I wrote “Mountain Nature” was to encourage more people to get outdoors and enjoy the rich biological treasures of the Southern Appalachians. Millions of people live within a half-day’s drive of one of Earth’s greatest biological hotspots, and millions of us even visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but how many of us stop to really see? It helps to know what to look for.
The leaves really are beautiful during this fall season, but have you noticed the mushrooms? I’ve seen cinnabar red chanterelles, purple club corals, orange earth tongues, black trumpets, white oyster mushrooms, and even green-headed jelly clubs. This palate of colors decorates the fall forest floor among the still-colorful leaves from the trees overhead. But to see them, you must be looking.
While there are fewer showy flowers, there are blooms in the fall season that not only delight the eye but encourage a closer view. Stop to look closely at the purple gentians that grace the roadsides of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Each small flower is tubular, like a balloon barely inflated. The even smaller white flowers of Nodding Ladies’ Tresses are also worth the effort of bending down to see. A dozen or more of the face-like flowers spiral up the stalk, each one nodding slightly as if in prayer.
Big, shaggy purple asters and slimmer but numerous goldenrods provide broad swaths of color in fields and other openings to complement the backdrop of tree leaves. But if you stop to look closely at the flowers, you’ll see astounding numbers of insects and other arthropods. These beasts are just so strange to consider; I think their very strangeness is what makes so many people uncomfortable around them. Have a look at the triangular head of a preying mantis and watch it turn to watch you – it is an eerie sensation when you realize its eyesight is probably as good as yours! Crab spiders perfectly camouflaged in green, white, or yellow await on green stems, white petals, or yellow flowers with arms outstretched to welcome a visiting bee or fly. And what a choice of tiny native bees, larger honeybees, bumble bees, and uncountable numbers of wasps!
Jennifer Frick-Ruppert is the author of “Mountain Nature: A Seasonal Natural History of the Southern Appalachians” and a professor of biology and environmental science at Brevard College in western North Carolina.
Watch a goldenrod blossom for 10 minutes and you’ll begin to appreciate biodiversity. In fact, stop nearly anywhere in the southern Appalachians for 10 minutes and just look around, in any season. Look at the small things, nearby, to get a glimpse of the incredible Earth we inhabit. We are right here in the middle of it. Of life.
