At home in the mountains
By: Elaine K. Delcuze Plant Rescue Team
"Sassafras is abundant. It blossoms like a burst of sunshine"

Sassafrases are the one North American tree in this group (often a shrub in the North) that has aromatic twigs and leaves. The root bark makes a spicy tea, once imbibed as a tonic. Bees favor the nectar of the blossoms, and birds the glossy fruits. Look for oval leaves, 3- lobed or mitten shaped; twigs are bright green and fruits are blue, berrylike.

Every spring as the buds start to color on the maples, the red-wing black birds begin to light on fence posts, and the mountain landscape greens, I seem to reach for the book The Carolina Mountains by Margaret W. Morley, published in 1913 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. I call this my spring tonic because I have read it, all or in part, every year since I was a child in the late 1940s. I distinctly remember selecting this book from the shelf and placing it in my pack as I rambled the north spring woods with my grandfather back then. When we would stop to rest I would take out the book and read. Occasionally I would read portions to him or he would read to me. It was from these pages that I got my first insight into the interconnectedness of all life.

Margaret Morely was a classroom teacher at the Oswego Normal School, later at the Wisconsin State Normal School, now a part of the University of Wisconsin, then to Chicago and on to Boston to lecture on nature studies. Though her primary career was as a c l a s s r o o m teacher, she wrote eighteen books on nature topics for children promoting an understanding of the conservation of nature and a compassion for wildlife. She brought these ideas southward with her as she vacationed and then settled in the North Carolina mountains for more than twenty years until her passing in the 1920's.

While living in Tryon , N.C., or "Traumfest," as she called it (translated as Holiday of Dreams) during the 1890s and early 1900s, she recorded her observations of plant life, people and places; and she traveled throughout northeastern South Carolina and Northwestern North Carolina photographing much of what she saw. The tremendous variety of flora native to the Southern Appalachian Mountains astounded her and the detailed accounts of her observations serve as a reliable guidebook to these mountains today, nearly a century later.

From page 46 . . .

"Sassafras is abundant. It blossoms like a burst of sunshine along the edges of the yet leafless woods, each of its bare branches terminating in a pretty amber ball of delicately fragrant and fringe-like flowers. There is nothing prettier than sassafras with the sun behind its blossoming twigs. "With the sassafras one often finds its near relative the spice-bush, whose botanical name is Benzoin, because of its fragrance, and whose pungent, camphor-flavored bark is also pleasant to the taste. There are seven known species of the spice-bush, two in the eastern United States, the others in Asia. Another shrub that belongs to us and eastern Asia and that tempts one to nibble is what the people here call "sweet bubbies."

It appears in old-fashioned Northern gardens under the name of sweet-scented or flowering strawberry shrub, but every child who has warmed the stiff maroon-colored flowers in his hand.and what child has not?.will tell instantly that "sweet bubbies" is the preferable and proper name."

You cannot separate the mountains of northeast Georgia from those of North Carolina for they share a long and complex geological past and are among the oldest mountains in the world. The Appalachian's history of continent collisions, period of mountain building and erosion, and valley formation, faulting and folding were events that resulted in the mountain topography which extends from south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to just north of Atlanta, Georgia, as we know it today. The diversity of animal and plant life that exists along this Appalachian chain is unique and awesome and Morley who witnessed the early development in the mountains that newcomers wrought-- the development of Asheville, the Biltmore Estate, the highways and tourist attractions-- questioned the effects of future progress on them. From page 159.

"It is the highest type of progress that one wishes to see at work in the mountains, the spirit that transforms by enhancing instead of diminishing beauty.

". . And this spirit may animate not only the man of millions who comes to build a stately pleasure-house in these enchanting mountains, or place a group of palatial hotels on some choice eminence, but it may equally animate every one who owns a piece of land, be it ever so small."

To help you experience The Carolina Mountains first hand, a 2006 re-publication copy by Historical Images, an imprint of Bright Mountain Books, Inc. is available at Mountain Regional Library in Young Harris. This new edition includes the photographs taken by Morely.

If you are planning any land disturbing activity, you are urged to contact a Plant Rescue Team member for adv ice in preserving the rare plant material that may exist on your property. Should you find that the plants stand in the way of your construction activities, please call a member of the Plant Rescue Project, a project to identify, protect, and preserve our native plants, Jennifer Cordier, Chairperson, at 706-745-9317. This project is sponsored by the Preservation Committee of the Community Council of the Georgia Mountain Research and Education Center, Blairsville, Georgia.