Wildflowers at Choctaw Lake

Every two months or so my family joins a few friends with kids to walk around Choctaw Lake in the Tombigbee National Forest (near Ackerman, in Choctaw County, about twenty minutes west of Starkville). The above photo was taken last October. Even though I probably pushed the saturation up a little too much (it was a very sunny day and the photos were pretty washed out color-wise), you can see that the pine forest behind the bench was recently burned. Judgin by the open character of the woods understory, it appears to me that most of the area around Choctaw Lake is burned on a regular basis.

This is another shot from last fall. Black-eyed Susans growing lakeside under an oak.

This panorama shows a moisture gradient expressed in plant strata. Grasses and sedges at the water margin, tag alders above that, maples and other hardwoods (gums?) above that, with pines on the drier areas upslope. The late Ed Blake taught me to see this.

This is the boardwalk through the tag alder grove that you see in the panorama above. A small girl from our group poses at the vanishing point. All of the above photos were taken in October of 2011.


These next photos were taken this past April. The Tombigbee is in the North Central Hills physiographic region. Starkville is more of a flatwoods kind of system, with patches of Blackland Prairie chalk outcrops. A greater variety of spring ephemerals can be found in the hills than in the flatwoods. At least that's what David Evans in the Forestry Department told me. I think the fire regime helps. Anyway, most of what follows has not been seen by me in Oktibbeha County (yet).

This Indian Pink, Spigelia marilandica, I might never have identified if it weren't for the book Wildflower Watch by Margaret Gratz. The only reason I have this book is because I happened to be in the Barnes and Noble Bookstore on campus one day when Mrs. Gratz was signing copies. I got into a conversation with her about local wildflowers. Looking through the book, I noticed that most of the flowers were pretty common and were probably covered in my other books. Also, I thought her descriptions of the flowers was a little corny. But she was sitting right there, and she was such a nice, charming person, and I did indeed feel that I should have a book with a local perspective, so I bought it. Back in my home state of North Carolina, many botany freaks and nature lovers like myself consider Wildflowers of North Carolina, by William Justice, C. Ritchie Bell and Anne H. Lindsey, to be one of the greatest books ever written. But this Indian Pink is not in Wildflowers of North Carolina. Nor is it in the two wildflower books I always bring with me into the field, and which have never let me down (until now): the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern/Northcentral America and Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. So Thank You Margaret Gratz!

Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, is in just about every wildflower book and I was very happy to see it out at Choctaw Lake.

Finding these trilliums was also a treat. Justice, Bell, and Lindsey list nine species of trillium in their North Carolina book. Gratz only mentions the species cuneatum, which I am pretty sure is what we have here.

Gratz writes that this Coreopsis tinctoria, or Garden Coreopsis, is an escaped introduction from the western United States. Dozens of other coreopsis species are mentioned in my reference books, but, outside of Gratz, the only book to include tinctoria is Peterson's. Peterson confirms that this is an escape from the Manitoba/Minnesota west area.

Each of my four wildflower books is organized differently, and the organization reflects each writer's understanding of how to observe and understand wildflowers. Peterson's, probably the most popular, goes for what the general user is most likely to notice first: color. The problem with color is that there are many gradations of hue, especially from red to pink, or red to purple. I have found Newcomb's to be the most useful in the field when it comes to identifying wildflowers. It is based on keys that organize flowers based on the number of petals, then break them out in terms of opposite or alternate leaves, basal leaves or not, and other features. Gratz organizes her flowers temporally -by season- so if you are looking for a particular flower you first navigate to the approximate season then start flipping pages. Flipping pages is something you get used to with Justice, Bell and Lindsey as well, since it is arranged by the rather specialized rubric of taxonomy, or plant families. I have had the Justice, Bell and Lindsey book close at hand for a very long time, and in my early, youthful attempts to learn about wildflowers their organization would frustrate me. Over time, I got to enjoy the necessity of flipping pages, meeting new characters in the understory drama, and developing a vague appreciation for how taxonomy works.

Selma Chalk Layer Exposed Downtown

Last August I blogged about a good development in downtown Starkville. Rick Underwood has made a lot of progress on his furniture boutique since then and I plan update that post in the near future. In terms of addressing the street and creating density, Rick is doing everything right. His rehabilitation of the old structure emphasizes how out-of-place the Bordon plant across the street looks. The Bordon plant is landscaped like a suburban office park. With no pedestrian connection to Bell's Building Supply next door, it seems to not know where it is. It doesn't realize that it is downtown. But that is a subject for another post.

An updated version of the furniture store, as of February.

This post is about the construction site diagonally across from Ricks furniture boutique. The electrical supply shop, auto body shop, and parking lot have been removed and the grading nearly completed for the installation of a large building on that lot. Here is an aerial image from 2007 with the lot delineated in orange. This image does not show the work done on the Borden Plant, which is the long building along the railroad tracks to the left of the orange rectangle.

The process of grading has revealed a very clear profile of the Selma chalk that underlies the red clay of Starkville. Starkville is on the western edge of the Black Belt Prairie physiographic region, which is crescent-shaped and extends across northeast Mississippi and south-central Alabama. At the time of European settlement, much of this area was open prairie with scattered woodlands and forested creek bottoms. A good, quick description of the Black Belt Prairie Region can be found here.

The Selma chalk is a Cretaceous marine formation and the prairie patches tend to occur where it is close to the surface. Generally this is on slopes. In the Black Belt, many ridges support groves of post oak or blackjack oak. Bottoms are more silty. But the assemblage of grasses and forbes extends into both ridges and bottoms, with subtle changes in palette. More on this later when I report on the Southeastern Prairie Symposium I attended last week.

Work at the southeast corner of Lampkin and South Montgomery Streets has revealed an area where the Selma chalk is very near the surface. Late in the day, when the sun is low in the west, this exposed face is particularly interesting to look at. I created several panoramic images using shots from my Nikon coolpix point-and-click camera. I wanted to preserve an image of this structure before it becomes hidden forever.

 Above is a view looking south from the northeast corner of the site. This is a gentle, north-facing slope with the chalk a foot or two below the surface. In a natural setting, this slope might have supported a blackland prairie with an oak-dominated woodland or forest on the red clay at the top. Prairies have been said to occur on cuestas. My understanding is that a cuesta is where the dip of the strata intersects with the angle of the slope. I find it plausible that we are looking at a cuesta here.

Above is one of my favorite graphic depictions of how cuestas are situated in the Gulf Coastal Plain. Note that the Selma formation is associated with the Black Belt. In reality the angle of the dip is not nearly as severe. From Nevin Fenneman's Physiography of Eastern United States 1938.

Five photos I stitched together. The brown clay building foundation is flat in reality but distorted in this image.

 Marl layer up close. I use the terms "marl" and "chalk" interchangeably. That is probably incorrect. 100 million years ago this was ocean floor.

Another five photos stitched together. At the southern end of the site the marl dips below the building foundation level. The acid cap effect takes over. Not sure what the black strata is, perhaps a layer of topsoil that was buried when the auto-body shop was constructed.

While trying to find some information about chalk outcrops in this area I came across a blog about student geologists from the College of Wooster exploring Mississippi that I found interesting.

I honestly know very little about geology and soils. There is always more to learn. It was interesting having this going on just a block from my house while preparing for the Southeastern Prairie Symposium, which I will write about soon.

Back Yard Pond Project

This is a weekend project that got a little out of hand, as all of them do. A few years ago I built an ephemeral pond in the back yard to catch the outflow from a French drain I installed on the south side of the house. I always had the idea of putting a liner in it and creating a real pond. The project became a little more urgent two weeks ago when my wife went to dump a below-grade bird bath in the backyard and found that it was full of tadpoles. She did not want to dump the tadpoles, but the bird bath was also full of mosquito larvae. So we purchased a liner, dug the pond and filled it with water. With some help from the kids, the tadpoles were scooped out of the bird bath and transferred into the pond, along with some mosquito-eating fish from the pet store. So now everyone is happy. Later that day a female painted bunting visited our pond. The formerly-below-grade birdbath is now sitting on a stand.