Harrell Prairie

Last Saturday, June 16th, I visited Harrell Prairie with some people from the Mississippi Native Plant Society. Heather Sullivan, staff botanist at The Mississippi Museum of Natural Science led the group. We saw a lot of purple coneflower and yellow prairie coneflower (Ratibida). We spent a lot of time looking for a blooming eryngium yuccifolium, rattlesnake master. We found lots of individual plants, but none in bloom. Other plants seen include butterfly milkweed, mountain mint, and asters.

 Ceanothus americanus New Jersey Tea

 A native Lythrum, or loosestrife. This is not the invasive purple loosestrife.

 Helianthus, scrubby oaks, burned oak.

 This huckleberry is common at Harrell Prairie. The others said is was good to eat and lamented that it is not yet ripe.

 This aster was spotted several times.

 One of the few blooming Rattlesnake Master plants. All in all we were on the prairie for a little over two hours with a group of about thirty people, all ages. Temperatures rose into the low nineties and most of the group decided to call it a day. But a few hard-core prairie enthusiasts, including my friend from the MSU Landscape Architecture graduate program Rob Anders, southern gardener and "certifiable plant fool" Gail Barton, and an avid gardener from Vicksburg named Jennifer, decided to tour some of the recently restored prairie remnants in the Bienville National Forest. Here is a large one on Morton-Marathon Road:

At this prairie we were serenaded by some large and noisy hawks overhead. We were impressed with how intact and diverse this patch is. In the very midst of it, Gail flushed a turkey. She had been sitting on nine eggs in the shade of a small persimmon tree. We spent a good long hour here, then walked around another large patch on Walk Hill Road. We told stories related to our experiences in the green industry, landscaping, gardening and botanizing. It was a great day.

New Ocean Front Construction

Constructed last Sunday with various family members on Oak Island, NC.

New Hanover County to Hire "Sandman"

A permanent, county-level position to oversee an endless series of temporary fixes. Read it here.

I am enjoying a relaxing week on the North Carolina coast. This was on the front page of the local paper my brother-in-law just brought over from the Beach Pantry.

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.

Controlled Burn South of Campus

This semester I have been auditing a class in prescribed fire taught in the Forestry Department. It is an undergraduate class with no graduate section. I learned a lot, and I encourage landscape architecture students, and any student interested in landscape ecology, fire ecology, or fire effects, to take the class. This class gives the student an opportunity to examine how climate, weather, physiography, and forest types interact, not just in general (as in an ecology class), but in terms of a specific disturbance pattern: fire. I found that I was able to focus much more intently on weather processes when viewing them with a specific application in mind rather than for the sake of the processes themselves. In order to effectively burn a unit of land, that is, to burn it in order to achieve specific management goals, a certain set of conditions must be met. Fuels can't be too wet, but they can't be too dry either. Air has to be stable - high winds can spread the fire out of control - but not TOO stable: stratified air won't allow the smoke to rise.

The second half of the course involves developing a burn plan for a specific parcel. The burn must have a goal. The effects, especially smoke effects (since smoke is mobile) on neighboring areas must be considered. Everything needs to be mapped: the site itself, and the site in the context of the landscape matrix. In this way, the class is much like a landscape architecture studio course but with a twist: a lot more attention is paid to weather and the design intervention amounts to a human-produced imitation of a natural disturbance.

Part of the class involves participation in a prescribed burn. All semester the conditions were not good, but finally, on the last week of class, the MSU forest supervisor was able to plan and get a permit to burn a 40 acre unit in the John W. Starr Memorial Forest. Students were notified the day before by email and were told to arrive at the classroom at noon with hardhats, boots, and safety glasses.

We arrived at the unit about half past twelve. The temperature was about 71 degrees Fahrenheit with relative humidity about 34%. Wind was from the west at about 4 miles per hour. The purpose of the unit is production of saw timber. The purpose of the burn was to reduce hazard fuels. The hazard fuels were understory trees and vines. From my observation walking through this consisted mainly of maple, sweetgum, hickory, and a lot of smilax (greenbriar) and vitis (muscadine or scuppernong grape, I can't tell them apart).

So here are the photos. As always, if you want more detail, click on them and they get bigger.

This road is the east boundary of the unit. The view is southwest. The unit is a square quarter of a quarter section. The backing fire was set first along this east boundary, about an hour before we arrived. A backing fire moves slowly into the wind.

 This is the fire lane that was plowed along the north boundary.

 

Our professor showing us the disc that was used to plow the fire lanes. Since the unit is bounded on three sides by roads, only the north side needed a plowed lane. The crew had added an extra lane running east-west in the center of the unit.

 We walked along the north boundary and observed the backing fire. There wasn't much to see. Flame height was about a foot and it was advancing slowly. The above is a three-photo panorama hastily snapped and stitched of the students and some of the fire crew on the north side watching the backing fire. Smoke is blowing away from us to the east.

The burn crew gave us a drip torch and we all entered the forest about fifty feet beyond the front of the backing fire to set a strip head fire. The professor carried a compass to ensure that we stayed on a due-south line. The flaming front of the strip head fire moves with the wind to meet the back fire. Even though the wind was very light (imperceptible to me in the forest interior), the strip head fire behaved quite differently than the backing fire. Flames were much higher and it moved faster. Going was rough in the interior: lots of smilax, vitis, and small hardwoods.

The strip head fire consumed a lot of the smilax and  vitis and the needles draped among the vines. Where these fuels were thick, the fire actually roared and hissed.

We paused in the fire lane at the halfway point to watch the strip head fire approach the backing fire. This is another hastily snapped and stitched three photos of the strip head fire we just set.We then continued south setting fire to the woods. The underbrush here was even thicker than before.

A student with the drip torch.

Here is one of the more dramatic shots of the strip head fire. After we emerged on the south boundary, we lit up the rest of that, then moved north along the west boundary, setting it alight as the final head fire of the day.

It looked to my inexperienced eyes like a fairly successful understory burn. We observed that not all of the duff was consumed, just the top layer. The soil was undamaged. But most of the smaller maples, sweetgum and understory trees were top-killed by heat girdling. Many of these will resprout from the roots, but their above-ground mass is gone for now. Better browsing for deer.

Again, I encourage landscape architecture students to take a prescribed burn class because it brings out the details of the natural environment in dynamic interaction. Also, "certified burn boss" looks good on a resume. At least it does to me.