Year Three - 2015

This begins year three of this blog, which chronicles my quest to find and photograph as many Wildflowers in West Virginia as possible. In 2013, I found and photographed 308 different wildflowers. In 2014, I added another 25. I hope to add more this year as well as revisit old favorites. I will be playing around with macro photography along with a ring flash.

      Today I hiked into the hills around my home. Last October, we were hit by a rare West Virginia tornado which flattened many acres of of forest. The owners of the farm accross the road from me have allowed loggers to begin recovering the fallen trees as well as a large portion of the woods there. I have been able to roam over that property for 40 years and I enjoy it very much. I have hiked, hunted, fished and gathered Morels and Ramps there. One of my favorite hikes is to walk up the hill across the road and around the ridge and come back down on the back of our property. A hour or so hike and a mile or more through mature forest and fields. Today, I saw the results of the logging. I have no problems with land owners allowing logging on their property, but I have to wonder if there is some better way to accomplish it. 

This is the remains of a natural spring that used to feed a wet gully where I could find purple trillium and   even Ginseng. It was so steep that it escaped logging in the past, probally 80 years ago. Now, I can't see how it will recover. I know the natural progression is briars and thorny brush, then bushes and trees and maybe in 20-30 years or so, a decent forest again. I have even thought about trying to find the trillium before it quits growing in the now sunny area. But, I suppose it somehow made it those many years ago to re-establish, so it will again.

                                     A walnut tree that I remember well. 

                                    Many Morel mushrooms were gathered here

I recently saw a bumper sticker that said 'If you object to logging, try plastic toilet paper.'

I really get that, but the bull dozed roads, clogged streams and springs, wasted wood and spilled fuel seem very wrong. So much so that we decided to not take an offer from loggers to do the same on our farm. We will harvest what we can for firewood and let the rest lie and decay naturally. 

        Now days, I have on my mind some Trillium that I found near Camp Creek State Park. They were in a remote and hard to get to area, where I had found some Appalachian Twayblade Orchids. I can hardly wait to get back there this Spring to see them.

"Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest."

— James Lovelock

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools."

— John Muir

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

— Henry David Thoreau