Chattahoochee River

. We took a walk by Powers Island at Chattahoochee River National Rec. Area. We followed the trail on the east side of the river that gets almost no use. It's just quiet eastern woodlands, with rich bottomland forests along the river.

The diversity is pretty incredible. I could spend years there and not identify everything.

The first thing we stopped by was a sprawling evergreen heath called 'dog-hobble' (leucothoe editorum):

Brooke's sketching the leaves. Here's a close-up:

Very common in damp places in the South, especially the Southern Appalachians. I found it often along trails and streamsides in western North Carolina.

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The leaves are reported as being highly toxic . . . which is interesting, considering its close deciduous relative sourwood's leaves are excellent food through spring and summer. Evergreen leaves in general are almost always inedible (it's how they last year after year on the plant).

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I came across a patch of Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) while wandering up a small wooded valley. Here's a close shot of the stocking-shaped leaflets:

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The young fiddleheads of this plant are unfortunately not considered edible.

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I spotted a young southern magnolia (magnolia grandiflora) up the hillside, with its large glossy evergreen leaves:

I tried to get a good shot of the rusty hairs on the end bud, but it's kind of a blur:

Here's a moderate-sized beech, still surrounded by its coppery-orange leaves:

Here's an American holly:

A close-up of the spiny evergreen leaves:

The Ebbing's silverberry (eleagnus ebbingei) is absolutely everywhere. Not only is it all around our apartment complex, in bushes, as hedges, escaped and sprawling at the edge of the road - we found it over and over again in the bottomland forest beside the river. There were a few young slim shoots without berries, but most was full of the immature gooseberry-like fruit.

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Here's one dense patch sprawling over the trunk of a sourwood:

The twigs, stems and foliage are speckled, and I want to believe this is some other type of silverberry. How can the exact same plant species be everywhere you turn, in all possible habitats?

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But every silverberry we find is at the same stage of fruiting (brown immature berry), so they must all be the same. Autumn olive doesn't even begin to get a berry till late summer, and it isn't ripe until late fall. And it grows in full sun.

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The same species of plants tend to do the same things at the same time of year throughout an area. It's an important part of identification. If all the red maples are flowering, and you see a tree nearby that looks like a red maple, but it isn't flowering, it probably isn't the same tree. This is usually the case. And what links all the different habitats together as far as the Ebbing's silverberry, is that each one is disturbed. When I headed off into the forest I stopped seeing them.

Rachael picks out a giant Eastern cottonwood to draw and trace the leaf of (each one picked out a plant to study as part of their schooling).

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Here's a photo of its massive trunk, by far the biggest tree here:

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Here's a shot looking up at the trunk breaking up into stout branches, another cottonwood characteristic:

The ground was littered with old leaves, very similar to aspen (which it's related to), round-toothed and spade-shaped. Cottonwoods are in the willow family, and really just gigantic broad-leaved willows. They grow in the same habitat (beside water), and have the same deeply fissured accordian-like bark (sort of like an air filter):

They also snow in early summer. They shed their cottony seeds in June, and with enough of them around, it really feels like it's snowing with fluffly seedheads flying and covering everything. It was something distinctive about living in Sante Fe in June, just walking the streets. We also encountered it paddling the Erie Canal back in 97', trying to get from PA to New Mexico. Not only was the air full of fluffy seedheads, they covered the water, covered everything in the boat, were on our clothes, in our hair. It was pretty magical.

Here's some wild onion growing beside the base of a tree. Excellent mild taste. Definitely worth harvesting and dicing up for a meal:

I catch some Canada geese nearby in the river:

Here's a crag with enough space beneath it to bed down for the night - a product of floods:

We follow a trail off into the woods to get a closer look at a huge mature southern magnolia:

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Here's a close shot of the bark:

And a look up from underneath at the dense tangle of tropical foliage, a good place to stand out of the rain:

English ivy has totally taken over back here and it's like a jungle in places. Some trees' trunks are totally obscured by massive vines. Look how it's engulfed these trees:

Oregon grape is very common down in the bottomland forest and just up the hillside. Some of the plants are nearly ten feet high, with long craggy trunks terminating in a bract-like mass of spiny leaves with huge yellow plumes of flowers:

Petals are now falling to the ground. I've never tried the berries from this particular species (mahonia bealei - introduced - native to China), but I hope I get a chance to, it looks like it will be a good harvest.

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Horticulturists refer to the plant as 'leatherleaf mahonia', or 'Beal's barberry' (it's in the barberry family, like Nandina), and it is seldom called an 'Oregon grape' here in the South - considering how far we are from Oregon.

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But for me it's important to simplify and not have random unrelated names for the same plant. Oregon grape is a mahonia, this is a mahonia, they look identical, and produce identical edible fruit. It's like understanding that a cottonwood is a giant willow, and a tuliptree a giant magnolia - there are not really that many different plant families here in the U.S., and it's important to see plants in the context of their families, rather than all as isolated species.

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Here's a deciduous greenbriar still full of blue-black berries:

I ate some, and unlike the usually tasteless greenbriar berries, these actually had a trace of sweetness. I wonder if it's carrion flower (smilax herbacea), as Couplan says the berries have a "date-like flavor". It's hard to know for certain without any leaves. And I don't have any great detailed guides to southern shrubs and vines anyway, which I need. All I've got is the Peterson's, and one to the Southern Appalachians.

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But as I look around there are actually several masses of these greenbriars covered in berries. It would be a prime food source this time of year.
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I also find chickweed:

So with the onion, the chickweed, and the greenbiar berries, and acorns scattered everywhere, you have everything you need to eat well.

The main purpose in coming to this side of the river was to gather bamboo to use as pins in our straw bale cabin. The bamboo grove covered about an acre, with plants over 30 feet high. We'd tease the kids and tell them to look for pandas as we walked by. We even thought of actually stashing a stuffed panda up high in the bamboo for fun, so they'd see there really are pandas here . . . but never did it.

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However, to our surprise, the bamboo is gone:

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I'd like to think somebody came out and harvested it for building. But the reality is, being an invasive, the forest service probably came out and cut it down and hauled it off to the dump - or burned it. Here's what's left of the stumps:

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Too bad. Sprouts are already shooting up vigorously in places.

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At least I've found a small colony of bamboo close to where we live that I could use. But I'd have to either harvest it at night, or ask for permission.

Mishka finds a large pincer down by the river - do crayfish get this big?

Here's the Chattahoochee River, broad and shallow through here - shoals:

Above the bamboo grove is an old homestead. There's a stone pumphouse, a lot of metal scraps, several stone walls, and an old metal gate.

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Below the pumphouse water's seeping out of the rock - it's probably why this spot was selected for a well. With our long cold spell these seeps have formed icicles:

Here's s shot looking outside from behind the icicles:

Here's a large rhododendron:

An ironwood (carpinus caroliniana), in front of one of the stone walls:

Ironwood is a small tree with a very muscular fluted trunk - unmistakable. Though the bark is smooth like beech, it's in the birch family. And what's interesting is they hold on to their leaves -something I didn't realize before. But the leaves are smaller, darker, and have a more serrated edge - very different from beech. I found a whole colony of ironwood on the hike out all holding on to the their leaves - crisp and shriveled, as if the trees had been burned.

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Here's a bud on the rhododendron:

The old capsules:

Here's a giant three-chambered sink I came across on the hike up to the pumphouse:

It still looks servicable, and would be a neat thing to have on a farm property. If we were up near Sunbright I'd take it with us.

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Here's a shot of the stone pumphouse:

The inside:

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A great view from up here:

I come across lots of interesting metal scraps up in the old home-site. Probably enough to make a roof out of if you knew how to weld. There's also an interesting evergreen shrub with tiny hairy leaves I wasn't able to identify that's all around here. And a giant 10-12 foot Oregon grape covered in blossoms.

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Back down off the trail, in the bottomlands, the multiflora rose is getting its new leaves:

This common thorny plant is typically considered a nuissance. But from an edible plant perspective, it's solid gold. It's got the best hips of any rose I've ever tried. Small and candy-tart to sweet. Larger hips tend to be very seedy, and the flesh is insipid - the key is to dry it.

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I gathered several baskets-worth of hips that were in great abundance off the Guadalupe River in northern New Mexico. They were absolutely everywhere - it was a blowout harvest, along with the grapes, and gambrel acorns. But trying to process them fresh took forever - the flesh is so sticky. So I moved on to drying them. This was going well until the mice who were nesting in the air filter box of our jeep began stealing them. They also stole heaps of our gambrel acorns, and stashed them everywhere. At least they left the apples alone.

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Here's a vine strangling another vine, giving it a dose of its own medicine:

There are actually three separate vines climbing up this poor tree.

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Here's an old fireplace:

There's only one steel band over the cavity supporting all the stone above. It seems to be doing a good job - hasn't buckled. But the entire fireplace has rocked way back from frost heave. It was obviously not built on any kind of foundation. I wonder if bottomland soils heave more than most because of their high moisture.

Here's something Brooke spotted, a slim vine with a burst pod full of fluffy seeds:

I remember this from soutwestern New Mexico. It's a climbing milkweed called 'milkvine'.

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Here is a large hackberry, with its unmistakable warty bark:

A shot of the upper part of the tree:

There are several hackberries down here (celtis spec.). I'm not sure where it got the name 'hackberry' - which seems to have a negative connotation - because the berry is one of the best edible foods out there. Trees can be absolutely covered in tons of tiny pea-sized orange-red berries about late summer. Over the fall they turn darker and almost black - the fruit at this point is more date-like and not as pleasantly tart . . . I prefer it orange. The berries can remain on the tree very late into the year, depending on where you are. In southwestern New Mexico, where the trees are common along the Gila River valley, there was still plenty of fruit in January.

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What makes the berries such a great wild food, besides their abundance and long harvest, is that both the flesh and the seed is edible. The berry is like candy - both sugar and fat. It's a little hard on your teeth crunching the seeds after an hour or so - but so is candy. And we've found hackberry just about everywhere we've gone. Off Owl Creek down in Florida, the Gila River, along streams in parks in Atlanta, and even on top of Kennesaw mountain.

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In fact it was the unbelievable harvest of hackberries up on Kennesaw (northwest Atlanta), that made me rethink the Southwest as far as being a mecca for wild foods and best for survival. Kennesaw has hackberries, hickory nuts, persimmons, mulberries, farkleberry, sumac, wild plums, muscadine, wild grape, walnuts, prickly pear, a soft yucca perfect for cordage, even peaches and pear growing wild - not to mention the greens. But I'll cover Kennesaw in the next post.

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A good way to end this is with another Ebbing's silverberry. This is probably the hundreth plant we've seen - and with many ripening berries:

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