Guarding the tree of paradise

If you visit Paint Rock in deep summer, these are the people you want to have with you.

John and Kendra Abbott are anxious to see the University of Alabama Museum of Natural History take a step up to join the world’s top tier of research facilities and museums. Don’t underestimate them. They are a powerhouse, a dynamic duo, expert entomologists, natural historians, researchers, teachers, photographers. And one of them is a really good cook.

They’ll go anywhere with their cameras, even down a steep and treacherous limestone bluff, to the yawning mouth of Saltpeter Cave, rising out of the stone cliff like an airplane hanger. And they never hesitated when the great cathedral of the opening turned down a narrow black hall carved by an invisible stream. Their cameras  helped us see a sightless world, teeming with giant cave crickets, translucent cave crawfish and (crawling on my shirt) a cave endemic millipede.

Bruce Sorrie is my mentor in the plant world. Bruce is legendary in the Carolinas for cataloguing that state’s natural diversity, and describing many new species in the process. He’s still naming. Bruce came down to Alabama decades ago, looking for plants in the Red Hills and pinewoods and prairies. He steered Beth and I around North Carolina’s longleaf country while we were working on our longleaf book. I could happily spend the rest of my days running around the woods and prairies and savannas with Bruce, arguing about plants.

With this group, you know you’re going to find really good stuff, even if you’re stopping to take a rest propped up against a tree. All of us had walked round the tree a dozen times before John shouted. And then we all saw it, Paint Rock’s most insouciant inhabitant, the timber rattler. It never rattled, never struck, never moved, in spite of our constant traffic. It tolerated only with great disgust our lingering to take its photo over and over. And of course, snakes always stand guard at the tree of paradise. Above our heads stood a persimmon tree with the biggest wild persimmons I’ve ever seen. We took the fruit thereof, and did eat.

Bruce has seen plenty of the Southeast, and you’d think there’s nothing new for him to see. But Bruce says he’s never ever seen anything like this place. It’s not right, Bruce said, that all these plants are so close together here. It’s going to make the community ecologists really angry, he says.

And that’s why Bruce is coming back.

Bruce Sorrie, great botanist from North Carolina,  is one of Bill’s oldest friends. You add our two newest friends, Kendra and John Abbott and it was a once in a life time experience. See some of Kendra and Johns Nature Photography.

Paint Rock through the lens of the Abbott’s

Diverse ways of seeing diversity

Before you decide the younger generation is disengaged from nature, you better meet Nina Morgan.

Nina Morgan is as old as I still imagine myself to be. She graduated from UAB last year after developing a catalogue of all the trees on campus. She’s now working for the city of Birmingham to help them figure out a way to do their business in a more sustainable way, and just helped them win a nice grant to do it.

And Nina is a whirlwind in the forest, too. Nina looks at things. I mean looks at them. She takes in what’s around her. And she asks more questions and better questions than anyone else I’ve been in the woods with.

Nina’s special. No doubt about it. But maybe more young Americans would develop Nina’s keen eye for nature, and her passion for questions, if they were exposed to places like Paint Rock.

That’s one of the big goals of our project, to train a new generation of scientists who understand the natural world. It may surprise you to learn that natural history, biodiversity and ecological studies, and good old-fashioned field taxonomy have been largely forgotten by major universities. A new generation of students sees the world only through the eyes of an electron microscope, or in a readout from a molecular analysis. That’s not the student’s fault. That’s the fault of the universities training them, and the narrowly focused grants that support them.

E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard evolutionary biologist, wants the Paint Rock Forest Research Center to promote not only great research, but also a new generation of researchers who have one foot in the forest and one foot in the laboratory. Paint Rock, with its emphasis on field sampling, its relationship with Alabama universities, and its association with the country’s top field biologists and ecologists, is a perfect place to do this training.

The center’s close ties to Alabama A&M has also added another dimension of diversity to the program. As the result of a special USDA grant, the Paint Rock Forest Research Center will be able to promote the training and advancement of minority students.

The goal is to open up new opportunities for teens and college students  who usually don’t get much exposure to this kind of scientific research, and provide them a stairway to the best research programs in the country.

That kind of opportunity development is how Francesca Gross, who works with The Nature Conservancy’s urban outreach program in Birmingham, met Nina. Francesca’s genius is figuring out how to re-engage people with the natural world they almost forgot. Nina, while a student at UAB, interned with Francesca. And Nina and Francesca have been working together to introduce inner city kids to the mysteries of the forest environment.

I expect we’ve got some things to talk about.

E.O. Wilson, Pulitzer-prize winning author and Harvard’s pre-eminent evolutionary biologist, sees Alabama in a way that few other people can.

Like so many Alabamians, Ed is proud of his alma mater, the University of Alabama. And he’s proud to recount “his people” and their long history in the state, going back to the dusty streets of Holly Pond in the hills of Cullman County and the ghost town of Blakeley overlooking the swamps and marshes of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.

But Alabama is more than a football team and a family heritage for Ed. It’s a place, with a very special and unusually rich landscape and one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity in North America.

So there’s nothing that gets Ed’s mind churning quicker than the possibilities of a research center focused on Alabama’s unique biodiversity.

For a week, we hosted a meeting of the titans of ecological research at Paint Rock. Ed, along with UCLA’s Steve Hubbell and Patty Gowaty, began hammering out a vision for the Research Center in Paint Rock, challenging themselves and each other to develop a concept and program that gives us new insight into the way the world works. Kathleen Horton, who has worked for decades to get Ed’s prodigious research and writings into publication, eyed the proceedings knowingly.

Steve brings to the effort the Smithsonian protocol that he was instrumental in developing in the tropics. That massive and intensive forest monitoring program has transformed our understanding of tropical forests. It will be the baseline of our work in Paint Rock, and we expect the data from this site will provide groundbreaking information from the temperate forest.

Patty brings her own love of Alabama, having growing up wandering the banks of the Coosa River, and acute insight into that key passageway of evolution — sex and reproduction in the natural world.

Ed brings an intense appreciation for biodiversity in all its forms, the trees, the ants, the butterflies, the snails, the salamanders, even the primitive microscopic protists that live in the soil. Ed speculates that we know, at best, 20 percent of the species that make up our world. And the 80 percent we don’t know may well impact the future of humans more than the 20 percent we do know.

Merging those scientific visions – and getting good and useful scientific results in the process — is what the Paint Rock Forest Research Center is charged with doing.

Every morning, Ed rose early with his butterfly net in hand to tackle the Alabama countryside. Then we’d sit for hours, trying to figure out how to know more about all the things we don’t know. We spend our early evenings talking about the merits of fried okra and the herd instincts of our pack of border collies, then jump back on the research again – about what’s here, and why it’s here, and whether it will be here for another generation.

And so Ed warns us: You’re making a mistake if you think too small. This research center needs to be as rich and diverse as the forest it operates in. It needs to do for forest research what Woods Hole and Scripps do for marine life. It needs to put Alabama on the international map of forest, conservation and biodiversity research.

And if you don’t mind me inserting myself, he said, I’d like to be on your board.

Yes sir.

Perhaps no plant speaks more clearly to the profound weirdness of Paint Rock’s forests than the smoketree. But that weirdness has a surprising relevance to forests throughout North America.

So we made our pilgrimage down into Honey Holler in June to see the smoketrees in bloom. Puffs of pale lavender smoke covered the treetops, as the spent purple bells of the endangered Morefield’s clematis twined around its trunks.

Around here, folks treat smoketree as something sacred. They call it chittamwood, the wood from which the biblical ark was built. There’s no good explanation for how Noah managed to stumble across a plant that exists only in North America, and not much patience for the idea that biblical chittamwood was used in the construction of quite another kind of ark, the Ark of the Covenant.

But there’s also no real reason for the tree to have inspired such legends — unless those who saw the smoketrees sensed something very odd and special about this tree. Maybe it’s the way the golden wood never seems to disappear. After falling, twisted trunks lie in the forest for decades, maybe even closer to a century, before rotting. To see the carcasses of these trees scattered across the limestone ledges where the tree grows is enough to inspire a kind of awful reverence.

Folks are just as awed when they discover that the smoketrees they’ve grown up with or in fact quite rare anywhere else in the world. In the eastern U.S., they’re known only from certain soils in a handful of counties in north Alabama and adjacent Tennessee. Then they skip some 500 miles before finally showing up in the Ozarks of Missouri. And they skip again, another 500 miles or so, to show up in a handful of counties in the Hill Country of Texas.

The conventional explanation for this far-flung distribution is that the smoketree, and others like it, were once more widespread, and because of climate changes, contracted to a few special refuge areas, like Paint Rock and the Ozarks and the dry Texas hills. But that really doesn’t explain why they contracted, or why they continue to persist in a few refuge sites that have little in common when it comes to climate.

That’s one of the important reasons we’re here in this weird and weirdly rich forest in Paint Rock. We want to know why it has been home to such rare trees as smoketrees, and extraordinarily rare vines like the endangered Morefield’s clematis that trails around its trunks. On the rocks a few feet below is one of the few sites in the world where the rare limerock viburnum grows, and beside it, there’s the limerock woodmint that has never really seen the world outside of the Paint Rock mountains.

What in the world is going on here?

Understanding how to conserve forests like this – particularly as climate changes – is going to depend on how well we understand what species are and how they interact with each other. But plants don’t wear labels. And sometimes the things that bind plants and other creatures together in species-like groups aren’t the things we humans are likely to notice.

That’s why we we’re anxious to understand more about the genetics of the plants of Paint Rock. Their molecular patterns and chromosome structure can sometimes tell you surprising things about the familial relations of a species that would never be obvious to by looking at the plant.

So there was something just right about having Rick Myers and his wife Wendy along to see the Paint Rock azaleas in full bloom, for the first time in full daylight. Rick is president of HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, the groundbreaking genomics campus in Huntsville.

Rick sees this forest not only with the eyes of biogeneticist, but also as a son of Alabama, one who spent his childhood roaming the woods of central Alabama and his college years roaming the Appalachian Trail.

Maybe the current species filing system will demand that these azaleas be seen as interesting but minor variations on already described azaleas (WHICH azalea these could be a variation on is not going to be easy to demonstrate). But more careful genetics work could allow us to determine whether they are polyploids, having extra sets of chromosomes. In their variability, strong fragrance and rich colors, they do resemble the famous polyploid azaleas of the world, the mountain flame azalea, the Red Hills azalea, and the luteum azaleas of Europe. If the azaleas of this Highland Rim population does prove to be a polyploid, it ain’t going to fit neatly in anybody’s filing cabinet, and Paint Rock may have another secret to share with the world.

Rick appreciates that as well as anyone. But this morning, Rick and Wendy are just lost in the beauty of the place.

Beth and I returned to further explore the sandstone cap that afternoon. Mountain laurel line the bluffs, and blueberries form what old-timers might call “blueberry hells” – thickets of blueberries that force you to squat to make it along the ridgetop. But the blueberries open onto another crevice in the bluff, and more populations of these strange azaleas.  The azalea experts will be here next week. Stay tuned. We’ll let you know.

If we’re going to save species, we probably ought to have a good handle on what a species is. But nearly every day, Paint Rock raises important new questions about what a species is, and how it fits into the community around it. Addressing those questions is one of the core missions of this forest research plot.

These deciduous rhododendrons on top of the plateau, for example, don’t seem to be particularly fond of our file drawers full of species names. The locals would call these honeysuckle azaleas, and leave it at that. Botanists who live by the book would most likely call them Rhododendron canescens, or maybe they’d be tempted to say Rhododendron prinophyllum or Rhododendron periclymenoides. Or maybe they’d be honest enough to acknowledge that these azaleas don’t really fit any description, so to get out of a fix, they’d write them off as “hybrids.”

As Ron Miller points out, that’s essentially what the famous azalea hunter Henry Skinner did nearly 70 years ago when he saw these strange creatures blooming only here in northwesternmost Alabama and southeasternmost Tennessee, on the southern outcrops of the Highland Rim. Skinner went on the become the much esteemed director of the National Arboretum, so few thought to double check his assumptions.

But the problem is that this “hybrid” has no obvious parents anywhere in the vicinity, and the plants, while displaying extremely variable flower characteristics within each population, are dead-on consistent in other characters across many miles.

We saw these azaleas ready to burst out in bloom weeks ago, thought they were curious, and asked Miller to help us sleuth them. And what we’ve found, now that they are in bloom on the Sharp Bingham research site, is not only surprisingly beautiful – they also appear to be quite unlike any other azaleas described.

Getting to those azaleas had proved to be a challenge. We first found them on a muscle-grinding hike up the slopes. There had to be an easier way.

But Dr. Govind Sharma, professor emeritus for biological sciences at Alabama A&M and principal researcher Luben Dimov exhibited extraordinary patience as we tried road after road in the dimming light of the afternoon. We were enchanted by our first encounter with a few blooming specimens in a sinkhole. But when we finally found our way back to the largest population, dripping with blooms over the waterfall, we were all overwhelmed. In the name of science and great beauty, Dr. Sharma missed an appointment that evening, and Luben (once again) came home after dark. They were both gracious. Dr. Sharma seemed elated. We can only hope their families back home were understanding when they saw the pictures of these stunning azaleas late that evening.

Beautiful sites are so common in Paint Rock, you can almost for a moment forget how beautiful they are. But then another one slams you in the face: The falls at Honey Hollow are overflowing. It’s a cornucopia of water, a place where the energy of life springs right out of the rocks.

While Beth attended to our wounded mule and the public television crew had a field day shooting footage of the falls, David Lubertazzi from Harvard and  Doug Booher did what ant people do: They traveled an inch an hour looking for ants on the slopes of Honey Hollow.

Late in the day, we were joined by Doug Phillips, the host and series creator of Alabama Public Television’s Discovering Alabama. Doug recalled the days when he first engaged with this part of the world.

By the end of the day, thanks to the efforts of our hunting club members and nearby residents, we had vehicles to carry us around, and the wounded mule was delivered to the parking lot, fully repaired. There are good people living around this good place.

And Beth got to see in person the famous Clemmons tractor. It was almost as beautiful as that repaired mule, and one day we’ll have to tell you the story of this remarkable tractor, the remarkable man who helped create it, and how he helped make the Paint Rock Research Center possible.

Red bud spring is turning into dogwood spring in Paint Rock. Blue long-spurred violets are giving way to blue crested iris, and the breathtakingly blue phacelias are replacing the breathtakingly blue bluebells.  And as Alabama Public Television winds up its shooting for the week, it reminds me to ask, Why is there so much blue in Paint Rock?

Yellows for the bees, reds for the birds, but who and what in nature besides us is seeing all of this blue, and how are they seeing it? There’s so much beautiful blue here in spring, it’s almost spooky, and you have to wonder what is it about Paint Rock that has evidently made blue such a signal color.

But seeing Paint Rock is partly about the challenges of seeing it. Its beauty is in part a result of its isolation and the difficulty people have in accessing it.

The mules, as a result, have become indispensable for travel through this forest. Some are disappointed when they discover the mules have four tires rather than four feet. I’ll admit, I’d rather have the latter, too. But these motorized, four-wheel drive mules are almost as sure-footed on these mountains as the real thing, and a whole lot smoother.

You appreciate how hard they have to work after riding up and down these thousand foot drops repeatedly during the day.

Monday opened cold, with the Paint Rock River in full flood and streams gushing. The falls descending deep toward China in the mouth of Keel Sinks Blowing Cave entertained the film crew for much of the morning. It was apparent the water falls coming high off the plateau were going to be equally spectacular, and we had two mules full of film crew, film equipment and ant specialists ready to get from the sunken bottoms to the high tops.

As we ground toward the top, one of the mules just sat down and quit. It was our only significant glitch after weeks in the field. Fortunately, you don’t need a drive belt to come down off the plateau.  Luben Dimov patiently ferried everyone down in his mule, and since everyone knows everyone hereabouts, Dennis and Tim got us in touch with the person who knew more about sick mules than anyone else in Alabama. His shop was just down the road in Paint Rock.

Bill Finch