They’re always here, but invisible until now, when the trees are bare, stripped of green by the first hard cold, in the closing dark of December. 

Hollies and I go back. They show up again and again, at surprising times, in surprising ways. That may be inevitable in a place so rich with native hollies. Alabama can claim 11 widely recognized species, plus two or three more that probably deserve a good name. 

The American holly (Ilex opaca) stands tallest among the evergreens, and there are mysterious, shadowy groves of it scattered around Paint Rock Valley. We should ponder them together.

But many of Alabama’s hollies lose their leaves in fall just as the oaks and elms and ash and hickories do. Up here, that includes the long-stalked holly (I. longipes), the possumhaws (the I. decidua group) and the round-leafed Cumberland holly (let’s just call it I. ambigua until something better comes along.)

This summer and fall, I drove in near panic along the Paint Rock River, cursing the railroad, the highway, the herbicides, the mowers for the disappearance of a magnificent line of possumhaw hollies I’d seen there last winter. I was worried in July, but I knew by October the berries would already be turning red. Having an eye for hollies, I surely should have seen them off the highway. Not a glimmer of red in that dull green, even into November.

Until a hard frost shook the mountains. The oranges and yellows of the maples were shattered at their peak. The trees trying to hold on too long to summer shed leaves bruised purple and black. Bare sticks clattered in the harsh winds.

And there they were unleafed, wreathed in red berries, the hollies, radiant one after the other, enough to make even a few irritable commuters turn their heads.

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Photography by Sakora Smeby

It was hard to see while we were in the thick of it this year, but there was a lot going on at the research center, on The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp Bingham Preserve, and on our other research lands in Paint Rock. Now, while the research center house is quiet, I’m slowly adding it all up.

We finished the first census of the largest forest dynamics plot in North America, nearly 90,000 stems identified, tagged, measured, mapped over 150 acres — a jaw dropping effort involving some 75 researchers and students over 6 years.

Alabama A&M researchers and students, who played a key role in helping our research team start the first census, finished the first re-census of the first third of the plot. 

University of Alabama’s forest dynamics lab started a long-term project to reconstruct a multi-century history of the forest. 

We developed an exciting partnership with Hudson Alpha Institute of Biotechnology that will expand the tree census to include the DNA of thousands of trees – a project unlike anything that’s been attempted before. We expect it to play a significant role in saving Eastern North America’s forests.

We worked with The Nature Conservancy and Paint Rock’s Carter England to help rebuild the Shortleaf Pine Initiative and sponsored the first national shortleaf pine conference in years. With National Fish and Wildlife Foundation funding, we supplied enough of our Alabama shortleaf seedlings to restore 300 acres above Little River Canyon. We helped coordinate an 80-acre prescribed burn to establish a shortleaf seed orchard at Guntersville State Park.  We managed to channel $85,000 to Hudson Alpha to build the base for a study of shortleaf pine genetics range wide.

We dug out from a tornado that mangled a couple of hundred acres of forest to find ourselves in a great relationship with animal behaviorists, ornithologists and ecologists at Auburn University, trialing new techniques to determine how birds might use the naturally disturbed sites – and to alert rare species to take advantage of this new habitat. 

We brought funding to researchers at University of Georgia to complete the whole genome on a tree that was believed to be extinct – until it was rediscovered on the preserve with the generous help of our expert research partners, Brian Keener and Ron Lance. (Yes, a very big deal…we should have that ready for publication soon!)

We worked with researchers to finish up a paper (and a pollinator video) on a new and very distinctive species of violet known only from Paint Rock, and continued to study a half dozen other species of trees and shrubs that will likely be acknowledged as new species.

We began work to restore canebrake and grasslands on a 1500-acre property on which we have a long-term lease.

We worked with the University of Georgia and U.S. Forest Service researchers to develop new ways of understanding the future of threatened native ants, which are critical to the reproduction of many of Paint Rock’s wildflowers.

Caves are now a major focus of research at Paint Rock. Hazel Barton at University of Alabama declared Paint Rock should be the center of cave research in North America, and it’s quickly moving in that direction. Auburn University’s Molly Simonis added her exciting new work on bats to ongoing research by Hazel and long-term projects by Matt Niemiller of University of Alabama at Huntsville.

We developed a relationship with Jacksonville State University’s Art Department that brought in artists from across the state to promote understanding of nature and science through art. It resulted in a celebrated museum show, Drawing Knowledge from Nature, and will lead to even bigger things next year.

With the help of an Appalachian Regional Commission Grant, and support from Lyndhurst Foundation, we secured a partnership with two of the nation’s top landscape and organizational planning firms to help us chart a clear plan of research, education and conservation for the next 50 years.

We created a great support staff of young researchers and veteran managers, and I’ll introduce you to them and their exceptional skills in the coming year.

It’s hard for me to believe we were managing all this (and more) in a single year. We have mixed emotions, knowing we did this at a time of great crisis, when funding for science has been slashed, and many of our federal partners are retiring and their programs eliminated. We managed to keep on with support from various state of Alabama programs and grants, from our legislative delegation, and from many private donors, including especially generous donations from the Kuehlthau Family Foundation, the Tom Sardy Foundation,  the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Chouinards, the Goldenrod Fund.  We couldn’t have done what we did without constant support from many faculty and students at Jacksonville State University, University of Alabama, University of West Alabama and University of Georgia.

It may continue to be a dark time for scientific study and our understanding of nature. We’re as worried as any research program would be about what happens in the next few months and years. We’re even more worried for many of our research partners, who face uncertainties and constraints greater than ours. But we are on track with our mission: to understand the future of eastern North America’s ecosystems and our place in them. 

Look with us. Even in these short days, there’s still light enough to find comfort in what’s been done, and to see the hollies are still there, radiant, bearing in the barrenness, promise of the year to come.