outdoor miscellany: my favorite non-plant pictures from 2010

I am culling and sorting and deleting odd pictures from 2010. I couldn't resist posting some of my favorites that do not easily fit into a gardening topic. I hope you enjoy them.

NEAR IREDELL STREET / DURHAM, NC

INSIDE FULLSTEAM BREWERY / DURHAM, NC

COAL PILE DRIVE / DUKE U.

SUMMER SOLSTICE ON FALLS LAKE

pearson's falls- polk county, north carolina

Well over a hundred years ago, an employee of the Southern Railway was scouting land in southwest North Carolina.  He would remember one particular place of beauty and was able to purchase it for his family homestead. Now known as Pearson's Falls, this property's mountain glen has been open to the public ever since the Tryon Garden Club acquired the 268 acres in 1931 in order to preserve this scenic attraction and its  native woodland flora.

An admission fee is charged by a resident caretaker. The site, open year-round, lies just off what used to be the major road (Hwy 176) between Henderson and Polk Counties. This two laner has plenty of narrow curves and kudzu covered embankments. Tourist cabins used to dot this stretch of Pacolet River valley before I-26 made the route obsolete. Visiting Pearson Falls is well worth the back road route and the $5 adult ticket.

On the hike up to see Pearson's Falls I was intrigued by the large number of wild native hydrangea canes that seemed to crowd the trail- Hydrangea aborescens is also called smooth hydrangea.  Dried brown clusters of the summer flowers still hung on, helping me make the positive identification. Come March I would wager there is  a good show of early spring ephemerals between the massive mountain laurel shrubs that seem to clamber everywhere.  I'd pay to see that.

ten acres in chapel hill for ten thousand dollars...

....and that's not even the most interesting part of the story.  See today's Home and Garden feature from the New York Times.

there is an aperture for that

-this pic is from Durham's Brightleaf district. I took it on a whim while putting my seatbelt on with the other hand. I am not usually this lucky.

Having a decent camera on my phone has become less of a novelty and is now something I take for granted. I love old film cameras as well as my wife's digital SLR.  But I appreciate the convenience of not having to carry a bag with stuff in it just in case I see a good shot. And sometimes the stress of looking for pictures can suck the fun out of what you came to see.  Now that my camera fits in my pocket all the time, I forget it's there.

 Stress free? ...No. Not when you consider how easy it is to drop a tiny smart phone or spill coffee on something that cost more than a week's worth of groceries. I'm always worrying about that.

elsewhere: central tyrrell county, north carolina

We spent this past weekend visiting my grandmother who lives between Fairfield and Columbia, NC in a farming community most folks haven't heard of.  A couple of years ago I wrote an essay about my memories of this place. I was glad my grandfather got to see that column before he died. This weekend's visit came in the Season of Tall Corn.  It's kind of like a little bit of Kansas sits less than an hour  from the Outer Banks.  The stalks photographed above grow less than thirty yards from my grandmother's kitchen door; she says that it makes the air still and hot. This farmed land belongs to a large scale agricultural operator that rotates the crop year by year...some summer it's potatoes and some it's soybeans. Through the last 25 years of growing seasons, the pines my grandfather and I  planted beside that field have grown and tall and straight.

other people's wwws: Randy and Meg's Garden Paradise

Randy Emmitt is from  Rougemont, NC and is the  blogger / photographer / handyman behind Randy and Meg's Garden Paradise.  

His photographs of flowers, butterflies, dragonflies, and other works of Nature set the blogger-bar pretty durn high. I stumbled on his site as a link from a link and was psyched to find piedmont plots on his list of other blogs that he follows.... keep up the good work Randy!

merit badge trivia...

Here is a chart of discontinued merit badges...from Wikipedia

And here is a link for folks interested in signing a petition to bring the beekeeping merit badge back.
I don't think there will be similar initiatives for "Cement Work" or "Master at Arms."

other people's wwws

Today is the first installment of what I hope will be a regular Tuesday post for piedmont plots. Every week I will share a blog or a website with my regular readers in mind (I think there’s enough of you that we could all pile into my minivan).

 I do have a few trusty bookmarks that I check daily and those sites will eventually get featured. But I may also be guilty of a knee-jerk decision to post a link to a site I have only visited once (like today’s offering). So this  isn’t meant to be an endorsement or an advertisement….just a weekly pause to share something interesting.

Today, I stumbled across the blog for the let’s color project, a global beautification initiative sponsored by Delux Paints. Even though it is not centered on ornamental horticulture, it is all about color… And what green thumb/flower geek  doesn’t like color? Or maybe, in this case, colour…..

super sunday hike at stagville

I attended the Trading Path Association's "Super First Sunday Hike" yesterday. A couple dozen of us parked our cars outside the state-owned Stagville historic site and immediately started trouncing briars and rotten pine logs in the hopes of finding an old packhorse trail or wagon road bed. TPA founder and CEO Tom Magnuson has been leading hikes around this former plantation site for years. We had originally planned to check out one of the old fords across the nearby Flat River, but the ground was too wet (and in some places-too frozen).

For me, the highlight of the trip was coming upon the Bennehan family cemetery. I had a vague notion of where this burial ground was, but since it is not a part of the normal public tour, I had never visited. I wasn't expecting to see beautiful low walls of red sandstone. This was obviously not the rubble foundation of a service building. You could tell right away that it was the work of a skilled mason or team of masons.


Inside the cemetery were three raised tombs. This was where Richard Bennehan, his wife Mary, and son Thomas, were laid to rest over a span of thirty-five years. Mary A. Bennehan, in 1812, was the first to be buried here. It seemed like a big empty space for only three grave sites. In Piedmont Plantation, Jean B. Anderson's history of the Bennehan-Cameron family, she notes that the large size probably reflected Richard Bennehan's hope that his daughter Rebecca would be buried there along with members of her brood. She married into the elite Cameron family. Her body lies elsewhere. I'm not an expert on this family history but the docents at Stagville are......the site is open for free guided tours Tuesday-Saturday from 10-4pm. The last tour starts at 3pm. Again, I should note that this cemetery is not on the tour and visitors are not allowed to wander into the forestland surrounding the visitor's center, parking lot, or main house. If you want the behind-the-scenes treatment, then get involved with the Trading Path Association because this hike is one of their favorites.

I would love to learn more about the work that was done to build this cemetery's walls. Tom Magnuson mentioned that it is one of the finest examples of a dry-stacked stone wall that he has seen in North Carolina. And even though dry-stacked stone masonry has a long western European tradition, that does not mean it wasn't often carried out by folks only a few generations removed from west Africa. Like almost everything else on a Southern plantation, it was likely built by the enslaved.

thermal belts

Here is a curious post from North Carolina Miscellany about isothermal belts in the Tarheel state. I can attest to the thermal belt that lies in Polk County. My in-laws, who live near Columbus, have a mature oleander shrub in their backyard and view of Hogback mountain from near their front drive. When in bloom, it's almost as if a little taste of the coastal plain is less than an hour from the Blue Ridge Parkway.

rent-a-goat...

Scared of poison ivy, chiggers, and spider webs? Need to use less gasoline for cleaning up your lot?

Today's post at Bull City Rising breaks some wonderful news....

far east

I grew up telling friends about this crazy place my grandparents were from. It always seemed like Gum Neck had to be the most remote community in North Carolina. I cherish a lot of memories from visits there as this essay describes.