The Backwoods Resurgence: Native Plants

Partridge Pea (Chamaecrista fasciata)

One of my goals through online outreach is to make a wide variety of native plants (and occasionally animals) available to experts, hobbyists and everyday citizens to restore and improve natural habitats in the Southern Appalachians. Various trees, shrubs, wildflowers and ferns will be offered for sale here on a highly variable, alternating basis according to my ability to access and cultivate them. As a college student, it is somewhat difficult for me to cultivate any marketable quantities of plants, but I will try to give away/offer for sale what I can in the meantime.

These species will come from various sources; prior populations of local, native species in gardens and arboretums, individual plants collected on sites of impending construction/development, and seeds or cuttings sustainably harvested from healthy, wild populations. Each species offered will not only be native, but will be from a specified locality in Southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, East Tennessee or the surrounding area throughout the Southern-Central Appalachian region. Cultivating, introducing or re-introducing native plants from other populations in different parts of the same species' range can expose our populations to lethal diseases, bring in plants not suited to our environmental conditions, and make them inaccessible to the birds, deer, insects (especially as host plants for caterpillars, bees, etc.) and other wildlife usually attracted by the plants with different genetic material. Documenting an accurate locality ensures that any "native" species are truly compatible with your local natural communities.

I hope to offer not only live plants usable to start restoring habitats, enhancing backyards, etc., but also to provide insight on the techniques and merits of establishing such communities. Feel free to contact me, Cade, via email at crittercade@gmail.com with any questions about cultivating and restoring your own natural habitats with native plants, for an opinion based around my research and experience with Blue Ridge habitats. Products will be listed below as they are available. Best regards for your adventures with native plants!

Due to the nature of this blog and the purpose of this endeavor, shipping is not available at this time (and probably will be seldom in the future). Contact me to discuss the means of purchasing any native plants; which will probably involve meeting at a designated, public location somewhere in the region. Thank you for your support of our Appalachian ecosystem!

Index

Trees & Shrubs

Ferns & Herbs

Seeds

Trees & Shrubs

Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)

Appalachia's only native tropical fruit! These trees originate from Hawkins County, TN and Scott County, VA, at sites hypothesized to once have been populated by Cherokee and Yuchi settlements. The ancestors of these trees were likely artificially selected by humans, and their descendants have been able to survive on in the wild for several thousand to several hundred years feeding local people. Now, they're being returned to cultivation. Instead of typical sugars, pawpaws also have lots of fat and lipids giving them a unique texture and taste.

American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)

Cloned trees from cleistogamous individuals, Sullivan County ecotype. Persimmons are usually cleistogamous, or fruit-producing without pollination. Even if one of these trees is the only persimmon in the area, it will produce fruit given adequate sunlight and time to mature. If it is the only local tree, most of the fruits will be seedless making them much easier to prepare and eat, even though propagation will be difficult.

Price: Out of Stock

Pecan (Carya illinoinensis)

Seed-grown trees, Sevier County ecotype. Grown from a mountain population of pecans outside of the Great Smoky Mountains in the Pigeon River watershed, these trees have produced large nuts with a long shelf life (up to a year before rot/desiccation in a cool, dry storage) and can handle cooler winters (Zone 7+).

Price: Out of Stock

Overcup Oak (Quercus lyrata)

Price: Out of Stock

Swamp White Oak (Quercus bicolor)

Price: Out of Stock

Silky Willow (Salix sericea)

Price: Out of Stock

Quotes

"Humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do." - Wendell Berry, for The Dying of the Trees, 1997

"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by the singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place." - Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." -Crowfoot, 1890 dying speech to the Blackfoot Nation after the wholesale slaughter of buffalo by the Canadian government.

"Civilization is not, as they often assume, the enslavement of a stable and constant earth. It is a state of mutual and interdependent cooperation between human animals, other animals, plants, and soils, which may be disrupted at any movement by the failure of any of them." - Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 1949

"The human world is so bleak, simple-minded and tragic compared to that of the living biosphere. Learning about the rest of life on Earth is like having the blinds pulled up on a window that you previously just thought faced a bleak brick wall, only to look out the window and see mountains, forests, beaches and a verdant landscape stretching for miles." - Joey Santore, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, 2o20

"We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things." - Charlotte Mason, Out-of-Door Life for the Children, 1904

"Instead of mountain men we are cursed with a plague of diggers, drillers, borers, grubbers; of asphalt-spreaders, dam-builders, overgrazers, clear-cutters, and strip-miners whose object seems to be to make our mountains match our men -- making molehills out of mountains for a race of rodents -- for the rat race.

Oh well, revenge is on the way. We see it in those high thin clouds far on the northern sky. We feel it in those rumbles of discontent deep in the cupboards of the earth: tectonic crockery trembling on the continental shelves. We hear it down the slipface of the dunes, a blue wind moaning out of nowhere. We smell it on the air: the smell of danger. Death before dishonor? That's right. What else? Liberty or death? Naturally." -Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

"There is a way of living which is liberating, which does not make us feel trapped and isolated. We could call it "the wilderness mind". It doesn’t matter whether one lives in the city or in the country, whether one works in a factory or a university. The secret to this "wilderness mind" is keeping the power of wonder of the universe alive. If we keep this sense of awe, we will remain young forever. If we lose it, we wither inside." - Enviroscapes, 1995

The Backwoods Resurgence

Native Plants

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