A Walk in the Kentucky Woods

I just went for a walk in the woods up Ryans Creek Mountain here in Whitley County with my mom and dad, and as usual, I got to learn a lot about my families’ subsistence methods when they were still in thrall to the coal mining camps of the region.

As you walk up the side of the mountain there are flattish areas called benches, and mom was telling me about how the locals would used the natural clearings on them for ‘mountain fields’ when she was a kid in the 1950s. It was a kind of slash and burn agriculture, but without the burning part.  According to mom, the family would clear an area (usually about 20 X 30 feet square) of brush and stones and plant corn, and then green beans and fall beans when the corn got about a foot high. The fields would produce incredibly well for about 3 years,  and then you’d need to let them go fallow again. With farmable land at a premium and beyond the reach of a lot of coal miners, these small plots could mean the difference between famine and feast.

My mom also showed me where some locals had made a stone house, which was inhabited until the mid 1800s. During the civil war, people would hide their livestock (particularly horses and mules) in the ruins of the stone house to prevent them being confiscated by troops on either side. She also showed me the foundations of a cabin or two, which people had lived in for decades before the families either moved closer to town or into a coal mining camp for work.

She also recounted a tragedy she remembered being told about when  she was a small girl. Apparently a family had built a cabin too close to a gully on one of the benches in Rube Hollow above Ryans Creek, and a flash flood washed away the entire cabin and killed everyone except for the father – who was away getting corn ground at the time. In the hour he was gone, he lost his wife and eight children. It was heartbreaking.

My parents also showed me several plants, some of them they recounted their mother’s fixing as part of a “mess of greens” to eat when they were children. Among them were the ubiquitous dandelion leaves (Taraxacum), as well as plantains (Plantago which is also called fleawort in some areas), coltsfoot, (Tussilago farfara), bear’s lettuce (Micranthes micranthidifolia), wild mustard, and creasies (Barbarea vulgaris, more commonly called winter cress outside of Appalachia).

One of the edible greens was cutleaf toothwort (Cardamine concatenate), which is also called called crowsfoot or crow’s toes by some people. This one wasn’t just edible – according to mom it was used by her parents and grandparents to ease the pain of toothaches. Apparently, it tasted a bit like horseradish, and a little online research assures me it was used by the Iroquois for headaches as well as toothaches. It is theoretically hallucinogenic, so I don’t have the ovaries to try it, to be honest.

 

There were also the wild blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries, which anyone could find. Another plant that they also called wild strawberry as children was actually (as they found out as adults) cinquefoil (Potentilla), a ground-growing wild rose which produces a fruit that tastes a bit like dried strawberries. 

Some of the other edible plants she showed me were ones that were used mostly for seasoning, like wild oregano (actually American dittany), wild ginger, and winterberries. Some were edible but used sparingly because they were harder to find and didn’t taste all that great, such as (and the name makes me cringe to type) squawroot (Conopholis americana). Apparently squawroot would make you pee like a racehorse if you ate too much of it, but was therefore good for swollen ankles. They were right, because research has shown squawroot is a diuretic. 

One of the edible flowers she showed me, which she said her grandparents called Indian turnips (Arisaema triphyllum) but we know more commonly as Jack-in-the-pulpit, could only be eaten after being dried. It was considered dangerous, so instead of being eaten the root was used more often to make a poultice to eradicate ringworm, a fungal infection of the skin which was endemic due the poor sanitation they had when she was a child.

Mom also showed me rabbit tobacco (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium), which was just blooming. Her older brother and sisters (who were smoking before they were even teens; such was life in Appalachia) would dry the mature leaves and smoke it. Sometimes they mixed it in with ‘real’ tobacco to make their supply of the good stuff last a little longer. As it so happens, rabbit tobacco – unlike the real thing – is good for you, and acts as a decongestant among other things.

Other plants they showed me just because they were lovely to look at, rather than because they knew of an edible or medical qualities. I saw rattlesnake plantain orchids (Goodyera pubescens), groundcedar (Diphasiastrum digitatum) which can also be called crows foot clubmoss, bluets (Centaurea), mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), star flowers (Trientalis borealis) which are now endangered in Kentucky, common violets (Viola), and springbeauty (Claytonia virginica), a flower that used medicinally by the Iroquois but not locally within memory.

I also saw several plants that weren’t fowering yet thanks to the cold spring – like the flame azaleas (Rhododendron calendulaceum), and extremely rare trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) that’s also called the mayflower or Plymouth mayflower, lady’s-slipper (Cypripedium reginae), dwarf crested iris (Iris cristata), and mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum). The mayapples are known to be poisonous, but in small doses the ripe fruit can be eaten – IF you take the seeds out. Eating the seeds will kill you dead as a hammer.

Other flowers were bravely blooming in spite of the chilly air and occasional unseasonal snow shower. I saw trout lilies (Erythronium americanum) along the banks of the creek, and the aptly but unfortunately named stinking lilies (Trillium sessile). The stinking lily – also called toadshade in the more northern parts of Appalachia – smells a little bit like meat just starting to go bad. It’s pollinated by flies and beetles, who think the stink is awesome, but no one is likely to make a bouquet of these things any time soon.

A lot of the trees in the area I’ve seen since I was a kid – your bog standard oak and beech and sourwood and ash and sumac and magnolia and holly and whatnot – but I also so one I’d never noticed before; a winged elm (Ulmus alata) or wahoo. The bark grows these kind of corky protuberances that look like long dragon-wings, and it boggled my mind a bit.

My parents also looked for edible mushrooms they like – such as ‘dry land fish’ or morels (Morchella) and chicken of the woods (Laetiporus) — while we were out, but to no avail. The weather hasn’t been nice to the fungi this year. We did see some common polypores, or shelf fungi, on the dead wood, though. I saw one with small, brilliant-orange conks, but they seemed different from the orange-peel fungus (Aleuria aurantia) I thought they were at first. For one thing, the orange-peel fungus grows on the ground, not on the bark of dead trees. I think they might have been (Phyllotopsis subnidulans), which is like the mock oyster (Phyllotopsis nidulans) but smaller with a darker orange color. On second thought, I think I was looking at common orange lichen (Xanthoria parietina). Never mind. 

Something I am more sure of is the fruticose lichen I found, which looks like some strange light-green softer kind of Spanish moss (probably from the genus usnea) and is a good indicator of the air quality here. It’s proof the EPA of the 1970s and 80s actually did it’s job! This kind of lichen is normally out of reach of the casual wood-walker, but a big storm blew some of it down recently for me to find on the forest floor.

I have to say that even in during this cold, wet, delayed spring, the woods and mountains of Eastern Kentucky are filled with beautiful flora and well worth walking through. Although you never know exactly what you may encounter …