Gettin' Down and Dirty: Unearthing Appalachia's Flowers

It all began with a simple idea: if I was going to spend five months in the Appalachian wilderness, I should become a student of my surroundings and learn something of the plant life that I would encounter as I walked. This idea was hatched when spring began to paint green on a brown, wintered forest floor. It so happened that the first green that caught my eye belonged to the mottled leaves of Red and Yellow Trillium. And so my tack was set: as the Trillium leaves grew, diversified and eventually blossomed, so did my project to identify the wildflowers that I saw during my walk north.

A rare five-petaled Bluet

Virginia Spiderwort

Taxonomy became queen, second only to the walking itself, and it quickly demanded that caliber of attention. What I thought would be a small handful of new flowers a week -- perhaps two or three -- became one or two flowers a day. Moreover, as the number of flowers grew so did my need to better classify them. What began simply as, "Oh, that's a Trillium flower," soon called for adjectives: "That's a Purple Trillium," or "Red Trillium," or "Vasey's Trillium." It wasn't long after that when common names themselves became inadequate as they left too much overlap between flowers. Was I looking at Red Trillium, Trillium sessile, or the other Red Trillium, Trillium erectum? And just like that a flower's unique genus and species name became part of my vocabulary.

Canada Lily

Round-leaved Sundew

As I now stand on the completed end of my journey, I can look back and say that I have been as good of a student as I knew how to be. Early on in my walk I would browse internet collections of Appalachian wildflower pictures, becoming familiar with the flowers that others had found on the trail, then looking to spot them myself. As my eye sharpened I began seeing flowers that weren't on those websites, either because they were never seen by that particular photographer or because they were overlooked as too ordinary. So, I graduated from browsing internet pictures to visiting local libraries. I developed two new strategies: browsing flowers by color in a resource such as Peterson's Field Guide to Wildflowers, and searching for flowers based on their flower and leaf characteristics in a resource such as Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. This last approach proved to be my bread and butter, as even browsing by color became inadequate. Not only does the same flower often present in different colors, but my definition of purple might be Peterson's idea of blue. And so I began counting petals, checking for alternate or opposite leaves, and noting such characteristics as leaf shape and if the margins were toothed or not.

Butterfly Weed

Rough-fruited Cinquefoil

Scarlet Lychnis

All of that is to say that my journey in wildflower identification was a significant project, sometimes hated as much as it was loved. In the end, I identified well more than I initially imagined. The forty to fifty flowers I expected to name grew to a final tally of 357! Knowing that I only actually hiked for 133 days, some quick arithmetic will tell you that on average I saw 2.7 flowers a day; that also meant taking nearly 5,000 pictures to help in identification once I had a field guide handy. All of the flowers I identified can be found here.

Fireweed

Yellow Lady's Slipper

So there you have it: 357 wildflowers are now known by a hiker who knew next to nothing about them while standing on Springer Mountain. A few of you may also have committed to donating a certain amount of money to ECHO for each wildflower identified. Whether that may have been one cent per flower or ten, I encourage you to do some quick arithmetic of your own as you prepare to follow through on any personal pledges you may have had.