Mistletoe is common in the Southern Piedmont and has a
strong herbal tradition as a medicine and as a
holiday superstition and game. This evergreen parasite is spread by bird defecation after eating mistletoe berries. The latter link from the
NC Museum of Natural Sciences tells us the name derives from the Anglo phrase for ”dung-on-a-twig.” Three different species have a complex role in all this. The species most commonly used as decoration,
phoradendron flavescens, is a native of North America. In California, it is
considered a parasitic pest.
Viscus album is the European species whose berries are poisonous and also useful as medicine. The species in my pictures is
Phoradendron leucarpum, oak mistletoe, considered less common and rare in Europe, but apparently it is Raleigh’s most common, and the one favored by European Druids for its alliance with the mighty oak.
Raleigh certainly has its share of oaks, and many of them in the area northwest of downtown sport the dusky green balls. The spots inside the Beltline I best remember mistletoe are gone. The
planted median of Glenwood north of Peace Street used to have oaks that were full of prominent mistletoe, but I just today realized they have been replaced (quite some time ago – another geezer moment) with crepe myrtles, which are doubtless less trouble for the Progress Energy linemen. But a
large oak with a
huge spread of mistletoe grows just across the street. Mistletoe is not endangered: in fact I
see it often in my travels, now that I have trained my eye to look for it. But it does get harvested, and some of what you see hanging in door jams is quite local indeed.
Where do you get yours? Maybe from Dan, who was set up on Person Street as I drove out to take mistletoe pics for this post. I explained our coincidence, bought a big branch and chatted about mistletoe. I mentioned the old strategy I’d seen out at my country cousins of shooting it down with a shotgun.
“Yeah, but that messes it all up. I got this here the hard way – thirty feet up.” From his yard, he said, but there is mistletoe in some public areas around town. Does much inside the beltline get picked each year? Wondering, I say goodbye to Dan and head out in search of unharvested mistletoe. First stop is the most hilarious spot for mistletoe to hang: the corner of Cook and Oakwood. The irony of this clump presiding over a corner where women of the street often hawk their sad-eyed wares in broad daylight is just too great for me to forbear mentioning.
Mistletoe at Oakwood Cemetery
Heading out of downtown, I find
nice groups at
Harvey Street but none on Glenwood north of 5 Points. Over on Wade, there are healthy stands at the
SECU facility and on
up that hill toward Oberlin. The Canterbury/Banbury neighborhood has huge oaks, but many of them are Willow Oaks, and I saw almost no mistletoe there. My schedule took me back toward home, and I saw the
nice batches at the edge of
Blount Street Commons. This was a very partial and cursory inventory, but I plan to make this an annual post and develop a map of mistletoe sites in Raleigh (as I will for pecans, thus the name for my
nature project blog).
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Have a great holiday season!
Raleigh from Dix Hill
Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-87) was perhaps the most famous and admired woman in America for much of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1840s, she launched a personal crusade to persuade the various states to provide humane care and effective treatment for the mentally ill by funding specialized hospitals for that purpose.
306 acres are left from a huge estate that was given over to the benefit of some of our neediest folks. As the fall colors take their time this year decorating Raleigh’s skyline, so Dix Hill’s fate lingers in the slow balance of state decision. Walk the big meadow with me and glimpse some early fall colors.
We turn from downtown and look down at the gazebo and greenway path which runs along Rocky Branch as it follows its new, straightened course beside Western Boulevard. On that walk we’ll see lots of elusive birds, wild grape, and some small spots of fall color.
The campus has many historic buildings, massive white and red oaks that ring the meadow, a small grove of highly productive pecan trees, and one open slope that is the joys of all sledders. Centennial Campus and the Farmer’s Market have already taken the lion’s share of what once was . Now the state needs to let Raleigh’s long term interests take precedence over a short-time cash windfall. The folks at Dix 306 are working hard to make that happen. We should support them any way we can.
Below is a trace of fall glory in midst of a glorious lingering summer. Hopefully this image does not represent the sunset of hopes for the landscapes of Dix Hill.
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I went on this walk partly because of Ashley Sue over at Green Grounded, who complimented me in anticipation of seeing fall colors on Raleigh Nature. Below are clickable thumbnails of some other sightings at Jones lake off Sunnybrook, and then ending with my all time best fall picture, from the west Beltline. Happy leafing!
The Blue Ridge Parkway serves as a ribbon of access to the peaceful grace of both rural and wild scenes in the NC mountains. The stretch surrounding Doughton Park, where Cara and I camped in August, offers more of the agricultural type. The Parkway passes through currently used farms, with cows, sheep, goats and small gardens. Near Doughton Park is Brinegar Cabin, whose old style of mountain farm living was enacted, and thus preserved, well into the 20th century. I posted a set of documentary photos about it at Pecans & Mistletoe, which is fast becoming the home of my explorations into heritage sustainable agriculture as well as a site for extended nature projects of all kinds. The nature images from our trip are on a post at the Raleigh Nature Photo Archive, which, like Pecans & Mistletoe, is a blogspot blog where I load and display most of the pictures for The Natural History of Raleigh, which is the name of my overall nature project and the future book which will culminate the work of these three blogs: Raleigh Nature, the main site, Raleigh Nature Photos, the photo album site, and Pecans & Mistletoe, the nature project site. Occasionally some piece of all this leaks over into Raleigh Rambles, my personal blog, where I can talk about anything I want.
Getting back to our mountain trip, we saw a beautiful pair of walking sticks at our campsite on the grassy knob of Doughton Park. There are campsites at this park where you can walk out your tent, start down the hillside behind you, and go for a day or so before hitting a road. We took a long hike through a nearby wooded trail and saw lots and lots of mushrooms, as you will see on the photo album. Below is a particularly lovely grouping of shrooms, moss, and liverworts.
Brinegar Cabin, which is right on the Parkway, really reminds you of how closely we lived with nature until not so many decades ago. The Spring House (which is now contaminated by a Park Service outhouse built uphill from it), the naturally cooled food cellar, and the “linsey-wooly” products and cobbling service which generated cash money, all are vivid reminders of a way of life that, at this site, lasted until the 1930’s. Best of all was the sights and lessons of growing and processing flax, which excites papermakers like ourselves very much.
This post was originally published on April 4, 2008.
I believe the parent/predecessors of this green frog came to us in a large potted water plant from that amazing aquarium store on west Hillsborough. We have bullfrogs in the turtle pond at the top of the yard (see below), but these smaller, more active individuals inhabit the unfenced pond at the bottom of our garden. Although we do bring in a few tadpoles each year as live treats for the turtles or general pondwater/biota additions, I consider these frogs to be voluntary residents and a compliment to the micro-ecosystems we try to maintain in our sloped Oakwood backyard. Below is this frog’s view of our garden.
Below is a bullfrog peering into the ivy that rings our pond turtle grotto. Bullfrogs have larger ear spots and usually green noses and no small spots. But you get such furtive looks at them they are hard to identify with total confidence. One reference I use a lot is Dorothy Hugh’s wonderful nature website. She is honest about the difficulty and ambiguity of amateur sightings, and yet goes ahead and provides excellent information in a beautiful format. Her page on frogs is a great example of comprehensive, efficient tools for comparision of the surprisingly varied but similar species present in the area.
Below are more garden images from this rainy spring break. I didn’t go canoeing above Lassiter Mill with my buddy Clyde as I had planned. You can check out some preliminary photos, but the mill post will have to wait. Our brand new rain barrels are definitely up next! Buy yours soon.
This post was originally published Feb. 24, 2008.
This meadow off Sunnybrook is surely doomed, but it is sure fun to browse for now. I have seen deer and gray foxes, lots of butterflies and a wonderful diversity of plant communities that range themselves around the various landscapes contained on this old farm. It is the remnants of the very large farm bisected by the eastern stretch of the Beltline and displayed in all its historicity at Oak View County Park right across the highway. This privately owned portion contains two ponds, one large enough to be called Jones Lake, an abandoned farmhouse, and a small grove of pecan trees. The main pond is dammed at an unusually deep cut into sandstone that makes for an imposing ravine just below the dam, which then delivers the water to Crabtree, close by. You can walk from the Sunnybrook meadow down a hill to the pipeline cut that parallels the beltline, and follow that water all the way to the pumping station , to see where those teenagers flung their Dad’s sports car over the guard rail, and you can see the memorials left at the site, which is still slightly blackened and scarred from the conflagration. This floodplain zone is wet and full of animal tracks. The soil is sandy and obviously derived from the sandstone bowl which helps form Jones Lake. Or you can walk across the top of the dam, jump past the ravine, and walk around to the upper pond near Poole Road. Here you see the pecans and the upland plants that are taking over from them. Whatever subdivision gets created here will surely make some benefit out of the water holes and the many mature trees. You would hope, at least. I also used to park on Poole Road just past the fire station and walk in from that direction, but that end, between the upper pond and Poole, is now already under construction. The clear cut for that part is not promising. See below.
The meadow ends at the slope down to the creek that drains Jones Lake.
The upper pond and pecan grove.
And the clearcut.
The oak grove above will probably survive whatever is to come, but the old “Dix Hill” where I went sledding has already been truncated by Centennial and the Farmer’s Market, and is now being fought over like a scrap thrown between dogs. I realize there is going to be more development of some kind,and that the state will hold on to some space – as a matter of fact, the Dix hospital employees I talk to say they don’t expect to leave. It makes sense for some portion – the juvenile part, say – of the mental health facilities to remain. I am not an activist but I’m glad the Dix group is working so hard to save what they can. The truth is, the magnificent lower meadow, surrounded by majestic oaks, with Rocky Branch edging it, is the prettiest place inside the beltline. A park here would go a long way toward establishing Raleigh as the true and enlightened city of oaks.
Rocky Branch above, Dix Hill pecan trees below
