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F O R E S T C O M M U N I T I E S At certain seasons House Mountain looks as if its forests were arranged by color. In summer, the mountain is draped in green, but, come fall, this blanket shreds into arthritic fingers of green reaching valleyward against a yellow backdrop. Guidebooks confirm such color schemes, dividing the forest into distinct plant communities: the green fingers, ridge-growing, pine-oak forest communities, and the yellow- backdrop, valley-hugging, oak-hickory communities. These are typical,the books,say of drier,southwest facing slopes of the Appalachians. Europeans sought to discover the mysteries of such plant associations by laboriously counting individual plants in randomly chosen plots.Certain plants, such as beeches and maples,repeatedly formed communities.Americans noticed the same thing, among them Frederick Clements, who argued that these associations could be viewed as if they were themselves organisms with births, lives, and deaths, and that they gave way, one to the other, in an orderly succession tending toward a climax forest that would,undisturbed,last forever. I remember being taught the term climax forest, and a part of me still seeks it, driving hours to walk through postage stamp-sized remnants of what I imagine was the great and near eternal American forest that predated European settlement .Anyone who has watched an abandoned field grow up knows that succession is real, that annual weeds arrive first, only to be supplanted by perennial herbs in a few years that then give way to weedy shrubs and briars that eventually givewaytotrees.HereintheValleyof Virginiasuchsuccessionisthebaneof farmers who, to maintain pasture, must mow their fields on a regular basis to keep down weeds.But such tedious mowing is a catch-as-catch-can proposition,done in between more pressing jobs, so that the farmer who rented our fields seldom mowed before late fall. By that time, the stickweed and thistle had already set seed.So I took to walking the fields in midsummer when their flowers were new, beheading legions of massed stickweed,thistle after thistle falling with a satisfying thwack to my swingblade.But the upwind fields across Cedar Creek bloomed yellow with stickweed, and our neighbor’s paddocks were chockablock with Canada thistle already downing up for the flight into our fields.And thistle itself resprouts, as do the red cedars and shoestring the farmer would later brush hog FOREST COMMUNITIES 43 sothatourlaborsbutpreparedusformorenextyear.Wewerevainlytryingtostop time itself, a process the Indians began when they maintained the valley’s grasslands by repeatedly firing them. You can tell roughly how long ago a farmer gave up fighting time by what’s growing in his fields—stickweed is always present,but broomgrass and shoelace vine suggest abandonment several years before, while multiflora and cedar thickets take years to develop. And many a deciduous forest has remnant cedars and locusts that betray its origin as an open field. But what sort of forest? Am I right in thinking that the nascent oak and hickory forests climbing up House Mountain’s flanks are the natural inheritors of the land, that their restitution represents a return to a primitive purity? Not really. Science tells us that such forests are only ten thousand or so years old around here, that before this, back when the land was cold, boreal forests like those in Canada dominated the landscape,and that House Mountain’s summit and upper flankswere,inallprobability,treeless.Remnantsof thisborealforest,whichlasted for millennia,came into their own in West Virginia,where many were logged into extinction a hundred years ago. Spruce Knob, 4,863 feet high, sports an alpine forest of wind-tortured red spruce similar to what might have clung to House Mountain’slowerslopesduringthelastIceAge,whichbeganaboutseventythousand years ago and ended only ten thousand years ago.West Virginia’s Cranberry Glades preserve a flora of spruce,mountain ash,huckleberry,and cranberry more like those in Canada and the last Ice Age than like those in the sunny South of theShenandoahValley.Indeed,onlytwentymilesfromLexingtonarebogswhere wild cranberries grow,thought to be leftovers from the same Ice Age.Few people visit them,so there are plenty of cranberries for Thanksgiving,if you’re willing to risk cold feet. The oak-hickory forest association I walk through today is itself the product of European interference,since only a hundred years ago the dominant tree here would have been the chestnut, whose demise thanks to an imported fungus is told and retold as an ecological cautionary tale.One out of every four trees...

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