Rediscovering Bountiful Margins in the Southern Appalachians

Native Histories and Contemporary Possibilities

Cherokee farmers had in the ancient past learned to draw their harvest from beyond the boundaries of what could be reconstructed as recognizably cultivated fields. Thus first generation agriculture remained as central as corn to the colonial-era Cherokee diet. Gathered foods—nuts, fruits, and grasses—made a critical contribution to the Cherokee diet and were almost entirely collected by women. These foods perhaps made up as much as half of the nonmeat portion of the early Cherokee diet in the precontact period. Cherokee gathering, as in many agricultural societies, focused on species growing on the edge of the forest and often in old fields. Not surprisingly, trees provide the most conspicuous, persistent, and persistently overlooked evidence. At an old townsite along the Savannah River, William Bartram described in 1775 a husbanded—or, perhaps more properly, mothered—forest community growing in “ancient cultivated fields.” Among the species Bartram listed were persimmon, honey locust, Chickasaw plum, red mulberry, shellbark hickory, and black walnut, and he drew attention to their apparent semidomestication: “Though these are natives of the forest, yet they thrive better, and are more fruitful, in cultivated plantations, and the fruit is in great estimation with the present generation of Indians.” Traces of the hands that created the “cultivated plantations” of trees described by Bartram are visible at various points: in the apparent range extensions of the chestnut; in the yard trees, especially persimmons, locusts, and native stone-fruits such as the “Chickasaw” plum; in the scatter of locations for pecan, walnut, and especially thin-shelled hickories like the shellbark hickory. This esteem reflected differences in quality attributable to long attention to these and other quasi-domesticated trees and shrubs bearing high-quality edible fruits and nuts. Field and town edges were in part colonized by such useful “plantations.”¹

The remarkable world of native plants and foraging practices that historian Tom Hatley describes above is, if not exactly gone, much harder to find in the modern age, for two major reasons. One, the kinds of occasional cultivation that marked the “food forests” and other agroecological interventions of native peoples of North America have become rarer and rarer to non-existent, victims of everything from the ethnic cleansing of so many native peoples to the near total dominance of industrial agriculture and other forms of industrialized “land management,” to which older native logics of land use and care are quite foreign. Some of these transformations began well before full European conquest, with some food species of the Southern highland forests disappearing due to the introduction of new species and practices:

The introduction of large herds of livestock resulted in the clearing of not only canebrakes but other forest ground cover as well. Within decades of the first European settlement, wild pea-vines, hog-peanuts, and the wild strawberry were all but eliminated from vast areas of the forest floor. The pea-vine, which once grew "as high as a horse’s back," was rarely seen in any great profusion after the American Revolution. The hog-peanut, a low twining vine that produces a small root eaten by livestock, was also eliminated from areas of the forest by advancing cattle herds. Wild strawberries, which had once carpeted large areas of the Blue Ridge Mountains, became scarce, making strawberry fields such as those witnessed by William Bartram, "in painted beds of many acres surface," no more than small scattered colonies or individual plants. Indeed, the ecological effects that resulted from the introduction of cattle, hogs, and horses were great enough to receive notice from the oldest generation of Cherokees.²

Two, and concurrent with the first, for the last hundred years or more North America has seen a huge influx of invasive plant and animal species, often things that no one actually wanted, in other cases escaped ornamentals, occasionally food plants gone feral. While biotic exchanges have always taken place to some extent, and picked up considerably with European exploration and conquest, it has especially been with the rise of industrialization and global capitalism that invasive species have been able to absolutely explode across the earth and establish dominance. Where early modern apples might have cropped up on Appalachian field margins, mingling with native species, invasive Bradford pears will now totally dominate the same environment, displacing native species, and offering no human benefit in return.

Even the effects of cattle grazing and large-scale hunting were, arguably, less deleterious, as they only persisted for so long in any given place; invasive species tend to establish themselves and not leave short of human intervention. If for native farmers and foragers in the past, like the Cherokee woman foragers described above, disturbed habitats represented a potent space for semi-passive food production, those same spaces are extremely attractive to many invasive plants, whose march across the planet has also been aided by the vast scale of disruption and disturbance industrialized humanity has left in its wake.

That said, there are refugium where the agro-ecological world of the Cherokee and other native peoples can still be found despite the losses and declines. That will come as no surprise now to anyone who has been reading this newsletter lately; we’ve already explored mast-producing “food forests,” remnants of which are still scattered far and wide, marked by unusually rich concentrations of walnuts, hickories, and so on, and we’ve learned that despite the complete obliteration of the great canebrakes, reduced stands of American rivercane can still be found if you look closely enough. The same, fortunately, is true of the kind of productive margins and ecologically repurposed old fields that once provided so much support to the Cherokee residents of our Southern highlands. I know because, serendipitously, I came across just such an ecological assembly mere days ago.

Last week I took my kids up to Unicoi Mountains, the less-traveled range just south of the Great Smoky Mountains, spending the night in Swan Cabin, a remote primitive cabin in Nantahala National Forest, just over the line in North Carolina. Located at an elevation of 4,300 feet above sea level the surrounding ecology is distinctive, but not so high as to not have many species in common with lower elevations. As we explored the immediate surroundings, I was struck by the species composition of the meadow (“old field” is probably more apt, though less poetic) near the cabin—probably of human derivation originally, though there are certainly high altitude meadows (the famous “balds” of the Southern Appalachians) that probably predate humans in origin. Yet while I imagine the meadow here is in this instance anthropogenic in origin and perhaps periodic ongoing maintenance, all of the plant species present are native ones, taking advantage of human disturbance but without the pressure of reams of invasives, the deep mountain forests acting as a barrier. Similar habitats have existed for—well, a very, very long time, certainly long before humans, Pleistocene megafauna no doubt doing much to maintain open habitats and successional sequences, humans more or less taking over the job after the end of the last ice age.

It’s maybe a little hard to see in the above and the following photo, but the entire space is absolutely full to overflowing with edible plants, shrubs, and trees, neatly layered almost like a diagram out of a permaculture manual. Most obvious in my photos are the hawthorns (Crataegus sp.) along the forest edge, in full bloom; historically margins like this at lower elevations would have hosted Chickasaw plum in particular, and would have done so until quite recently (within my parents’ lifetime in fact). Look a little closer in the foreground and you can see elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) as well as blackberries; not visible are the abundant carpets of strawberries that were just beginning to flower and which in a week or so from now will be laden with fruit.

At the edges of this old field, where the elderberry is densest, there are abundant clusters of cutleaf coneflower, also known by its Cherokee name, sochan, ᏐᏨᎾ, (Rudbeckia laciniata). It’s hard to make out in the photo below, but trust me, it’s there, the rich green below the old elderberry canes. It was just starting to really come up when we were camping here, though at somewhat lower elevations it was rip roaring and getting ready to bloom come summer. At any stage, but especially during fresh new spring growth, sochan makes a delicious edible green, raw and cooked, and grows in incredible abundance.

I imagine there are even more edible botanical treasures out in that old field, and if we make it back up to Swan Cabin later this year I will report back; certainly in a month or so there will be a veritable feast of fruit and greens available to any creature so inclined. During our visit, falling as it did in what was still pretty early spring in the high country, would have been fairly meager takings, a reminder that, paradoxically, for peoples dependent on hunting and foraging subsistence the spring months were the leanest. That said, I am pretty confident that a seasoned Cherokee forager would have spotted even more edible things even in early May; I did not spend any real time exploring the lowest levels of the understory, to say nothing of potential root crop plants such as the American groundnut (Apios americana), about which I’ll have more to say this year and which is, unsurprisingly, also a creature of margins and especially of wet locales. We found leeks growing in the woods nearby, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some were present at other points along the old field-forest interface, for instance.

What can we learn from the above historical examples and from this refugium of an older, richer type of landscape? Happily, the kind of de facto food forest visible in both the historical description and in the exemplar in the Unicoi Mountains is not out of reach; it is in fact easier to model deliberately than, say, nut groves or rivercane stands, both of which take a pretty decent chunk of space and require a fair amount of time to get one’s return on investment. The old field to forest margin above is the sort of productive species assembly we could nurture anywhere we have a forest edging onto a strip of grass or field or disturbance; all of the species involved can become established pretty quickly, producing food in some cases the same year they’re planted (such as sochan, pictured below from a patch at a lower elevation). Density can go a long ways in preventing invasive capture, but in an urban or suburban context management, especially to keep out privet, Bradford pears, and the like, will always need to be in the background of concern.

But beyond providing practical models to imitate, knowledge of the productive margins can reshape how we think about what are often ignored and throwaway spaces in the modern landscape.³ Edges and margins abound in our world, but we usually rush by them, hurtling down the highway, ignoring the treasures that even invasive choked edges and hedges can still contain. We tend to treat old fields and disturbed spaces as trashy and weedy and ugly. Not to get too moral theological here, but our attitude towards landscape margins and neglected spaces often overlaps with our attitude towards humans we see and treat as marginalized and neglected, “useless” and at best a problem to be dealt with. Realizing that our view of the world—literally, and metaphorically—has been shaped by other powerful forces and dynamics, that it is we who have done the neglecting, and that other ways of seeing and relating to places, plants, and people: such a takeaway can take us very far indeed.

1. Tom Hatley. “Cherokee Women Farmers Hold Their Ground.” In Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Revised and Expanded Edition. University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 309-310.

2. Donald Edward Davis. Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians. University of Georgia Press, 2000. 77.

3. Cf. Pope Francis’ remarks in Laudato si’: “These problems are closely linked to a throwaway culture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish. To cite one example, most of the paper we produce is thrown away and not recycled. It is hard for us to accept that the way natural ecosystems work is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients which feed herbivores; these in turn become food for carnivores, which produce significant quantities of organic waste which give rise to new generations of plants. But our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. A serious consideration of this issue would be one way of counteracting the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet, but it must be said that only limited progress has been made in this regard.”