Monday, February 1, 2010

Snowy Glade

 
Snowy Glade
Some pictures of the late January snow,
2010

Tyler Alley Sykes memorial trail


 
the sky was so blue

 
the colors popped through the snow

 
the stream trickled through the ice and snow

 
an ice shelf overhangs the channel of the stream

 
Here and  there the moss peaks through the snow

 
Some prickly pear, O. humifusa,
peaking out through the snow,
cacti in the snow!
the glades are really a place
of working contradictions !

 
Here and there there are small sinkholes in the limestone
releasing warmth from deep in the ground


 
it melts the snow from the stone

 
delicate and rarely seen ferns like this
  pellaea thrive in these chasms

 
I do wish it would snow this way each winter,
I actually find the season tolerable
so long as there are bright snowy days
to cheer up the gloom of our winters,
Thank you all for reading in 2009, 
here's to many more years of cedar 
glade beauty for me to share with you all!!

Posted by J.J. at 1:40 AM
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Sun Drenched Islands in the Dark Cedars

You may have encountered a cedar glade before if you enjoy walking through the woods in the Nashville Tennessee area, you would have been walking along through the cedars and would have come to a clearing, upon passing through you may have noticed how hot and dry it was,if in summer,or how wet and spongy the limestone gravel was ,if in winter.You may have had many of my own first thoughts , wondering "is this an old lot? perhaps and old road of some sort long degraded" before you started to notice plants you hadn't ever seen in your life,even though you've lived your entire life in the Nashville area, and if you had been lucky enough to happen across one during spring bloom time you'd notice the rainbow of colors blooming on those never before encountered plants, what an exiting place these glades can be!
In truth that place you thought may have been an old lot is a natural limestone clearing, Sometimes tens of thousands of years old , old enough for the plants there to adapt to their unique micro climate.
It's feasible to think that these places have been visited by animals and humans alike, for thousands upon thousands of years, being a natural clearing where one could camp or simply gaze up at the sky,and the way it seems so much bigger in the glades somehow, you can see the whole milky way sparkling there on a clear summer night, these places truly are a gift of natural beauty and diversity and a testament to the strength of life and its ability to adapt.
Sadly most of this rare ecosystem has been lost forever ,and some endemic plants are either extinct or severely endangered, in the past they have been built on ,dumped in,and covered over with rubble, they are inundated by man made lakes and torn apart by people with atv's and four wheelers who do not realize what they are doing.
There may be less than 10% of what cedar glade
there was before the Nashville basin was settled, and that continues to shrink even today, So lets educate our friends in the world of horticulture about our cedar glades.

Here are some resources for Cedar Glade Research:

Cedar Glade Endemic Plants

Center for Cedar Glade Studies

Cedar Glade Wikipedia