Soul medicine: The green splendor of rich cove forests

While urban and suburban folks around the world were shut up in their dwellings, many in my mountain community took to the woods.

From the spruce-fir cloud forests and grassy balds that crown our mountains to the coastal plain’s longleaf pine and maritime forests, botanists around the state have their respective favorites.

The shrub layer in a rich cove is sparse — not a lot of rhododendrons and laurels — but the layer of herbaceous plants is as crowded and lush as in any landscape in the world.

Appalachian rich coves are among the most diverse plant communities in North America, home to three times as many rare plant species as are found in other forest types.

Natural Heritage Program’s definition of rich coves, attempted to unearth the origins of what it called a rich cove’s “aesthetic lavishness.” He concluded that soil fertility is a significant factor in determining the plant species found in each forest type.

The ephemerals’ pace of leafing out, flowering and seed production is a race against the closing tree canopy and the growth of the larger full-season herbaceous plants: cohoshes, wood nettle and horse balm.

These euphonious, colorful neotropical migrants are like precious gems forged in the crucible of dense tropical rainforests, and when they migrate north, rich coves are a preferred habitat.

Over generations, we trained our minds to seek out diverse plant communities, and in the process, our brains gradually became wired to appreciate the beauty of a lush carpet of green foliage.

Now, however, the powerfully medicinal goldenseal has been poached to near extinction, and ginseng, once abundant, is similarly rare.

And while some rich coves have been able to recover from two centuries of logging and other disturbances, many of the richest forest soils were converted first to pasture or tillage, then to subdivisions.

As my wife and I learned the native flora, it became evident which species wanted to live there, and in each place we removed the multiflora rose and encouraged the trillium and mayapples; we’ve planted foamflower, squirrel corn and ramps and watched them thrive.

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