| Carolina
Hemlocks in Ohio |
Steve
Galehouse |
| Feb
13, 2007 13:03 PST |
ENTS,
One of my favorite close-to-home “wild’ areas is Ritchie
Ledges, with
rugged sandstone cliffs and outcroppings and a woods with a
northern
association, with eastern hemlock and yellow birch common, along
with
trailing arbutus, partridgeberry, and low-bush blueberry. It’s
an area
I’ve been visiting for nearly forty years, and is always
enjoyable to
hike through. The area is now part of the Cuyahoga Valley
National Park,
but was once an Akron metro-park called Virginia Kendall Park’
One part of the ledges has a popular overlook
providing a nice vista
of woods below, with graceful hemlocks framing the overlook at
the top
of the cliff. Years ago, home for the summer while a student at
Miami
U., I was near the overlook and spotted a shrub I wasn’t
familiar with.
I stopped to key it out (turned out to be Nemopanthus), and
while keying
it out I looked more carefully at the hemlocks nearby. They
always had a
different look than the hemlocks in the rest of the park, which
I
attributed to exposure on the top of the rocky ledge. They
turned out
to be Carolina hemlock! (no “upside down” row of needles on
top of the
branchlets like eastern hemlock, needles arranged radially
rather than
two-ranked, larger cones).
I knew very well that these 50 or so
individuals couldn’t be a native
disjunct population; the closest native stands were several
hundred
miles south and a couple of thousand feet up. I located a park
ranger
and asked about them—he didn’t know what I was talking
about, I called
the park office, no help there either but suggested I talk with
the
recently retired director of the Akron metro-parks. I got his
address
and went and knocked on his door. He was not very co-operative,
or
amused, or even intrigued, but he did say they might have been
planted
by the CCC work corps in the ‘30’s.
So how they got there is still a mystery. The
hemlocks in the rest of
the park are all eastern hemlock, and are definitely native. I
would
think Carolina hemlock would have been a pretty obscure species
for the
CCC to plant 70 years ago, especially with native stock growing
in
profusion a quarter mile away. It has taught me to never assume
what I’m
seeing is what I think it is.
Steve
And a link to info about this area:
http://www.virtualakron.com/virginiakendall/index.php?vr=3 |
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