Changes in Altitude

Changes in Altitude (and Flowers)

Spring is such a glorious time of year! If, like me, you’d be happy to extend springtime into extra innings, then you, too, can take advantage of our special surroundings. Most of our towns in western North Carolina are built in the river valleys. It makes sense, of course, to found a town near a water source, on fertile ground that could grow crops to feed the inhabitants, and on flat land that is easy to build on. Surrounding us are the ridges and peaks, providing beautiful views and cool summer breezes. Now that climbing those ridges is easy (in a car on a paved road), we can quickly ascend the cool heights from those warm valleys.

For each gained 1000 feet of elevation, there is a drop in average temperature of 2ºF and a change in the climate that is equivalent to traveling 200 miles north at a constant elevation. Brevard is located at an elevation of about 2200 feet. If you travel up to the Blue Ridge Parkway’s Pisgah Inn, which is located at 5000 feet, you have made a trip, biologically speaking, of approximately 600 miles north, or into southern Canada and New England. You might expect to find wildflowers blooming in early June that you would normally see in early May at lower elevation. You can also expect that the plants and animals that live around Brevard are different from those that live on the Parkway, and you’d be right on both counts.

One of the best trails for enjoying spring wildflowers that are normally found in the northern Appalachians and into Canada is the trail between the Pisgah Inn and Mount Pisgah. It is about 1 mile in length and easy to traverse in either direction. Parking is available at both ends: use the northern end of the Pisgah Inn parking lot or the first parking slots you come to in the Mount Pisgah lot.

Lilies are among my favorite flowers. (Do I say this with every plant I write about?) Along with orchids and others, they are monocots, placed in one of the two major divisions of flowering plants, which means that their grass-like leaves have parallel veins, among other botanical traits. In addition, the simple flowers of lilies are composed of 6 tepals, the technical name for their indistinguishable petals and sepals. Lilies grow from bulbs, which store nutrients produced by the deciduous leaves, and many are spring ephemerals that die back in summer.

Wood lilies (Clintonia umbellulata) begin blooming in mid-May at low elevation in the southern Appalachians. The 6 or fewer shiny green, broad leaves are edged with delicate silvery hairs. In the center of the basal rosette of leaves, a flower stalk about 6 inches high supports a small head of several white flowers. Wood lilies occur throughout the area, including the section of the trail near Pisgah Inn.

A closely related species, Clinton’s lily (Clintonia borealis) is a more northern relative, reflected by the scientific name borealis. The boreal forest is the northern forest, found in Canada and bordering states. Because the Appalachians run basically north-south, organisms of the boreal forest often reach their southernmost extent right here. Like many organisms of northern climes, this lily is bigger than its southern relative. Each flower is about half-an-inch long, droops downward, and is more greenish than white. Like the wood lily, several flowers are borne on the single stalk, but the larger flowers are separate instead of clustered together at the tip.

There are many other flowers on this trail and on any of the other trails that we have available to us. Enjoy some hikes at elevation, and pretend you’ve gone back in time by about a month or have taken a vacation to New England or Canada. You might even need to take along a sweater!

Wood lily (left) and Clinton's Lily (right) comparison of flowers and leaves

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