This article is published on the Atlas Obscura website (Thomas Callaway’s Gravestone in West Jefferson).

As summer begins to fade, pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) begins to dominate open areas of the southern Appalachian landscape. The plant is a familiar feature in traditional mountain cookery, and widely used as a folk remedy. Paradoxically, folklore also identifies pokeweed as a lethal poison.

The tree triggered a health craze in Europe upon its discovery in North America, when it gained a reputation for curing everything from wounds to rheumatism. Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) became a major commodity for early America, and continues to have economic significance today.

When European settlers arrived in America, they found an abundant nut tree unknown in the Old World. Native Americans had a curious practice of pounding the nuts and tossing them into boiling water. The heat separated a cream-colored oily substance from the nuts, which was skimmed off and stored as a pasty material the Indians called “pawcohiccora” in the Algonquin tongue. Indians used pawcohiccora in ways similar to butter; i.e. as a spread and an ingredient in corn cakes and other dishes. English-speaking settlers soon shortened the Indian word to “hickory,” broadened its meaning to the name for the tree itself, and referred to the creamy nut extract as “hickory milk.” This oily substance became economically valuable in colonial trade; one quart of hickory milk, for example, could be exchanged for 19 pounds of pork.

As the sun weakens at the end of the growing season and flowering plants fade to brittle remnants, gardeners and wildflower lovers resign themselves to a few months estranged from nature’s brilliant colors. But one wildflower - the Jerusalem artichoke...

A major characteristic of southern Appalachian weather is the large amount of precipitation we receive. Certain locations record the second highest annual rainfall in North America (after the Pacific Northwest), and even fit the definition of a temperate rainforest.

U.S. Geological Survey maps tell the names of the earliest hunters, explorers, and settlers; give clues about the early economy, reveal what crops were grown, and inventory native plants and animals that were living there when white people arrived.

Think of the most remote Appalachian wilderness you have ever visited and imagine that landscape if you time-traveled centuries into the past. Would it look much the same as it does today? Not likely, even though it may be “untouched.” The landscape would be filled with seemingly exotic species: towering chestnut trees, vast expanses of river cane, wolves, elk, panthers, and maybe even buffalo. The strangest sight, perhaps, would be that of a Carolina parakeet.

Lenoir is a familiar name in North Carolina, with a city in the west and a county in the east named in honor of Revolutionary War Gen. William Lenoir. But it’s at the secluded home this prosperous plantation owner built in Caldwell County that you get the measure of the man.

One day as 18th-century botanist William Bartram traveled on horseback through the southern mountains, he discovered he had entered a field so thick with strawberry plants that the crushed berries had dyed his horse’s legs deep red.

In a wooded area near my house stands a large, impressive American beech (Fagus grandifolia). Curious about its age, I measure the tree’s girth and consult a simple table developed to estimate the age of beech trees. This method is not entirely reliable, but useful nevertheless for determining a broad age range.

Today, Andrew Jackson is well known for his military exploits against Indians and the British, as well as his success in politics and government. Few modern Americans, on the other hand, are familiar with Waightstill Avery. Ironically, the distinction of the two men was entirely different in 1788.

Mountain ash is found along the highest peaks, while holly is abundant farther downslope. Both trees, though, are generally absent in a belt between 3,000 to 4,000 feet in elevation. A familiar feature of the mountain South is the archipelago of Canadian “islands” along the spine of the Appalachian range. Peaks and ridges above 4,000-5,000 feet have climate and vegetation very similar to that of southern Canada and northern New England. American mountain ash (Sorbus americana) is a typical northern species also native to the highest reaches of Southern Appalachians. It shares a habitat with red spruce and Fraser fir. The plant is also known as the “rowan tree,” a name apparently borrowed from the European mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia), a species with similar characteristics. The Scandinavian word rowan means ‘red,’ referring to its bright berries. Roan Mountain, on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, supposedly received its name because of the numerous native rowan trees growing near its summit.