On a dewy gray morning in April, on the quiet northwestern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a pair of retirees from Minnesota encountered a man descending the trail as they were hiking up.
“Did you take in that show on the way up?” the man asked them. The couple knew right off what he was talking about: the explosive blooms of spring ephemerals, all the trilliums and fire pinks and bloodroots and trout lilies they’d been seeing flowering along the trail. “Amazing,” they said. Sensing a fellow plant enthusiast, they asked for the man’s help in identifying one peculiar flower they’d noticed that resembled a “little Christmas tree” poking from the soil.
“Bear corn,” came the answer. “It’s a parasitic plant. It flowers,” but it doesn’t photosynthesize. “And the bears do love it.” The couple exchanged quick happy glances. Could the man help them also ID an unfamiliar tree they’d been seeing, maybe cousin to a horse chestnut? (“That’s yellow buckeye,” he told them.) Could he explain why you see young chestnut trees but almost never mature ones? (“The bark fissures at right around the time they start fruiting, and that’s how the [blight] fungus gets in.”) Or how tall the native hollies grow? (“Twenty-five feet.”) Before long the man was directing the retirees to lay themselves down across the trail so that they could take in the sumptuous, jasmine-like scent of trailing arbutus,
