The Natural Gardens of North Carolina

By B. W. Wells

For seventy years, The Natural Gardens of North Carolina has been a must-read volume for anyone interested in wildflowers, native plants, ecology, or conservation in the state. This handsome revised edition features new line drawings and color photographs, an appendix that updates the botanical nomenclature, an introduction that focuses on B. W. Wells and his passion for the state's landscape, and an afterword that discusses the continuing relevance of Wells's ideas.

One of the first scientists to write and lecture about ecology, Wells introduced North Carolinians to the extraordinary tapestry of "natural gardens," or plant communities, within the state's borders back in 1932. His purpose was to help readers understand a plant within its community--a pioneering concept at the time--and to promote conservation. Moving from the Atlantic coast westward, Wells identifies eleven major natural gardens: the sand dune community, salt marsh, freshwater marsh, swamp forest, aquatic vegetation, evergreen shrub bog (or pocosin), grass-sedge bog (or savanna), sandhill, old-field community, upland forest, and high mountain spruce-fir forest. He devotes the first part of his book to a general account of the vegetation and habitats of each community and then identifies and describes the wildflowers found there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781469625928

B. W. Wells

The late B. W. Wells (1884-1978) was professor and chair of the Department of Botany at North Carolina State College in Raleigh from 1919 to 1949. He was a pioneer in the field of ecology and an ardent conservationist.

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The Natural Gardens of North Carolina

A CHAPEL HILL BOOK

The Natural Gardens of North Carolina

B. W. Wells

REVISED EDITION

With an Introduction and Afterword

by Lawrence S. Earley

and an Appendix on Scientific Nomenclature

by James W. Hardin

Drawings by Dorothy S. Wilbur-Brooks

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2002 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Minion by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Originally published by the University of North Carolina

Press in 1932. Revised edition published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wells, Bertram Whittier, b. 1884.

The natural gardens of North Carolina / by B. W. Wells.—

Rev. ed. / with an introduction and afterword by Lawrence

S. Earley and an appendix on scientific nomenclature by

James W. Hardin; drawings by Dorothy S. Wilbur-Brooks.

p. cm. A Chapel Hill book. Includes index.

ISBN 0-8078-2667-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4993-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Botany—North Carolina. 2. Plant ecology—North

Carolina. I. Title.

QK178 .W4 2002    581.9756—dc21    2002009184

cloth     06  05  04  03  02    5  4  3  2  1

paper    06  05  04  03  02   5  4  3  2  1

Dedicated to the members of the

Garden Club of North Carolina

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Preface to the Revised Edition

Introduction to the Revised Edition: The Life and Work of B. W. Wells, by Lawrence S. Earley

Preface

Introduction

Addendum

Part One. The Natural Gardens of North Carolina

Part Two. The Herbaceous Wildflowers of the Natural Gardens

Afterword: North Carolina’s Natural Gardens Today,

by Lawrence S. Earley

Appendix: Revision of Scientific Nomenclature,

by James W. Hardin

Index to Scientific Names

Index to Common Names

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

The first edition of The Natural Gardens of North Carolina was published in 1932 and reprinted in 1967 with only a few minor changes and an Addendum, written by Wells, to his original Introduction. Thirty-five years later, this revised edition differs from the original in several significant ways.

A new Introduction and Afterword have been written by Lawrence S. Earley to put Wells’s book and his achievements in a historical context. Wells’s original black-and-white photos of plants and habitats have been replaced with sixty-four line drawings and forty color photos.

Part II, Section 1, of the first edition—Artificial Key to the Genera of Herbaceous Wild Flowers of North Carolina—has been omitted. There were very few identification keys available in 1932 beyond those in professional manuals. Wells’s, therefore, provided a useful service for the general public at that time. It was and still is unique in that it was organized on the basis of habitat. Users were forced—just as Wells intended them to be—to think ecologically. There are now numerous, more complete keys available in popular and professional guides to the trees, wildflowers, and ferns of North Carolina, specific areas, and the Southeast that may be purchased in any bookstore. The remainder of Part II, the description of the plants and habitats of some 495 herbaceous wildflowers found in North Carolina, is included here, although the keys to important species, which were interspersed with the descriptions, have been omitted.

In reprinting Wells’s text, spelling has been updated (substituting drought for drouth, for example) and regularized, references to omitted portions of the original text have been removed, punctuation has occasionally been altered for readability, and a few surviving typographical errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the text remains as originally written.

In Wells’s 1932 Preface, he indicated that he had used as source books for botanical names three manuals: Britton and Brown’s Illustrated Flora of the Northern States and Canada (1913), Gray’s New Manual of Botany (1908), and Small’s Flora of the Southeastern United States (1903). Many of the names in these earlier manuals have been changed once or twice in the ninety or more years since their publication. Approximately 39 percent of the names in Wells’s Part I have changed. His original nomenclature has been preserved in this edition. However, an asterisk (*) appears after older names that have changed, and interested readers can refer to the Appendix, compiled by James W. Hardin (Emeritus Professor of Botany, North Carolina State University), where the more recent nomenclature is given.

SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS should be acknowledged for contributing their time and efforts in making this revised edition possible. Dorothy S. Wilbur-Brooks provided the sixty-four line drawings of plants mentioned by Wells. The color photographs were taken by Harry Ellis, Dr. James W. Hardin, William S. Lea, Dr. Alice B. Russell, and Dr. Thomas R. Wentworth, as indicated in the captions. As noted above, Lawrence S. Earley framed the text with new essays on Wells’s work and the subsequent fate of North Carolina’s natural gardens. James W. Hardin provided captions for the new drawings and color photographs, as well as supplying the Appendix and revising the indexes, and he and Lawrence S. Earley selected the color slides and assisted the publisher in a variety of other important ways. The efforts of Julie Moore and Benson Kirkman were critical early on in moving this project from idea to reality. Finally, the kind cooperation of the late Maude Wells must also be acknowledged.

Many others throughout the state—who must remain nameless here—have, by their persistent voices, encouraged the UNC Press to publish this revised edition of Wells’s enduringly popular book. They can now hold the results of their efforts in their hands.

INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION

The Life and Work of B. W. Wells

Lawrence S. Earley

On the small shelf of classic texts on the natural history of North Carolina, B. W. Wells’s The Natural Gardens of North Carolina keeps company with such eighteenth-century evergreens as John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Florida, Carolina and the Bahama Islands, and William Bartram’s Travels. Unlike them, The Natural Gardens is still an astonishingly useful guide. Indeed, as students of the state have known for decades, when it comes to understanding North Carolina’s landscape, there is still only one book to read and learn from. It is The Natural Gardens.

Though written seventy years ago, The Natural Gardens still teaches us how to look at North Carolina—that it is more than the mountains, the coast, and the rolling hills of the piedmont in between. Wells shows us that the landscape is a mosaic of different natural communities, each with its own suite of plants and animals related in unique ways. It was Wells who made the observation that in many places the state’s vegetation just doesn’t make sense; it’s all mixed up, primarily because of human alterations in the landscape.

No wonder The Natural Gardens has held up so well over the years. A dated style can doom a book for a modern audience as quickly as dated content matter. It is remarkable that neither of these problems has deeply flawed this book. Wells’s prose is serviceably crafted for a popular audience, simple, clear, and colorful. Describing Smith Island (now called Bald Head Island), Wells wrote lyrically: On the same winter days when subzero weather and deep snows are holding the Christmas tree forest of balsams and spruces in a death-like silence, the palmetto trees of Smith Island are softly vocal with the summer-like whisperings of warm breezes fresh from the Gulf Stream. Despite the passage of time, what Wells has to say in this book is still the most readable and informative account of the North Carolina landscape that has ever been written.

BERTRAM WHITTIER WELLS was a pioneer ecologist, a passionate conservationist, a careful and sometimes contentious scholar, and the author of many influential scientific papers. Though recognized in his day and ours for his pathbreaking work in understanding the ecology of the southeastern coastal plain, Wells devoted much of his life to making his scientific knowledge accessible to a wider audience. It may be ironic that he is remembered most widely for this book, one he wrote for a popular audience.

In 1919, Wells came to North Carolina State University (then North Carolina State College) to take the position of chairman of the Botany Department, a job he would hold until 1949. He was thirty-five years old. He already had a national, even international, reputation as an authority on insect galls, a specialty he had pursued for almost ten years. But in the year after his arrival, on a train trip to Wilmington, the view outside his window changed his life. Out of the railroad car window, I saw a vast flat area literally covered with wild flowers, he recollected years later. I immediately made up my mind to see it again. . . . I became convinced there was no such area of equal size and perfection with over a hundred species of herbaceous wild flowers blooming in profusion from late February to middle December.

It was the Big Savannah, a 1,500-acre treeless wetland near Burgaw that was half a mile wide and nearly two miles long. It was the first of several natural areas throughout the state that he was to call natural gardens. The spectacle of the year-long flower show dazzled his eyes, but new kinds of questions engaged his mind. Why did these plants grow here and not elsewhere? What factors made them grow in such abundance? He was looking not at individual plants but the way they related to each other and to their environment, an approach that embraces what we mean by the word ecology.

Today the concept is almost commonplace—when we look at the interrelationships between plants, animals, soil, and water, we’re talking in ecological terms. But we forget that even as recently as forty years ago the word was known only to specialists. The forest researcher Stephen Boyce, one of Wells’s students at North Carolina State in the late 1940s, recalled that when he told his family he was getting his Ph.D. in plant ecology, they asked, What’s ecology? In the 1920s, when Wells began his investigations, ecology was new and not very well respected.

After his exposure to the Big Savannah, Wells’s interest in insect galls quickly evaporated, and his professional life veered in another direction. That was the way he was, says James Troyer, professor of botany at North Carolina State University and author of Nature’s Champion: B. W. Wells, Tar Heel Ecologist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), a biography of Wells. He had tremendous enthusiasm. When he got interested in something, everything else went.

The vast natural areas of the North Carolina landscape beckoned to him, and soon he was ranging widely across the state, devoting himself to the study of the plant communities he found. Within two or three years of discovering the marvels of the Big Savannah, says Troyer, he had surveyed all the big plant communities of the state and written a publication that completely cataloged and described [them]. In that short time he had grasped these communities in essentially the same way that they are regarded today.

After his statewide survey, Wells began to study these plant communities in depth. He began with the Big Savannah, and then, over the next ten years, continued with studies of other areas—longleaf pine forests, pocosin wetlands, piedmont old fields, and mountain balds. Yet Wells spent relatively little time in the piedmont and the mountains; the coastal plain clearly drew his professional interest and remained the arena of his most important contributions.

In 1932, Wells summed up his discoveries about the state’s natural communities in The Natural Gardens of North Carolina. As James Troyer has described it in his biography of Wells, the book grew out of Wells’s attempts in the 1920s to popularize his scientific discoveries in numerous talks and articles. Ethel D. Tomlinson and Susan F. Iden, both members of the Garden Club of North Carolina, pressed him to make his knowledge even more accessible in a book about the state’s wildflowers. He began in 1931, completing it the following year. It was published in December 1932. Wells agreed to write it without compensation, and he turned over his royalties to the Garden Club.

The Natural Gardens was intended to be about the wildflowers of the state, and so it is—but with a typically Wellsian touch. Though Wells wanted to give wildflower enthusiasts an aid in plant identification, he wanted them to look at plants in a different way. He wanted them to think ecologically. Only when we are thinking in this manner do we make advances in the pursuit of truth and genuine understanding, he wrote. Only by appreciating the way wildflowers fit in their immediate environment, he was saying, could we truly understand them. Thus The Natural Gardens was an odd kind of wildflower book. It was divided into two parts: The Natural Gardens of North Carolina and The Herbaceous Wild Flowers of The Natural Gardens. In the second part readers found useful keys to identifying wildflowers as well as descriptions and photographs of individual plants. The first part contained his lessons in thinking ecologically.

For example, look at the way Wells handles the first few pages of the first chapter, on the seaside plant community. Before he mentions a single plant, he describes the conditions under which the plants will grow—the shifting sand, prevailing shoreward winds, salt spray off the ocean, and reflection of heat and light. Wells is saying that it’s only within the context of the ecosystem that we can understand what the plants must contend with and thus their full significance. From the chapter on what he calls shrub bogs, or pocosins, here is Wells explaining why peat underlies these vast and desolate areas.

The water in the surface soil layer . . . succeeds to a high degree in drowning billions of those invisible denizens of soil, the bacteria and fungi. This situation results in the slowing up of the decay process, for, as everyone knows, when you keep micro-organisms away from organic matter, there is no decay, as the vast supplies of canned goods testify. Hence it is that bogs are, in a sense, one of nature’s canning factories, where plant products are preserved.

Such colorful writing was a Wells trademark in this book. He never forgot the maxim that a good teacher is also an entertainer. And Wells was nothing if not a great teacher, enthusiastic, dynamic, and quick-witted. He had a gift of saying things in an interesting way, with enthusiasm, says Troyer. That’s what would capture a stranger on first meeting him. His eyes would sparkle and he would be talking about something in such a way that his whole person would be involved in what he was saying. The late botanist Robert Godfrey, another of Wells’s students, recalls that when he first came to North Carolina State in 1936, Wells set him on fire intellectually but also opened him up to new experiences. He was a very dynamic person, but he didn’t give all his attention to botany or biology or the college. One of his first questions to me was, ‘Do you dance?’ And he directed me to a dance instructor on Hillsborough Street where I and another graduate student took lessons. He didn’t want you to be just a botanist or ecologist. He wanted you to read things, think about things. I’d say he was a humanist.

Wells also believed in the democratic premise that education was for everyone, not just for university students. One of the things you must understand about Wells, says Stephen Boyce, was his long-time dedication to the education not only of his students but to older people across the state. As early as the 1920s, Wells was lecturing to garden clubs, schools, and other groups that wanted to hear him. In primitive automobiles on primitive roads, Wells brought the word about North Carolina’s natural wonders to countless school halls and unheated auditoriums in isolated villages and hamlets throughout the state. In one ten-year period, he gave over a hundred talks, many illustrated with lantern slides.

He loved North Carolina, says Maude Wells, his second wife. It was the love of his life, I think. He taught so many people to love North Carolina.

On the campus of North Carolina State, Wells was a popular teacher. The most eagerly anticipated part of his course in ecology was the field trip to the coastal plain, where students learned directly about ecosystems. But after spending the day poking about on sand dunes and in longleaf pine forests, the group would dance the night away at Carolina Beach. Photographs from one of these field trips show Wells looking unselfconsciously into the camera, sometimes bare-chested, a hint of a jaunty smile on his face. He was proud of his physique. He was not a tall man, but he was strong and wiry and possessed an astonishing physical vigor well into his old age. In his seventies and eighties, he would sometimes complain of younger companions who could not keep pace with him on frequent hikes to the summit of Mt. Mitchell.

In 1954, at the age of seventy, Wells retired from the university and moved with Maude to Rockcliff Farm, the riverbend farm along the Neuse River where he was to spend the final decades of his life. Not surprisingly, these were years of great vigor and accomplishment. He inventoried the plant life on their 154 acres, blazed trails throughout the woods along the river where he loved to walk, and threw himself into his painting hobby. He built a studio, laying the stone chimney himself, and produced over 300 paintings in these years. Intellectually, he was as vital as ever. His biographer notes that at the end of his life he subscribed to twenty-five magazines and read the New York Times daily.

When Bertram Whittier Wells died in 1978, at the age of ninety-four, he was one of the most revered ecologists of his generation, and one of the most influential—especially in his adopted state of North Carolina. His combination of scientific rigor and passionate love for the North Carolina landscape stimulated many younger men and women to take up the cause that Wells had championed for so long, the understanding and protection of the wild places that he so colorfully and justly named natural gardens.

PREFACE

In recent years a new emphasis has appeared in the field of plant study, which involves the attempt to understand the plant in relation to its environment. It tries to answer such an important question as why plants grow where they do and the equally significant one of why they are not present when absent from an area. Organism and environment constitute the real whole, so that ecology, the science which deals with both in their relation to each other, is becoming increasingly valuable as a major science helping us to understand the world about us. In this study the ecological approach is emphasized.

The first part of this popular book dealing with our natural gardens is devoted to a general account of the vegetation and habitat of each of the eleven major plant communities of North Carolina. The second part presents a description of the genera and important species of herbaceous wildflowers of the state.

The writer has always believed that a popular account of vegetation, systematically considered, should be an introduction to the professional manuals and not a mere repetition of these. Hence technicalities of all kinds have been avoided so far as possible. The emphasis is upon the genus or group of related species or kinds of plants. Only the professional botanist is interested in recognizing the forty species of goldenrod found in our area or the sixty species of aster. Even when the species are much fewer in number and separated by relatively unimportant characters, the author has stopped at the genus, realizing that such a complete differentiation of species should have no place in a popular account. It has been our aim to assist the amateur plant lover to learn the common names of the herbaceous wildflowers of North Carolina, most of which are recognized by a genus common name.

The woody plants of the state have not been included in Part II. Coker and Totten’s recently revised Trees of North Carolina covers that field in an excellent manner. The shrubs have been described in Apgar’s Shrubs of North America and in other manuals. Wildflowers in the popular mind are definitely the herbaceous plants; hence these, with a few exceptions, and these only, are dealt with in this account. It may be of interest to state here that of the latter, some five hundred genera are described in this book.

The author has freely used the standard technical manuals as source books: Britton and Brown’s Illustrated Flora of the Northern States and Canada, Gray’s New Manual of Botany, and especially Small’s Flora of the Southeastern United States. The nomenclature and sequence of the plant groups of the latter work have been adopted in this book. It is to be hoped that through this introductory work, many will be encouraged to purchase and use these larger professional manuals.

The appearance of this volume at this time has been made possible through the cooperation of the Garden Club of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina Press. Among the Club officials, mention must certainly be made of the very practical and enthusiastic support of the project by Mrs. S. H. Tomlinson of High Point, and to Miss Susan Iden of Raleigh goes the credit of originating the idea of the Garden Club sponsoring such a book as the one in hand.

Dr. I. V. Shunk, colleague of the writer, and Miss Beulah Weathers, secretary, have assisted materially in checking the many details connected with the botanical features. For this aid the author expresses full appreciation.

B. W. Wells

Raleigh, N.C.

November 14, 1932

INTRODUCTION

North Carolina is unique among the eastern states for possessing within her borders the best examples of the most diverse vegetations as these two criteria are judged in combination. Whoever the men were who designed the geographical biscuit cutter which sliced out the Old North State, they succeeded so well botanically that one might think of them as possessed with less political sense than vegetational acumen. In one east-west state unit they succeeded in including the very finest examples of the southern Appalachian high mountain plant communities, which constitute the southern extension of the Canadian balsam fir forest, along with very extensive developments of typical southern low country plant associations, savannas, pocosins, and swamps which range northward from the Gulf. In a very real sense North Carolina, though lying at right angles to the north-south longitudinal lines, unites Canada and Florida within a little over two-thirds of her length. On the same winter days when subzero weather and deep snows are holding the Christmas tree forest of balsams and spruces in a death-like silence, the palmetto trees of Smith Island are softly vocal with the summer-like whisperings of warm breezes fresh from the Gulf Stream. John Brickell, early North Carolina naturalist, was correct when he wrote in 1737, Of the Plants growing in this Country, I have given an Account of not the hundredth Part of what remains; a Catalog of which would be a Work of many years, and more than the Age of one Man to perfect, or bring into regular classes, this Country being so very large and different in its situation and its Soil.

And today with but 10 million acres under cultivation out of the state’s 31,200,000 acres, North Carolina is still an area of vast natural resources in a wild condition, and we use this phrase, natural resources, not only in the sense of monetary value but in that of educational and aesthetic resources as well—the kind of value implied in our title Natural Gardens.

The vegetation of North Carolina, approached from the ecological point of view, falls into eleven major plant communities or distinctive types of vegetation associated with distinctive habitats. Beginning, for convenience, with those near the sea these natural gardens are: (1) the dune or upland seaside community, (2) salt marsh, (3) freshwater marsh, (4) swamp forest, (5) aquatic vegetation, (6) shrub bog or pocosin, (7) grass-sedge bog or savanna, (8) sandhill, (9) old-field community, (10) great forest, (11) boreal or high mountain forest.

Close observation within these various communities discloses the possibility of a further classification into subcommunities. And these, in turn, may be correlated with slight changes in the habitat factor complex. However, these minor contrasts in the vegetation and habitat are at the present time only of interest to the specialist in ecology, and it must be confessed he understands them none too well.

The attention of the reader must be directed to the fact that in many places the vegetation seems all mixed up, and difficult to classify ecologically. Such areas are localities where destruction of the earlier stabilized vegetation has occurred and a process of plant succession is under way. Descriptions of such rapidly changing communities, which may involve the transition from one major community to another, will be given in connection with the various principal plant associations. Such apparently confusing areas yield readily to the understanding with regard to major features after a reasonable amount of ecological field experience.

In