Cabbage trivia!
As entirely different as they appear and taste now, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, collards, kale, and kohlrabi were all developed as cultivars from a single species of wild European cabbage, Brassica oleracea.
Sugar Pine is a new one for me. Loblolly, shortleaf, longleaf, slash, are a few varieties I know the names of, and I’m not even sure which of them has the long narrow cone that’s not as rough-textured as the ones you see decorated at Christmas. Those can get as long as a small pineapple but nowhere near as big around. Tell me more about Sugar Pine. I’ll go look it up online, too.
Fascinating!
Oh, and pineapple trivia!
Pineapple is in the bromeliad family, which means that its closest native relative (at least to us Southern folk) is good ol’ Spanish moss!
Damn, but that sounds familiar now that you said it. I heard that before but it slipped right out of my memory. See what fun can be had if you just start a thread on a whim! I’ve learned several new things off this notion.
Yes! I looked it up after that last post. All those other pines I mentioned, too, just to be sure I had them right. That is one bodacious cone on that Sugar Pine, too. I guess I can be excused from not being familiar with them, though, since I have yet to get any further west than Texas, and that was when I was a pre-schooler.
As far as I know, the pines in Alabama don’t have edible nuts, but I don’t know that for a fact. I do know that pines give way to Red Cedar in Tennessee, at least in the Nashville area. Not many big pines in this part of the state unless they were imported from further south. That’s one of the things I miss about Alabama. Big old pine trees and needles on the ground.
Actually, I have more trivia. You say that red cedar takes the place of pines as you move into the Nashville area. That’s true (although pines aren’t fully excluded.) Pines tend to have a harder time on limestone such as what makes up the bedrock of the Nashville Basin. But there’s a special type of habitat up there that is defined by the limestone, and is so closely associated with those cedars that they are known as “cedar glades.”
Here’s the simplified story:
Essentially, after the end of the last Ice Age, things warmed up to a point quite a bit warmer than it is now. As a result, the arid/semiarid prairie and desert communities expanded out of the Southwest and Midwest, until they reached almost out to the East Coast, taking all those xeric native plants with them. Eventually, things started to cool back down, and the good old mixed oak/hickory forests began filling in what was desert/prairie. The only places that those xeric plants could hold on was the glades. Glades are situated on shallow geology, which precludes the formation of deep soils. As a result, trees can’t really grow inside glades. And they’re hot. All that exposed rock wide open to Southern heat in the summer, combined with rapid runoff, means that, in effect, those glades ARE deserts. And they are typically FULL of rare plants that are hundreds (or a thousand or more) miles away from the nearest others of their species. And in some special cases, the glades contain endemic plants…species which occur nowhere else on earth. There’s a set of glades in Bibb County, Alabama that happen to occur on a shallow outcrop of very toxic dolomite. The flora of those glades are incredible. 60-some-odd rare and endangered plants, and (IIRC) 20 or more endemic species (including 8 or 10 that were unknown to science until 1996, when the glades were botanically “discovered.”)
And typically, those Nashville glades are surrounded by eastern red cedars.
Very, very cool areas. I’m doing my PhD dissertation on the evolutionary molecular genetics of some glade species. 
I’m truly amazed, Ogre at the breadth of your knowledge on these topics. My dad, who studied agronomy at Auburn back in the 30’s told me all sorts of things about the plant life in Alabama when I was a kid. One of the things he either didn’t understand or was too quick to be dogmatic about it was that the acidity in the soil was a major factor in why you’d never see pines and red cedars in the same place. My brother and I always wanted to take him to those places where we had found cedars surrounded by pines, or pines surrounded by cedars. But we just never got around to it.
Those glades you mention are plentiful in the Wilson County area, and the Cedars of Lebanon State Park has the glades as a major attraction.
You know much about the sinkholes in the limestone areas of Tennessee and Alabama? The geodes in Coffee County? Just some topics I’d like to know your version of, since I’ve heard other versions and have never really sought out a source I’d take at face value.
Thanks, Zeldar. I’m a dedicated nature-geek.
I know of no particular reason pines and cedars couldn’t grow in the same places. I mean, I know a bunch of places (glades in north Georgia, actually) where cedars, Virginia pine, and shortleaf pine (as well as some loblollys, if I recall) coexist.
Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. Man, glades are everywhere up there. I was playing disc golf up there a few months ago, and as I was standing at the tee box, it occurred to me that the fairway looked suspiciously glade-like. I started looking around for plants, and sure enough, I started seeing a lot of Nashville breadroot, Croton spp., as well as others.
I know a little about these formations. In a former existence, I worked for the National Park Service. I was stationed at Russell Cave National Monument, in Jackson County, Alabama. It sits right in the middle of a huge cavernous area affectionately known as TAG (it’s situated right in the corner of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.) I was doing all kinds of ecological monitoring and species inventories, and the nature of the park required lots and lots of caving. We’d go investigate new sinkholes all the time. I remember one time, part of a local woman’s cow pasture up and fell into the ground overnight.
Now, this is fascinating. I don’t know anything about this. Is Coffee County famous for its geodes? I’ve never heard anything about that. What do you know about it?
Ogre, all I know about the geodes is some second-hand information I got from a guy here (we were at his house for dinner and he had a bunch of geodes lying around as ornaments and conversation-starter sorts of things) who claimed you could just pick them up off the ground in Coffee County. I have yet to go there to see how true that is or whether you have to go to a specific place in the county or what. But it made for some fun talk at the table.
The sinkhole thing made me remember another yarn that either Daddy or some other “old timer” told me about a sinkhole over near Tuscaloosa where some guys (may have been geologists or students or drunks – or all three) filled some nail kegs with enough sand to make them sink and dropped them in a big pond that was over a sinkhole and later recovered the kegs from a creek or stream that they were either suspicious of or had prior knowledge about that the sinkhole fed an aquifer that ended in that stream. The weird thing about the yarn was the distance involved: miles between the sinkhole and the creek. And I always wondered how much that sort of thing goes on in this area, and how easy it is to figure out where a sinkhole’s outflow will be.
I’m damned if I can see any connection to pineapples in either case, but I already said I didn’t care where this thread went.
Yo, Ogre, maybe I heard wrong, or misremembered, or else the geodes in Cannon County and not Coffee County were what he was describing. It’s been several years since the conversation.
I also found mention of geodes in Loretto (Lawrence County) so maybe that whole southern tier of Tennessee counties are in the geode zone. I’m not much on geodes if you need me to say so.
I can’t swear to it in that particular case, but I’m pretty skeptical that a keg full of nails could be carried that far. I mean, sure, it’s flowing water. But carrying a keg of nails? That would have to be a serious flow.
Typically, groundwater stream flow is measured via dye tracing. They drop a non-toxic, brightly colored dye into a sinkhole, a cave stream, etc. Little mesh baggies of activated carbon are placed in suspected stream outflows (springs, other cave streams, waterfalls). The idea is that the dye will bind to the carbon, and it can be detected later upon analysis.
Groundwater mapping is a hit-or-miss game, as you can see. Honestly, mapping a complete groundwater system is damn near impossible, since there are so many possible inlets/outlets that the investigator may never know about.
Dude. I’m so totally going to Cannon County some time. That’s awesome!
Actually, Ogre, if it makes any difference (and I can’t see how it would) the kegs had sand in them and not nails, but the weight would probably be at least as great no matter which. I have heard of the dye technique, too. I share your skepticism, but you know how it is when somebody not prone to lie to you tells you something like this. Good yarn, little facts.
But I’ll share something I learned just last week working a word puzzle that startled me. The Ebbing And Flowing Spring near Rogersville, Tennessee (Northeast Tennessee near Virginia) is one of only two such springs. Any idea where the other would be?
Never heard of such a thing. I had no idea that any springs exhibit tidal characteristics. One thing that strikes me, however, is the temperature. That’s really extremely cold water for a spring in Tennessee. I’ve heard of warmer cave water at 8,000 feet in Utah. 34 is really, really, REALLY cold. Most cave water I’m familiar with is more like 55-60 degrees year-round. It does vary with latitude and altitude, but Rogersville is not really either that far north or that high up. I wonder if temp has anything to do with the tidal character.
I yield to your knowledge of such things. I was just blown away with the “only two such” part. That sort of thing catches my attention.
A similar thing from way back is that Prattville was (maybe still is) known as The Fountain City back when I was a kid. That’s because the local version was that there were more artesian wells there than anywhere else. The “than anywhere else” part always troubled me, but there were (most likely still are) oodles of them there in the part of old Prattville down near the gin shop and the cotton mill and Autauga Creek. My uncle had one in his yard that had the best tasting water I ever drank, and there were always-flowing fountains all around town.
I’ve wondered about the etymology of grape and grapefruit, especially as there is a similar relationship between their Hebrew names. Eshkol = bunch (usually of grapes); eshkolit = grapefruit.
Add the custard apple, breadfruit and soursoup as fruits that look a bit like pine cones and grenades.
So that’s why they call pomegranate syrup “grenadine!” Minor ignorance fought!