Geek out with me about critters and plants on a mountaintop in Virginia. I’ll share what I’m learning as I try to bring native plants back on 200 acres of old farmland and tell stories from my encounters on the mountain.

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In this issue

• Field notes: Ice capades

• Signs of life: Giant asparagus?

• Reader updates

• Recommended reading

• Book news

• Questions for YOU

• The Official Mountain Poodle

Field notes

Ice Capades

After weeks of alternating ice, snow, high winds, and below-freezing temps, we’re about to be visited by a cluster of springlike days. My birthday is at the end of the month, and my parents will tell me, as they do every year, that in the DC area where I grew up, the day of my birthday has always been warm—warmth being, perhaps, a relative thing this time of year. Although I remember notable warm days, temps in the 50s and 60s, I was sure that the claim that it was an annual event was apocryphal and would not be borne out by actual weather of record. So I checked.

Lesson: my mother is always right. In 48 of the past 60 years, the high temp was above 45 degrees on my birthday. More than half the time, it was at least 50 degrees. After the winter we’ve had, we could all use a spring preview, a day or two to try and make up for the work time in the field lost to all the tough weather.

The photo at the top of this newsletter shows some of our orchard cherries coated in ice. It looked like a wonderland, but the ice felled trees, large limbs, and power lines, knocking out power to thousands of people, including me. And the steep mountain road was blocked by the aforementioned fallen trees. Another reminder that living on a mountain comes with some, um, inconveniences.

But it was pretty. And there were some impressive icicles:

Three trees that stand sentry over the old cemetery were damaged by the ice storm. The one on the far right is a persimmon, and the one in the middle is an American hazelnut. Both of these are native. The hazelnut was hardest hit; I hope it will come back. I haven’t been able to identify the tree on the left. My usually reliable plant app gave me four totally different answers, and I’m pretty sure all of them are wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if the right answer is completely obvious to someone who knows trees better than I do!

If you can identify the tree this bud comes from, please write and let me know!

A couple of weeks after the ice storm, we had a day of wind gusts up to 50-60mph. (Fortunately, a lot of the vulnerable trees had already come down.) I found myself out driving in that wind, and it is not a situation I care to repeat.

Despite the damage to so many trees here during those extreme weather events, the old white oak on the hill lost no limbs, sustained no damage. It’s been here for 300 years, and I guess it’s learned a thing or two about surviving.

Signs of Life

Giant asparagus or native plant?

I first noticed this plant shortly after one of the fields here was bush-hogged for the first time. It stood out in a field dominated by a mix of native and nonnative grasses and native yellow crownbeard. The woody stems and flame-shaped “paint brushes” remind me of asparagus, but the way the plants branch and curve, as in the photo below, they look more like elaborate candelabras or, as per their name, antlers. This is staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), native to the eastern and midwestern US. From a distance, its droopy, pointy pinnate leaves remind of the invasive ailanthus. The sumac can stay small, like a shrub, or it can grow to 30 feet tall. It spreads through rhizomes, so it’s often found in thickets like this. It grows well in dry rocky soil, and I’m glad to see it in this field.

Its red berries provide food for birds, like the bluebird, bobwhite quail, and mourning dove, and critters like skunks. More than fifty species of pollinators use the plant, an added benefit for local birds. There are carpenter bees that will lay their eggs inside the branches, and the sumac is a food plant for the red-banded hairstreak. It may not be asparagus, but the plant is edible. The berries are tart with a lemony flavor that works well in a sumac version of lemonade and can be tasty in cocktails. They can be used as is or dried and ground into a powder for use as a spice. The berries are high in vitamin C, and they’ve been used in some cultures to treat coughs and stomach upset. Apparently, the young first-year shoots of sumac can be peeled and eaten, and unlike the berries, they’re sweet.

You’re unlikely to confuse stag horn sumac with poison sumac; the latter has white berries—don’t eat those! Also, poison sumac grows in swampy places, rather than relatively dry prairies and grasslands.

If you’re considering taste-testing sumac and other local plants, the book Southeast Foraging by Chris Bennett provides a helpful introduction.

Reader Updates

I’m always eager to hear about what readers are seeing and doing in the natural world wherever they live, and I’m grateful to readers who shared their observations and thoughts with me this month.

From Barry* in Maryland:

“When I am not writing and singing for kids, my wife and I seem to be living parallel lives with you and your family… twenty-five years ago, we traded in our 42-acre farm property in Amherst County, Virginia (bought when I was in my early twenties) for a 16-acre distressed property in Montgomery County, Maryland. That project started a steady stream of conservation and clean-up projects, including cleaning a 2-3 mile stretch of woods along the Patuxent River watershed next to our land… I have finally turned from cleaning up and restoring these properties, trail maintenance, and wildlife brush piles to meadow restoration and stream restoration.”

*Note: The letter-writer is Barry Louis Polisar, a longtime songwriter and performer of children’s music whose songs are funny, which endeared him to lots of kids over the years (as well as to parents who were tired of Barney the Dinosaur). Songs like “Don’t Put Your Finger Up Your Nose,” “Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan,” and “He Eats Asparagus, Why Can’t You Be that Way.”

Recommended Reading

In March, I’ll be speaking at the fabulous Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Va. (More on that below!) In preparation for a panel I’m moderating, I’ve been reading the historical novel The Last Whaler by Cynthia Reeves. This is an epistolary novel told in the alternating voices of a Norwegian whaler and his botanist wife who are struggling to survive in the Arctic in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s a dark, moving story, and the reader gets a visceral sense of what life was like at a whaling camp and in isolated parts of the Arctic at that time in history, how it feels to live through a sunless Arctic winter, all with compelling descriptions of the setting—the weather, the ice, the wildlife, and the plants.

“The moisture in my breath turned instantly to tiny particles of ice, freezing in mid-air and falling to the ground.”

Book news

Bad Naturalist is now available wherever books are sold in stores and online, in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook formats. You can sample the audiobook here.

The Washington Post ran a feature about my meadow restoration project, “Why a ‘bad gardener’ spent four years restoring a meadow: Author Paula Whyman’s dream of a modest ecological project took a wild turn on a Virginia mountain” by Ashley Stimpson, with photos by Matt McClain. The piece ran online and later on the cover of the Post’s Local Living section.

I’m featured in an interview in Garden & Gun magazine, “In Bad Naturalist, a Virginia Writer Gets a Humbling Crash Course in Ecology” by Lindsey Liles.

Author and critic Martha Anne Toll interviewed me in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, “Writing as Restoration: Paula Whyman on ‘Bad Naturalist.’”

Excerpts from Bad Naturalist appeared in Modern Farmer and The Writer’s Chronicle.

I was interviewed by Radio France’s station France Inter, for a weekly program focused on nature, hosted by journalist Camille Crosnier. “L’ecrivaine qui voulait reensauvage sa montagne”… If you speak French here’s your chance to practice! (My quotes are in English…)

Here I am on Finding the Throughline, talking in-depth with podcast host Kate Hanley about my writing process, curiosity, and immersive research.

You can find these links and more on my website news/event page.

Upcoming Events!

I may be coming soon to a place near you to talk about BAD NATURALIST. Please come out and say hello! New events and the latest details can be found on my website. If you don’t see your city or town on this list yet, please reach out, and I’ll see what I can do to get there!

Wednesday, February 26, 7pm, Little Washington Theatre, Washington, VA. I’ll be in conversation with former Washington Post ombudsman and Foothills Forum Board Chair Andy Alexander. Sponsored by Rapp-at-Home and RAAC, and The Open Book of Warrenton. RSVP encouraged but not required (it’s free!). [Note this event was moved from the Rappahannock County Library.]

Tuesday, March 11 at 7pm, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA, in conversation with the fabulous author Laura Zigman. (Please note, there are two locations, and I’m appearing at the Cambridge store at 1815 Massachusetts Ave.) RSVP here (it’s free) 

Thursday, March 13, The Nature of Reading Bookshop, along with the Madison Environmental Commission, the Native Plant Society of New Jersey, and the Museum of Early Trades and Crafts are hosting an event where I’ll be in conversation with Ann Wallace, Poet Laureate of Jersey City, and Kim Correro, master gardener and co-leader of the Hudson chapter of the NPSNJ. Both are hosts of The Wildstory podcast. The talk takes place at the Museum’s Education Annex, 23 Main St., Madison, NJ. Registration and details here (it’s free).

March 20-23, The Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, VA, is always a fun and stimulating venue for celebrating books and meeting authors and just generally getting to hang out with people who love reading and talking about books! The Festival draws speakers from all over the country, and I’m delighted to be speaking on two panels:

—On Thursday afternoon 3/20, I’ll speak on a panel called “The Wilderness Within,” with author Sally Chaffin Brooks, moderated by Peter Hedlund, Director of Encyclopedia Virginia.

—On Friday afternoon 3/21, I’ll moderate a panel called “Navigating a Changing Climate through Storytelling,” with authors Cynthia Reeves, Ellen Prager, and Dave Jones.

Check my website event page, or my Instagram or Bluesky feeds for details about events, and for more interviews, podcasts, and features.

Want me to visit your book club? You can reach me through my website contact page.

A special request

If you read the book in any format (and if you enjoyed it!), please post a review on the Amazon book page! It helps!

What’s happening in your neck of the woods?

Tell me where you are and what you see this month, in a park near where you live, or in your own yard or window box. Send me a photo, if you like.

And don’t forget to tell me about your favorite nature-related book or podcast.

The Official Mountain Poodle

Cleo posing in the meadow in the golden hour, on a rare non-snowy, non-icy day, against a backdrop of broomsedge and little bluestem.

Now’s a good time to subscribe for more mountain discoveries, book news, and the requisite poodle photos.

Thanks for joining me on the mountain!

Until next month—

Paula W.

Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop

Now available in hardcover, audiobook, and e-book everywhere books are sold!

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