#Canebrake

[headspace-hotel]

so i'm going to have to move like 60 rivercanes indoors for the hard frost coming since i don't have time to put them all in bigger pots and pile mulch around them and everything

i must say. i was not expecting to end up with 150+ river cane seedlings. I would have been fucking thrilled to have even two

they need repotted ASAP because they are growing rhizomes outwards to try to spread and hitting the sides of the pots, a bunch of them are growing additional stems as tall as the original stem at the very edges of their pots because they wanna Expand

[officialrailscales]

Rattler Canebrake 🌑

QTR-LT Stop | Carbon Black

RSB/M | Carbon Black

G10 XOS-H | Honeycomb | Black FR4 | 3-Slot

G10 XOS | Honeycomb | Black FR4 | 4-Slot

G10 XOS-H | Honeycomb | Black FR4 | 4-Slot

MonoLift Riser | Carbon Black

LEAF DBAL-A3 Sight | Carbon Black

Hardtop Mount | Carbon Black

MCX CSMR Button | Carbon Black

- RS

[paleodictyoptera]

Headspace hotel has infected me with the tism about canebrakes, mostly in the searching for content and not finding any

[americangrove]

Easement

I did not see a parakeet. Nor did I expect to because the last time anyone saw the kind I could have seen was one hundred years ago. But had I seen one, it would have had a green body, a yellow neck, and a red crown, like a granny smith apple, turning into a golden delicious, ending with a fuji flourish. Unlike apples though, this parakeet would have been indigenous. Back in his day, Audubon fixed four of them, all on a branch of matured cocklebur, their name swirling below–Carolina Parrot or Parakeet—just as live ones would have swirled above and outside his page, until they all passed (a century later) into life only re-presented (drawings, pictures, reminiscence, taxidermy).[1] So, I did not see a parakeet.

But I did see cane, as I was in a canebrake. Switchcane, rivercane and hill cane, the genus Arundinaria trio, bamboos native to North America. I am not sure which species of cane I was in, though my guess is switchcane (A. tecta), as rivercane (A. gigantea) also has the name of giant cane for its remarkable height—at maturity it is taller than a grown man on a grown horse; and hill cane (A. appalachiana) has a topographic preference that did not describe the place where I stood. 

Nevertheless, they all look similar, more like plants in diagram rather than plants in dirt, their linear stems appear pencil drawn, their lance like leaves seem generated by straight edge. Enmassed, canebrakes look like early computer-generated greenery before sinuosity was possible. In a way, they are an early plant—a fire rolls through, clears the understory, perhaps takes a tree or two down with it; the flames cease and cane is among the first to resurface, and resurface quickly for it is not as dependent on reseeding as it is on its rhizome.[2] Like the longleaf pines which it once accompanied over the land, it looked forward to the fire next time. Out of the flames came thickets, which though they may have barred other plants, they were quite welcoming to Carolina parakeets, warblers, “cougars, bobcats and wolves” canebrake rattlesnakes, creole pearly eye butterfly and untold others.[3] Walls of cane were a kind of mass housing for the many migrant, squatter and settling organisms of the southeast. They (particularly river cane) also provided materials of home and place making for humans, as their straight stems were (and still are) gathered by Native American communities especially the Cherokee.[4] Once hollowed out, canes can become basket or blowgun, mat or flute, or—as has become a rustic object— fishing poles.  There are not many significant canebrakes today. Cattle ate them, draining and development cleared them, fire suppression stymies their return; the scattered groupings I see along the road are remnants of a lost empire, holding out amidst a concrete ground that stifles them, a dense forest that smothers them, and farmland that suppresses them. But unlike the parakeet they remain. Though, like the parakeet, I was not in the canebrake to see the cane—it fortunately just happened to be there.

I only saw the canebrake, because I was in a conversation easement, which I only noticed because of a small, yellow, all caps sign—"NORTH CAROLINA SOIL AND WATER CONSERVATION EASEMENT BOUNDARY”. “Easement” is one of those legal terms that I knew more by general use than specific meaning.  Modified by the word “conservation” easement suggested the land was protected, but why, by who and to what extent was unclear until I looked it up later. The NC Department of Environmental Quality defines conservation easements as: “voluntary legal agreements designed to ensure the long-term viability and protection of the natural resources within a surveyed and recorded boundary. The easement planning process establishes allowances and restrictions that are beneficial to the landowner, the easement holder, and the environment.”[5] The conservation easement then is not foremost a means of protection, but (much more interesting I think), it is a way of organizing layers of rights and access upon a property.  Someone owns the lands, but the easement gives some else a right to use it (or not use it, in a way, when conservation is the right being exercised) which in turn inflects the rights and possibilities of both the one who possess the land and others (like myself) who neither own the land, nor hold an easement, but still gain some benefit from the easement’s existence (i.e. enjoying a now rare landscape feature).[6] The yellow sign that alerted me to presence of the easement was nailed into a sweet gum tree. In the FAQ for conservation easements one of the questions asks: “Are there way to precisely identify the boundaries of a conservation easement?”  

The answer:

As part of the restoration project, all easement corners were surveyed and monumented in the ground with metal rods. Most of these rods are also topped with 2” diameter aluminum caps. DEQ also uses a variety of methods to post easement boundaries including signage, metal posts, and tree blaze. These may be a witness post or witness tree, located near the line but not the exact location of the boundary.[7]

In some ways, my studies right now could be described as figuring out the extra-legal work of these “witness trees” and their “artefacted” forms into “witness posts” (and columns and panels and all sorts of other wooden things that “witness” human contracts and contact).[8] It gave me pause then, after reading the FAQ to realize that I had witnessed a witness tree that still witnesses (instead of being one in a historical document or text), but that in the moment the sweet gum’s legal function had not even registered to me. I was much more taken by the train of ants along its trunk likely extracting honeydew from aphids up in the canopy, and by the trail of Virginia creeper going up further than the ants, in search of its own luminous food. From the tree’s perspective, witnessing a survey has been only one frame in a very long film still being made around, and around and around it.

In truth, I did even see the easement sign until I was near the tree. And the reason I was near the tree is because a few feet away from it, along the road was the initial object of my attention—a set of black and yellow object marker signs denoting some feature adjacent to the road, a feature which is this case was a culvert underneath the road. Culverts, in their projecting pipe form look like engineering/infrastructural litter, debris left over from a drainage project. In addition to being the ugliest kind they are also the cheapest and least efficient—they do little to channel a flow directly into their opening, which limits how much comes out their exit, potentially leading to the water overflowing the road. Luckily, the culvert I came to see is the recessed box kind with wings extending on its side to welcome water into its inlet, guiding it towards its outlet.[9] Embedded in the earth, moss covered, and a bit worn, there is a minimalist beauty to this kind culvert that does not readily betray the complexity of its task at once to convey ground traffic above and the traffic of water underneath. On the outlet side, some of the water pooled, its clear bottom supported small fish and tadpoles, while its silty edge moistened mosses and grasses and a bit further up also the canes. The water this culvert channels comes from the Indian Branch River, which drains into Deep Creek River, which drains into the Tar River, which drains into the Pamlico Sound, which joins the Atlantic Ocean. Follow these larger waters and you’ll find the larger history of the canes and the Cherokees, the parakeets and the many trees which have witnesses the work of so many kinds of settling, the human version being the most recent, but likely not the last. Though we often like to think otherwise, our homes and other feats of building are ultimately done under a kind of “natural easement”, the land allows us access for a while, but as all the other prior communities of plants or persons show, no claim of possession is final, no root is long and deep enough to always remain (though many can be long remnant). Maybe I will be able to spend a good deal of my life following these state and nation spanning roots, weavings, waters and rhizomes.  

But it is not yet time to go so far out. Afterall, the only reason I saw the signs for the culvert, which put me in range to see the blaze on the tree, which brought me close enough to see a canebrake, which led me to imagine what it would be like to still be able to see parakeets, was because I pass the culvert nearly every day when I am home. Fifteen hundred feet from the front door, I have crossed this place many times running, enjoying the brief respite of shade provided by the gums before the land opens again for the farms; and I have driven by it many more times on the way to town, the car bouncing lightly over the culvert.  So, I have noticed this spot for nearly thirty years, but this is first time I have “witnessed” the three hundred years of history flowing and growing in it. Either part separately is valuable—to live in a place and feel its features or to come to a place and learn its features, nesting sensations (the shade of the trees, the bump of the road…) or nesting histories (extinction, settlement…). But to bring them together, may, for a moment sustain that special sense which is just able to catch an apple-colored dart zipping across the far end of the eye.

Photos

[1] The Carolina Parakeet, once common from New York down to the Gulf of Mexico, seems to have gone in the first half of the 20th century. The last documented one, named Incas, died in captivity in 1918. It is unclear exactly why it went extinct though habitation destruction seems part of the problem. See: https://johnjames.audubon.org/last-carolina-parakeet and https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-carolina-parakeet-go-extinct-180968740/

[2] There is strong interest in canes and restoring canebrakes. For a general overview see: Barret, Richard; Grabowski, Janet; Williams, M.J. "Giant Cane and Other Native Bamboos: Establishment and Use for Conservation of Natural Resources in the Southeast" U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, 2021. For a 18th account of cane use in North Carolina see: Lawson, John.  A New Voyage to North Carolina. London: 1709. Digitized at https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lawson/menu.html.  Lawson recorded  many ways that cane was used by the Cherokee.

[3] See: Platt, Steven G., Christopher G. Brantley, and Thomas R. Rainwater. “Canebrake Fauna: Wildlife Diversity In A Critically Endangered Ecosystem.” Journal of The Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society 117, No. 1 (2001): 1–19.

[4] For contemporary work to maintain these traditions see: https://theonefeather.com/2012/05/22/river-cane-important-cherokee-cultural-staple/

[5] See: https://www.deq.nc.gov/about/divisions/deq-administrative-divisions/north-carolina-stewardship-program/living-your-conservation-easement#Aretherewaystopreciselyidentifytheboundariesofaconservationeasement-8672

[6] Though my enjoyment in this case was not a right because this easement is not public (i.e., I was trespassing).

[7] See link on note 4.

[8] Other have already done some of this work. See for example: Miller, Daegan. This Radical Land. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2018.

[9] Here is a wonderfully informative video on culverts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15XJDmawbYU

Images:

Carolina Parrot or Parakeet” in The Birds of America: From Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories Volume 4. John James Audubon. New York: J.B. Chevalier, 1842. p.306.

Image 3208 (Canebrake in Northeast Louisiana early 1900’s). USDA Bureau of Plant Introduction. See note 2 for source.

[clairity-org]

Canebrake, Wagoner, OK 5/18/24 by Sharon Mollerus

[alonglistofbirds]

[2027/11056] Canebrake groundcreeper - Clibanornis dendrocolaptoides

Order: Passeriformes Suborder: Tyranni Family: Furnariidae

Photo credit: João Vitor Andriola via Macaulay Library

[thunderandsage]

rewatching season 1 of iwtv and the sheer detail and care put into the series still blows me away, but as a former orchestra kid my absolute favorite is in episode 1 where they play “dances in canebrakes” by florence price in the background—first of all, it’s a really pretty piece, but more importantly, it would have been so incredibly easy for the producers to just fish out something from a white male composer (of which there is a sheer deluge in classical music), but they chose something composed by a black woman instead, and that small addition, in the wider context with the themes of this show, just makes it all the more satisfying to watch

[digitalmagpie]

"

It started with a few sentences in a book I was reading about the history of the Appalachian Mountains. The book briefly discussed Kentucky, before colonization, being covered with dense thickets called canebrakes, which mostly disappeared when settlers plowed and cleared the fertile bottomlands where they grew. “Cane,” the book claimed, was likely the origin of the name Kentucky—“Kain-tuck.”

“Cane” was just what the settlers called the tall, woody plant that dominated in canebrakes—the name refers to any of the three similar plant species belonging to the genus Arundinaria. In Kentucky, it was most likely A. gigantea, or giant river cane. Giant river cane has no relationship to plants like sugar cane, and are actually North America’s only native bamboo.

Bamboo? In Kentucky?

I recalled having seen some strangely bamboo-like plants in the area, including a large patch in an empty lot close to my house. My memory rushed back to several years ago, when my brother had been camping in a “bamboo forest” along a creek that bordered a farm. How strange, I had thought. Who would plant bamboo in the middle of nowhere like that?

Unless…it was native bamboo?"

[vibinwiththefrogs]

Omg thank you for all the information 😭 I'll respond to this all more succinctly next weekend because I'm not at the house with the cane during the week to take note on it. I do have a followup post I made a few days ago right here

I also am planning to move updates about this and other yard activities to @pokeberry-enthusiast . I will most likely clear more and post more notes next weekend.

Cane/Bamboo Adventures Part 1/?

So we just moved into a new house and there's this huge thing in the very back of the yard along a creek that I thought was bamboo, then I thought it was cane, and then after checking as many cane ID posts and videos I could find, I'm still completely unsure. My friend who's a wildlife student says it doesn't look like bamboo to her, but we both agree it doesn't look like the cane we've seen around South Georgia. She said it must be Arundinaria gigantea because no other cane gets this large, but all the cane we've seen identified as A. gigantea doesn't look like this. Here's my notes and some pics.

First, the leaves are much smaller than cane I've seen around here. Even very small, young cane around here has leaves about the length of my forearm.

Second, a couple things online I found distinguishing bamboo from cane say that new bamboo branches grow outward, while cane grows more upward. However there seems to be both upward and outward shoots on this bunch (examples of both pictured above). Also worth noting, the picture above on the left is the biggest diameter branch I found. I have relatively small hands for context (I wear small-medium sized gloves).

Then here's just some more pictures. I crawled down into a creek for the root picture (left)(a steep 7 foot drop haha). The middle picture is the youngest bunch I found, again it doesn't resemble cane I've seen around here. The picture on the right is a further away picture after I cleared some dead branches.

Also worth noting, this is tucked behind a house, between a fence, a creek, and like 3 trees. So it doesn't have a ton of space to grow, and I'm guessing that's why it's so dense.

If anyone happens to know anything about this please let me know! A week or so ago I emailed a guy from NC State and uploaded it on inaturalist, but I haven't received any replies or ID 😭

[headspace-hotel]

listen one of the major reasons i care so much about Arundinaria is that she's gotta be legit the most exciting rising star in the evolutionary world.

Flowering plants emerge like 100mil years ago, proceed to become the baddest bitches on planet earth with hundreds of thousands of species found in every environment.

from this lineage emerges the GRASS which, using the simple technologies of "Grow leafs from the bottom so the tops can get eaten and you can just keep a-goin'" and "Not die when stepped on" become the undisputed masters of the sunny and arid regions

From the lineage of the GRASSES. Emerges a grass that decides to step up its game and invent WOOD to become some sort of fucked up tree. This grass is known as WOODY BAMBOO and it kicks everybody's ass.

The woody bamboo is mostly thriving in Asia, but around 2mil years ago, a bamboo got LOST AS FUCK and accidentally went to NORTH AMERICA. It turns out the south-eastern part of North America is a downright luxurious climate for a bamboo and so the bamboo actually evolved into its own genus.

However, there was an ICE AGE that froze a bunch of North America and the bamboo was forced to a tiny edge of the Gulf Coast. Fortunately, the bamboo made a mutualistic symbiosis with HUMANS, which used controlled burning to create its ideal habitats in exchange for using the stems for a super-strong, versatile, flexible, water resistant material for literally everything. So basically it spread all throughout the Southeast of North America and formed its own habitat type, a bamboo forest environment known as a CANEBRAKE.

It's native North American bamboo, y'all. It's been reduced to 2% of its former extent and a lot of people don't even know it exists.

This plant is going places we can't let this shining streak of weird-ass plants with ideas just strange enough to work collapse because of a freak colonialism incident

Arundinaria gigantea my absolute beloved

[officialrailscales]

6.75” Rattler Canebrake

QTR Stop | Terra Bronze

RSB/M | Terra Bronze

HTP Solo’s | Matrix | FDE | 1.5-Slot

HTP Solo’s | Matrix | FDE | 1-Slot

MonoLift Riser | Terra Bronze

MCX CSMR Button | Terra Bronze

- RS

[thenarrativefoil]

2024 is the year I start applying all my hobbies for practical use

plants -> foraging

painting/sculpture -> car repair

fish -> aquaculture

i am about to get my hoosier on fuck this stupid city life im getting in the dirt

[thehatmage]

@leafstranger I found it! The blog is @headspace-hotel they have a ton more on it on their blog.

Where's that Native North American Canebreak/Bamboo post?

I was walking Pip near work the other day and spotted this, which I recalled using as a kid to make panpipes of a sort, and wondered if it was one of the North American native canebreak/bamboo species people get excited about:

I've walked that path before during this time of year and this is the first time I've spotted it this thickly -- previously, it was just the occasional plant.

[squawkoverflow]

A new variant has been added!

Canebrake Wren (Cantorchilus zeledoni) © Steven Easley

It hatches from black, bold, bright, brushy, few, plain, quick, rich, rusty, short, small, western, white, and whitish eggs.

squawkoverflow - the ultimate bird collecting game          🥚 hatch    ❤️ collect     🤝 connect

[clairity-org]

Canebrake, Wagoner, OK 5/17/24 by Sharon Mollerus

[alonglistofbirds]

[2028/11056] Canebrake wren - Cantorchilus zeledoni

Order: Passeriformes Suborder: Passeri Superfamily: Certhioidea Family: Troglodytidae (wrens)

Photo credit: Daniel Winzeler via Macaulay Library