Our remarkable region

For lovers of wildflowers and all things wild and wonderful, biological diversity is the spice of life. It’s the thing that accounts for the fact that here, along the southern tip of the Blue Ridge chain of mountains, we have more than a thousand species of flowering plants, some of which occur nowhere else on earth. We have songbirds, salamanders, crawfish, furbearers, and other creatures of the forest that are so rare, they are now threatened or endangered. One of several things that makes all this biological diversity possible is that we have a truly amazing diversity of habitats supporting a remarkable matrix of plants and animals.

If you want to get a feel for just how unique our area is, go to the Glassy Mountain Heritage Preserve just outside the City of Pickens. Follow the walking trail down to the top of the domeshaped granitic outcropping. In the foreground, you will see a pastoral patchwork of farms, pastures, and rolling hills. On the horizon looking north, you get a bird’s-eye view of the famed Blue Wall, a scenic wall of 3,000-foot mountains, including Table Rock, Pinnacle, and Caesars Head.

Now, here’s the key for what the Blue Wall means to biological diversity. That tremendous, two-thousand-foot drop in elevation from the peak of Table Rock (3,127 feet elevation), for example, to the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Byway near the foot of the mountain (1,200 feet elevation), results in several geological, meteorological, and botanical effects. First, it produces waterfalls with their own spray-zone habitats and plant communities, and it also produces thermal updrafts that lead to the highest rainfall rates of any region in the Palmetto State. These are the same thermal updrafts that — in the fall of the year — thousands of raptors effortlessly drift along in their fall migrations.

But perhaps most importantly of all, that dramatic elevational change along the Blue Wall and throughout the Blue Ridge Province results in a diversity of plant and animal habitats that rivals any found in other physiographic regions of North America.

Down at the base of Table Rock and throughout the mountains of South Carolina, you will find rich Appalachian Cove habitats, home to some of our most attractive and cherished spring wildflowers. This is where you will find the luxurious, maroon-flowered Vasey’s trillium, bloodroot, showy orchis, hepatica, trout lily, Jack-in-the pulpit, yellow lady slipper, and many, many more.

On the other hand, up at the higher elevations of the storied Table Rock* Mountain, you will find another, totally different habitat type — south facing rock outcroppings. It would be hard to overstate the ecological significance of these high-elevation, south-facing rock outcroppings. Suffice it to say that they are refugial habitats for plant communities of a bygone era that date back to prehistoric times. They range from prairie-type plants such as prickly pear cactus, beargrass yucca, granite stonecrop, Cliff saxifrage, Appalachian fameflower, Appalachian sandwort and elf orpine, to plants more commonly found in subtropical habitats along the coast of SC; such as pitcher plants, blazing star, dwarf buckeye, and several orchids. Each individual rock outcropping has its own unique mix of rock outcrop plants.

If you want to see an impressive array of rock outcrop endemic plants and other woodland wildflowers, spend a morning on the walking trail on the aforementioned Glassy Mountain Heritage Preserve during the spring flowering season. This ancient monadnock offers stunning vistas and is a literal garden of wildflowers, trees, shrubs and vines.

If you go to the SC Nature Conservancy’s 560-acre Nine Times Preserve in Pickens County, you can park on one end of the preserve at Little Eastatoe creek and walk fifty yards to find an impressive display of Appalachian Cove wildflowers. You can then take a short drive to the other end of the preserve and ascend the ridge adjacent to the parking lot where rock outcrop endemic wildflowers thrive in this austere, hot, dry environment. Caution — tread very carefully. The rock outcrop plant communities on the nature preserve are very sensitive, fragile ecosystems.

These south-facing rock outcrops are, in a sense, refugial habitats for many prairie-adapted plants of an earlier era. A number of these rock outcrop endemics have conspicuous, densely matted hairs along their stems and leaves, a water conservation adaptation of indigenous desert flora. Woolly ragwort (Packera tomentosus) is a classic example of this characteristic.

The flora of the Nine Times Preserve and the Naturaland Trust Big Rock Mountain Preserve, located across the road, are good examples of yet another reason for our biodiversity. We are at the southern limit for many northern species that range as far north as Canada, and the northern limit for a number of subtropical species more commonly found along the coastal region of South Carolina.

In other areas of the South Carolina mountains and piedmont, we have more regionally significant habitats that support rare, threatened and endangered species of wildflowers and plant communities. Mountain and Piedmont bogs, called “fens” by plant ecologists, may be home to showy species like swamp pink and the endangered bunched arrowhead, which is only found in the Enoree and Reedy River watersheds in Greenville County and in two isolated populations in North Carolina.

The diminutive dwarf-flowered heartleaf is a real conservation success story. This low-growing evergreen plant of wet forests is endemic to areas in Greenville, Spartanburg, and Cherokee counties in SC and three counties in North Carolina. Due to extensive efforts to preserve remaining habitats, the plant has been proposed for delisting as “Threatened,” from the Endangered Species Act. It can be seen at the Peter’s Creek Preserve in Spartanburg County.

Appalachian coves feature circumneutral or basic soils, but we also have acidic coves where you can find some real beauties among the annual spring wildflower display — species such as Indian paintbrush, gay wings, woodland pinkroot and yellow honeysuckle, a native plant first described by Governor John Drayton, an amateur naturalist, on Paris Mountain near Greenville in 1798. We also have more than our share of socalled Southern Appalachian endemics, plants that only occur from Virginia to our southern mountains.

The final factor that accounts for our remarkable biodiversity is the age of Blue Ridge Mountains. They are among the oldest mountains on earth. This has several implications for biological diversity. First, it accounts for the four major river gorges — Whitewater, Thompson, Toxaway, and Horsepasture, which have been deeply incised into the surrounding terrain through millennia of erosion; along with several minor gorges like Eastatoe gorge in the Jocassee Gorges property. All these gorges are home to unique sprayzone and cove habitats unlike anything else in the region. 

It’s in this area that we find the celebrated Oconee bells, first described by French botanist Andre Michaux in 1788, a plant that eluded plant hunters for nearly a hundred years before it was finally re-discovered in what is now the Lake Jocassee watershed. Nineteenth century scientists recognized Oconee bells as a “tertiary plant,” which means they have been here since the Tertiary Period, an older term used to designate the time period between 66 and 2.5 million years ago.

The ancient erosional wearing down of these grand old mountains also accounts for the deep rich soils in the coves and floodplains of the Southern Appalachians, and those extremely fertile soils support a truly impressive diversity of plants and animals — some of which likely would have gone extinct many, many years ago if not for all these unique refugial habitats in our area.

Just to put a fine point on how old the Blue Ridge Mountains are, we have plants such as shining club moss, ferns, and running pine (Lycopedium sp.), for example, that predate the advent of flowering plants 130 million years ago. Also, up near Sassafras Mountain, there is an extremely rare, itsy-bitsy spider that has a genetically identical counterpart in West Africa. Harvard scientists interpret that to mean that the spider on Sassafras has been there since Pangaea broke up to form the world’s continents and oceans 200 million years ago.

From a cultural perspective, we have good archaeological evidence of Native American occupation of this area for thousands of years. Clovis artifacts, the oldest artifacts in North America, have been found in the mountains and piedmont of South Carolina, providing positive proof that the Clovis people, the first humans on the continent, were living here 14,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have also found several thousand petroglyphs (ancient Native American rock carvings) scattered throughout the mountains and piedmont regions of SC. These prehistoric petroglyphs are thought to date to the Late Archaic to Early Woodland Period, between 1,500 and 2,500 years ago.

The Hopewell Culture migrated through our area during roughly that same period, leaving hundreds of their ceremonial mounds in South Carolina, primarily concentrated here in the northwest corner of the mountain and piedmont regions. The Cherokee people, once the largest, most powerful tribe in the Southeast, have lived in this area for at least a thousand years, leaving a rich, well documented cultural history.

All of the above helps make it understandable that several years ago National Geographic named the Jocassee Gorges region “one of the 50 last great places on earth to visit.” On your next walk in the woods, take a few moments to appreciate and celebrate both our biological diversity and the legacy of our extensive cultural history. This would also be a good time to reflect upon the fact that folks from Upstate Forever, and a number of other conservation organizations, have been working every day for decades to preserve and protect our vast natural and cultural resources.

*Note: This essay was written before the Table Rock and Persimmon Ridge fires. Dennis and his wife Jane live on his family’s homeplace in the shadow of Table Rock, where his ancestors have been deeply rooted since 1796.

Thankfully, Dennis and Jane are doing fine in the aftermath of this harrowing event, although he acknowledges that this historic fire will likely affect the ecology and appearance of the burned areas for decades to come.

We are all grateful to the brave and tireless crews who worked so hard to preserve this special area, and the generous folks who supported them. We find hope in the new seasons and nature's resilience.

About the Author

Dennis Chastain is an award-winning outdoor writer, historian, tour guide, and interpretive naturalist. Once described by the Greenville News as a “modern day Daniel Boone,” he has spent most of his adult life exploring, photographing, and writing about the South Carolina Mountains.

Along the way he has made a number of important discoveries, including wildflowers never recorded in Pickens County, the remnants of long forgotten roads and Native-American trails, and numerous prehistoric rock carvings on Pinnacle and Table Rock Mountains.