Greenbrier and Fire

Greenbrier is the big-leafed climbing vine with hooks and berries that provides bird food in winter and pretty dense shelter too. It climbs pretty high. To get through it, I often have to walk backwards.

Yesterday I ruminated on the therapeutic benefits of cold fall fires of the type set by native Americans.

We will never know the fire-manicured eastern forests that once existed, with massive food producing chestnut trees and a much-thinned understory that let in light for grass that once fed deer and elk as well as bison.

What we have now is mostly second growth, choked by invasives and unchecked underbrush.

The chestnuts, like the native Americans, are mostly gone; felled by disease brought from across the ocean. It’s a very different world.