From the spruce-fir forests at the state’s highest elevations to the sea level sand flats of the coast, a newly released guidebook offers detailed descriptions of these and the other nearly 350 recognized natural communities across the state.

The 1,235-page “Classification of the Natural Communities of North Carolina” by Michael Schafale, community ecologist with the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, is available online at no charge.

The Natural Heritage Program works to provide research and data, and helps guide decisions on the potential ecological impacts of conservation and development projects. This program is part of the Division of Land and Water Stewardship within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Schafale explained recently to Coastal Review that the Natural Heritage Program keeps records of the best examples of each kind of community and uses them to prioritize conservation and make sure all kinds get protected. The land conservation agencies and nonprofits work on that goal to varying degrees.

Schafale, who’s been with the program since 1983, earned his master’s in botany with a focus on plant community ecology from Duke University. He also has been part of the collaborative, multi-institutional Carolina Vegetation Survey since 1987. He references the survey’s data, and that of the National Vegetation Classification, in the guidebook.

This is the fourth edition of the guide, called an approximation like the three prior editions to “remind the user that, while it is the best synthesis of knowledge the author can offer at this time, and can be useful, our understanding will continue to evolve,” according to the introduction. The first approximation was completed in 1984, the second in 1985, and the third in 1990.

A “natural community” is the collection of living things naturally occurring together in a particular kind of environment, Schafale said. Or, “in terms of the things people see — natural communities are the different kinds of forests, grasslands, marshes, etc. that make up the natural landscape.”

These natural communities have a certain combination of moisture, soil chemistry, topography, elevation, fire or flood frequency, and tend to have the same kind of plants and animals.

“It varies a bit over time and a bit from one such place to another, but you can recognize it as the same kind of thing. If you see some of the species that tend to be in them, you can predict that you have a good chance of finding others,” he said.

The 343 natural communities in the state highlighted in the resource are grouped into 30 themes, with types and subtypes nested under the themes. “There is substantial description material for both the broad themes and the individual subtypes,” Schafale continued.

While the resource is technical and intended for ecologists, botanists and others familiar with scientific names and jargon, the concepts of the communities should be understandable to a broader range of people familiar with the wildlands and natural areas of North Carolina.

“The classification is also likely to be useful to anybody who needs to name natural vegetation or natural ecosystems or types of animal habitat– academic biologists, agency biologists, environmental consultants, possibly regulatory agency people as well, though the communities themselves are not targets of regulation,” he said.

Work began on the fourth edition at a slow pace just a couple years after the third was published in 1990, then a briefer publication to the fourth approximation, called the “guide,” was published in 2012, Schafale said.

“Most of the communities in the classification were worked out by then. It was the plan from that time to produce a more thorough descriptive book, with more thorough description of the communities, more literature review, more use of the Carolina Vegetation Survey data. Work on it began shortly after the guide was published. So that is what is now finished,” he said, adding all of this builds on the earlier editions.

One of the most important changes since the 1990 edition is that there is enough understanding to recognize subtypes where he said they once just saw unintelligible variation.

For example, the 1990 classification recognized one type of pine savanna while the fourth recognizes four, and they can determine what species are only going to be in one or two of the types of pine savanna.

“That kind of refinement has happened in virtually all the communities that were known in 1990. There are a few communities that we just didn’t know about at all in 1990, such as the very rare Calcareous Coastal Fringe Forest, where soils filled with shells support plants that need high calcium levels,” he said.

Also, for the new approximation, “We extended recognition to some things we knew existed but hadn’t covered, such as the pond lily beds along tidal rivers,” he said. “Over a much broader spectrum, we can recognize and name kinds of variation that once were just disorderly heterogeneity, and by doing so, we can make sure they get conserved and we can accumulate understanding specific to them.”

This includes a majority of the communities. “There are new data and information on the species that make them up, on their dynamics, and on their other characteristics.”

Schafale explained that the Carolina Vegetation Survey and National Vegetation Classification brought a tremendous increase in the amount of available data.

The Carolina Vegetation Survey works to document natural vegetation for inventory, monitoring of environmental impacts, and assessment of conservation status.

Survey data are still not fully analyzed, but they were used extensively in writing the descriptions for this guidebook, Schafale said.

“Where pieces of the dataset had been analyzed, the insights gained went into its classification. An example is the Sandhills Mesic Transition Subtype and Coastal Plain Mesic Transition Subtype of Pine/Scrub Oak Sandhill. The distinction is visible in the data but was not recognized until the analysis showed it to us,” he said.

The National Vegetation Classification is a comprehensive classification system for all vegetation types in the United States. Work began on this classification in the early 1990s with the first version released in 1998 and a second in 2016.

The classification brought the insights of many more people and people over a wider range of states to the fourth approximation, he said.

Coastal communities, climate change

Schafale said he finds the coastal region to be extremely interesting, ecologically.

“One of the notable things is its tremendous diversity of natural communities as well as species,” which he said is “remarkable” despite having very little topography.

“Most places with high diversity are mountainous, and differences in elevation and topography and rockiness are a major thing that makes it possible. The coastal plain has very little variation in elevation or climate and is nearly flat, but a lot of variety is tied to its subtle topography, to differences in soil texture, and to all the different ways a wetland can be wet,” he explained. “River swamps, tidal areas, wet upland flats, peatlands, Carolina bays, and limesink ponds are all wetlands, but they are different in how deep the water gets, how long it stays, how regularly it comes back, how long the soil is saturated, whether it flows.”

The coast is filled with exceptional natural communities, like “pocosins — those tangled masses of evergreen shrubs, both on the big peatlands and in the larger Carolina bays. North Carolina has the lion’s share of them,” Schafale said.

And the longleaf pine savannas, “with the tremendous numbers of plant species packed into small areas. There is something like them throughout the South, but North Carolina’s particular kinds are rare and narrowly ranging – you don’t get to the middle of South Carolina before you’re in different ones.”

The natural lakes are another exceptional natural community. “Almost all the natural lakes between Florida and New England are in North Carolina, and there are just a handful. And among them, there is not another one like Lake Waccamaw.”

North Carolina has some of the best examples left of “the more widespread coastal communities like the dune grasslands and tidal marshes, and the river swamps and bottomland hardwoods.”

While not the primary purpose, the tool still has usefulness in understanding climate change.

“The different communities will respond to climate change differently, so understanding what they are can give a framework for considering and predicting responses to climate change,” he said.

When the Natural Heritage Program analyzed the effects of climate change on the state’s biodiversity some years ago, the work was organized by the themes and communities in the fourth approximation.

Currently, he continued, the Natural and Working Lands committee for addressing greenhouse gases has put an emphasis on peatlands for carbon storage – the peatland pocosins and coastal plain nonalluvial wetland forest themes of the fourth approximation.

“As a concrete example of how communities differ, the spruce-fir forests theme is the coldest set of communities in the state, so perhaps one of the most vulnerable to warming per se,” Schafale said. “The longleaf pine communities are composed of species that mostly range well to the south, so they are not so likely to be vulnerable to warmer temperature. But they depend on fire, so changes in weather that make it harder to do controlled burning will be bad for them, though no more so than institutional changes that make burning harder.”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

When my wife and I were in London last summer, we visited the Natural History Museum to see the collection of plants that the naturalist, explorer, surveyor and sometimes fur trader John Lawson sent to the English naturalist James Petiver in 1710 and 1711.

Lawson, himself an Englishman, collected the plants on parts of the North Carolina coast near where I grew up: by the Neuse River, by the Trent River, at Thomas Pollock’s plantation on Salmon Creek, and along the shores of the Pamlico Sound, among other sites.

The collection is a wonderful array of coastal flora, including, just to name a few, a specimen of southern live oak (Quercus virginiana),  an American persimmmon (Diospyros virginiana), a patch of Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), two kinds of sunflowers (Helianthus sp. and Eupatorium dubium), a yellow-fringed orchid (Habenaria ciliaris) and a bit of woolgrass (Scirpus cyprinus), among much else.

Many are species that Lawson wrote about in the work for which we know him best, “A New Voyage to Carolina.”

Of the live oak, for instance, Lawson wrote in “A New Voyage to Carolina” that it bears an acorn “as sweet as chesnuts (sic), and the Indians draw an oil from them, as sweet as that from the olive, tho’ of an amber colour.”

According to Vince Bellis, an esteemed botanist who taught for many years at East Carolina University in Greenville, there are 295 specimens of Lawson’s at the Natural History Museum. To my knowledge, they are the only relics of Lawson’s life that have survived to the present day.

Deep in the museum’s inner recesses, they are preserved in a simple, but effective fashion that botanists have employed for nearly 500 years: dried and pasted onto linen paper pages, now grown yellowed and brittle, and bound together.

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Lawson collected the plants soon after he published “A New Voyage to Carolina.”

First appearing in London in 1709, “A New Voyage to Carolina” is by far the most important account of North Carolina’s natural history and native peoples written at any time prior to the American Revolution. Today it is widely considered a classic of early American literature.

In a way though, the path of Lawson’s plant specimens to London’s Natural History Museum began almost a decade earlier.

I think the story really begins when Lawson first settled on the North Carolina coast. That was in 1701, at a time when there were not yet any English towns or villages in the territory that the British would soon begin to call “North Carolina.”

Almost immediately, Lawson recognized the potential to do pathbreaking natural history work in his new home. No naturalist had yet done any serious collecting there. Neither had any colonist or settler yet written with any depth of knowledge about the Tuscarora, Neusiok, Coree or other native peoples who inhabited the region.

After a long journey through Carolina, and after spending much of that time in the region’s Indian towns and villages, Lawson contacted James Petiver, who was a well-known apothecary, naturalist and collector of plant and animal specimens in London.

In a letter dated April 12, 1701, now preserved at London’s Royal Society, Lawson wrote Petiver from “Bath County on Pamphrough (Pamlico) River.” In that letter, Lawson offered to collect plant specimens for Petiver, as well as shells, butterflies, fish and insects.

He told Petiver that he was willing to do so there by the Pamlico River and on a trip that he was planning to the Outer Banks.

At the time that Lawson wrote to him, Petiver was building one of the world’s great herbariums.

Beginning in 1695, Petiver published a series of booklets called, in Latin, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima Rariora Naturae Continens. They featured descriptions of plants and other specimens that had been sent to him from around the world. At the end of every volume, he encouraged readers abroad to send additional specimens to him. Lawson may have first contacted Petiver in response to that plea.

Herbaria, the singular is “herbarium,” are collections of plants kept for scientific study and teaching. Some herbaria focus just on vascular plants (trees, shrubs, grasses, flowering plants, etc.). Others feature an even more astonishing degree of botanical diversity.

The herbaria at the Natural History Museum, where Laura and I were, for instance, make up one of the world’s largest botanical collections, totaling more than 3 million specimens in all.

In addition to the General Herbarium, the museum is home to quite a few other, more specialized herbaria. There is a herbarium just for mosses and other bryophytes, another for algae, one for ferns, yet another for lichens and even ones for slime molds and diatoms.

The museum’s bryophyte herbarium alone houses 900,000 specimens, all of them tiny evolutionary descendants of what are believed to be the first terrestrial plants on Earth.

Yet another of the museum’s herbaria holds 300,000 diatoms. Resembling a pillbox and its lid (to borrow Rachel Carson’s description of them), diatoms are one-celled, microscopic organisms that, by some estimates, produce 20 to 30 percent of the air that we breathe.

Because of their hard silica shells, fossilized diatoms have also proven tremendously useful for studying changes in environmental conditions over the centuries.

Botanists have long used herbaria to advance our knowledge of plant taxonomy, the branch of science that identifies, describes, classifies, and names the world’s plants.

But in recent decades, with the advent of DNA analysis and other new  analytical tools, scientists have also begun to use herbarium specimens to study historic changes in local ecological systems and to investigate key questions about global diversity and climate change.

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A physician and botanist named Luca Ghini (1490-1556) created what is believed to be the world’s first herbarium in the early 1500s, during the Italian Renaissance. A professor at the University of Bologna, he pioneered the process of preserving and displaying plants by pressing them and gluing them to a page of paper, then binding them into a book.

The earliest herbaria, including Ghini’s, were created in order to catalog, study and exhibit plants that had medicinal uses. At that time, botany was fundamentally a branch of medicine. Few scientists were interested in the study of plants if they did not have healing properties.

That soon changed, however. Over the next couple centuries, physicians and other healers, including apothecaries such as James Petiver, began to expand herbaria to include nonmedicinal plants as well as medicinal plants. The modern science of botany was born.

Luca Ghini’s herbarium has not survived, but the herbarium of one of his students, the artist and herbalist Gherardo Cibo, is believed to be the oldest extant herbarium in the world. Dating from 1532, Cibo’s herbarium is preserved at a public library in Rome, the Biblioteca Angelica.

The oldest herbarium in the United States is generally believed to be at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The Academy’s herbarium holds a wealth of specimens from the early 19^th century, including all but a few of the plant specimens that the Lewis and Clark expedition collected in 1803-06.

I should add though that at least some historians of botany consider a much smaller herbarium at Salem College, a small women’s liberal arts school in Winston-Salem, N.C., as being even older.

That herbarium—for many years occupying just a few drawers in a filing cabinet—was started in 1772, the year that Moravian settlers founded the school. However, the oldest plant specimen that remains in Salem College’s collection today is apparently a common snowberry (Symphoricarposalbus albus) that was not collected until 1817.

James Petiver’s herbarium was not one of the first herbariums, but he certainly compiled one of the largest and quite likely the most geographically diverse in early modern England.

Judging by his surviving specimens, Petiver began building his herbarium in 1683-84, while on medicinal plant collecting excursions into the London countryside that were sponsored by the Society of Apothecaries, one of the city’s trade guilds.

Petiver did not build his herbarium by traveling widely outside of Great Britain, however. He only traveled overseas once in his life, and that was not until he visited the Netherlands in 1711.

Instead Petiver relied on hundreds of correspondents around the world to send plant specimens to him. Like John Lawson, most of those correspondents were somehow connected to the colonial or imperialist aspirations of the British Empire.

From his apothecary shop, Petiver corresponded with naturalists, naval officers, ship surgeons, explorers, merchants, physicians, missionaries and an astonishing number of individuals who were involved in the trafficking of Africans to slave labor camps in the Americas.

In a 2013 journal article, Kathleen S. Murphy observed that seagoing men made up the largest number of Petiver’s correspondents in the Atlantic Basin and that nearly half of them sailed on the routes of the slave trade. See Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade, ” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 70, No. 4 (Oct. 2013).

Murphy’s article is part of a growing body of scholarship revealing how tightly even the most enlightened spirit of scientific inquiry in Great Britain was entwined with colonialism and the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Petiver’s correspondents, including those involved in the slave trade and those who were not, lived or traveled in much of the world, including Western Europe, India, China, West Africa, and the Americas.

By one count, he corresponded with at least 80 individuals just in the British colonies in North America.

Above all, Petiver cultivated relationships with that far-flung network of correspondents in the hopes that they would collect plant specimens for him, as well as share with him any knowledge they might discover about their medicinal uses.

If they proved willing to collect for him, Petiver sent detailed instructions to them on how to gather, preserve and ship the specimens so that they would arrive in London in good shape. He often sent collecting supplies and scientific instruments to his correspondents as well.

The relationship between Lawson and Petiver unfolded slowly. While Lawson first offered to collect plants for Petiver in 1701, there is no record of him having done so for another eight years.

During much of that time, Lawson was busy with matters other than the study of natural history. He was a surveyor by training. In that capacity, he laid out the colony’s first English towns.

For years, he served as the official surveyor for the Lords Proprietors, the eight Englishmen to whom King Charles II had given the lands that the English called “Carolina” to use for their own profit and gain. (They were absentee landlords; none ever set foot in the territory that is now North and South Carolina.)

Lawson also worked hand in hand with the local British colonial leaders, a motley lot that we remember today largely for their corruption, perfidy, and rapaciousness.

Some were mere penny-ante charlatans and opportunists. Others were more like Thomas Pollock, on whose lands Lawson collected quite a few specimens that are now at the Natural History Museum. Pollock was a land baron, a trafficker in African and Indian slaves and an ardent, often brutal enemy of the region’s native peoples.

I have often struggled to reconcile the heartfelt sympathy that John Lawson showed native people’s culture in “A New Voyage to Carolina” and his eagerness to serve those that did so much to threaten the survival of Native American people.

After meeting with Petiver on a return trip to London in 1709, Lawson did finally begin to send both botanical and zoological specimens to him at his shop in London.

After that meeting in London, Petiver described Lawson to a friend as “a very curious person & hath lately printed a Natural History of Carolina wherein he hath treated the Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, & Vegetables, particularly the Trees, with a great deal of Judgment & accuracy.” (Petiver to William London, 7 Sept. 1709, Sloane Papers, Royal Society Archives.)

Petiver was referring of course to Lawson’s “A New Voyage to Carolina,” which was published in London that year.

Lawson sent a first shipment of specimens to Petiver in July 1710. (They apparently included some zoological specimens that have been lost.) A year later, he sent a second package, which he described in a letter to Petiver as “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up.”

The shipment of that second package of plants may have been Lawson’s last contribution to the field of natural history.

By the time they arrived in London, everything had changed back on the North Carolina coast. War had broken out between the Tuscarora ( or, in the language of the Tuscarora, the Skarù:ręˀ), and the English. Six or seven smaller Algonquin tribes had also joined the war on the side of the Tuscarora. Towns had been laid to waste. Many killed.

By the time his plants reached London, John Lawson was dead too, the war’s very first casualty.

The details of Lawson’s death are far from clear. The sources are few, and the sources that we do have are generally secondhand and far from trustworthy. Nevertheless, most scholars believe that Tuscarora leaders captured Lawson and sentenced him to death because of his leading role as an agent of British colonialism.

I would not be surprised if that was the case.  By the beginning of the 18th century, anyone, native or newcomer, could tell that the British were an existential threat to the region’s native peoples — and Lawson had become one of the most public faces of British colonialism.

Correspondence between Lawson and Petiver indicates that Lawson had dreamed of doing important new work in natural history. Those dreams would not be fulfilled. He left us only “A New Voyage to Carolina” and the plants now at the Natural History Museum, many of them having been in the “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up.”

-To be continued-

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Today I am at the archives and library of the Linnean Society in London, England. Founded in 1788, the Linnean Society is the oldest biological society in the world. I am only in London for a few days, but while I am here, I cannot possibly resist visiting some of the Society’s treasures, including a letter from 1759 that I have wanted to see most my life.

The Linnean Society sits in an old and revered square in Piccadilly Circus, just down the road from Buckingham Palace, where, as I write this, tremendous crowds are gathering to mourn the Sept. 8 passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

An English botanist, Sir James Edward Smith, was the Linnean Society’s founder. The Society’s first collections were those of Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist and physician who was the Society’s namesake. After Linnaeus’s death in 1778, Smith acquired his personal library and correspondence, as well as his specimen collection of plants, insects, shells and fish, and brought them to London.

They are still at the Linnean Society today. In fact, I’m sitting just across the room from a display case that features a doting fan letter that Jean-Jacque Rousseau sent Linnaeus in 1771.

One of the leading scientific figures of the Enlightenment, Linnaeus is best known for creating the taxonomic system for naming, defining and classifying organisms that is still used by scientists today.

Examples of Linnaeus’s system of taxonomy—called “binomial nomenclature”— include Homo sapiens (meaning “wise human” in Latin) for us human beings.

Or as a less aspirational example, one of my favorite plants back home on the North Carolina coast is Ilex vomitoria, commonly known as yaupon, a species of holly with lovely red berries. (Ilex for holly and vomitoria because the coastal Algonquins used as it as a ritual purgative).

The Linnean Society holds an even more important place in the history of science for another reason: this is where Charles Darwin first publicly presented his theory of evolution and natural selection.

On July 1, 1858, here in these rooms, Darwin gave the world a first look at the theory that he would elaborate more fully 15 months later, when he published “On the Origin of Species,” arguably the most important scientific work ever published.

As I write this, I am sitting next to a display case that includes a vasculum, a collecting box for plants, that Darwin used while serving as a naturalist on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle in 1831-36.

I find it just breathtaking to be here. It’s exciting and awe inspiring and frankly heartbreaking too, because of course I can’t forget how the scientific discoveries chronicled here went hand in hand with the spread of European colonialism and unprecedented environmental devastation.

In these old manuscripts and relics, we see scientists and explorers discovering and celebrating the glories of the world’s biodiversity. But it also feels a little strange, because I can tell that they did not yet know what we know: that it is all fragile and will only last if we make it last.

If I could, I would be here all week. I would browse the great British naturalist and explorer Alfred Russell Wallace’s journals. I would also look at the Society’s rare copy of Elizabeth Blackwell’s “A Curious Herbal,” a gorgeous reference book of medicinal plants that was published here in London in weekly installments between 1737 and 1739.

Maybe I would even take a look at the seashells that were collected on James Cook’s epic voyage to the South Pacific in 1771.

But I have time to do only one thing today, and it’s why I am here. I am holding in my hand a letter from the North Carolina coast that colonial governor Arthur Dobbs wrote on April 2, 1759.

He wrote the letter to an English botanist, Peter Collinson. In that letter, he told Collinson about a tiny but amazing insectivorous plant that was only found in the moist longleaf pine savannahs and pocosin swamplands within a 90-mile radius of present-day Wilmington, North Carolina.

The description is brief, but unmistakable: “We have a kind of Catch Fly Sensitive which closes upon anything that touches it. It grows in Latitude 34 but not in 35. I will try to save the seed here.” 

The plant of course was the incredibly beautiful, utterly fascinating species now called the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula).

Few of God’s creations symbolize the place I call home more.  Few symbolize the beauty, uniqueness and fragility of our coastal wetlands more either. And, according to historians of science, this letter is the oldest and first known written record of the Venus flytrap in the history of the world.

For Lisa Rose, author of the new book, “Urban Foraging,” her fascination with the often-overlooked plants that can be a part of a healthy diet began with family and has become a profession and a passion.

An anthropologist with an interest in ethnobotany and herbal medicine, Rose has written three books. Her first two, “Grand Rapids Food” and “Midwest Medicinal Plants,” were focused on her home state of Michigan. Her latest, though, “Urban Foraging,” released in October, takes a nationwide look.

“I’ve traveled a great deal between both coasts … so in considering this book, I really had to double click into generally what am I going to be able to find across most of my regions,” she said. “So in parts of North Carolina coastal regions, you might have 35 of those plants, whereas 15 might not be immediately at your fingertips. The criteria, first and foremost (was) geographic distribution.”

The foundation for her interest in botany, plants and how they can be a part of everyday life, began in Flint, Michigan, where she grew up. Her father was an engineer and mother an avid gardener, and both parents contributed to her fascination with plants.

“He was always asking questions, “she said, describing her father. “He was very engaged in the natural world. In fact, he taught me at a young age that the natural world is the best engineer, that the natural world has solutions to the problems of imbalance. There’s a natural rhythm, not always nice and frequently chaotic in the restoration of balance.”

It was her mother, though, who applied knowledge of the natural world to daily life.

“My mother was a gardener for a good chunk of my childhood, not because it was a hobby, but because it was a practical, economical way to feed her family,” Rose said. “We had a feral concord grape hedgerow when I was growing up and my mother would put up about 50 to 75 quart jars’ worth of juice. I mean that that really was a foundation of my childhood.”

Not every plant in the book grows in eastern North Carolina. Aspen, according to North Carolina Parks webpage “Vascular Plants of North Carolina,” only grows in the mountains of the state and even then, only rarely. Hyssop, described by the “Vascular Plants” page as “one of the tallest and most robust native herbs in the state,” has not been recorded in the Piedmont or coastal plain.

With 50 plants listed in her book, though, there are plenty to choose from. Some are well known as edible wild plants, particularly blackberries and grapes, although Rose features wild concord grapes of her native Michigan.

Some of her selections are surprising, although when reading about these plants, it becomes apparent why they were chosen.

The prickly pear is a case in point. Rose suggests numerous possible uses for the plant, ultimately settling on recommending a prickly pear simple syrup. When harvesting prickly pear, Rose makes clear the hazards involved, pointing out that the species has two types of sharp barbs awaiting the careless.

“Both the prickly pear pads and fruits are covered in large and tiny spines. While the large spies are somewhat avoidable, the glochids are pesky buggers that can get into the skin and feel like a fiberglass rash,” she writes. “The glochids will embed themselves into fabric, so do your gathering with leather gloves.”

She described for Coastal Review the lesson she learned the first time she harvested prickly pear.

I didn’t realize — It’s not the big thorns that are the worst problem. It’s the glochids. They’re horrible. I had harvested my first batch of prickly pear using a cloth bag and cloth gloves. That was the worst idea ever,” she said.

Her recommended recipe for prickly pear simple syrup is as a “delicious simple syrup for margaritas.”

A number of Rose’s recipes are for mixed drinks, which she noted is part of a long tradition.

“In past generations a lot of plants were preserved into a bitter as digestive aids and served as aperitifs. Monks were brewing them in the Middle Ages, 13th century France, Germany. So it’s really a long tradition, of maybe not for medicinal any longer but definitely today for a cocktail hour,” she said.

Many of the plants Rose writes about are often thought of as common weeds. Field garlic is a great example. Also known, according to the North Carolina State Cooperative Extension webpage as crow garlic, onion grass, stag’s garlic, wild garlic, and wild onion, the plant is common, especially along the edge of gardens. The plant has a distinct odor that is a cross between an onion and garlic and has the appearance of a spindly scallion.

Her recipe calls for a wild garlic flatbread, but she also notes the tops make an excellent garnish in place of scallion in a salad. She also writes that the bulb is exceedingly fibrous and quite difficult to use in a recipe.

Rose also takes readers into the forest. She noted that the needles, bark and resin of pine trees in general are edible. The needles in particular are emphasized for their culinary versatility.

“Chop the needles and use them as an herb to flavor salads, butters and vinegars for dressings,” she suggests in her book. She also notes that homebrewers can use pine needles to create ”a Belgian or wheat-styled ale without making the brew overly pine flavored.”

For Rose, “Urban Foraging” is a way to help readers understand the common plants in our lives that can be a part of our everyday diet — trees, flowers and many that are considered weeds. The book also reminds us of a largely forgotten history, a time when foraging for wild plants was a regular part of life. “In general, common knowledge we’ve forgotten about (wild plants),” she said.  “We’re about two generations now from that having been a really common practice.”

The public is welcome to join the Carteret County Master Gardeners 10 a.m. Feb. 12 when they will be “Exploring Native Coastal Plants of the Carolinas” with Paul Hosier, professor emeritus of botany at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Hosier’s publication, “Seacoast Plants of the Carolinas: A New Guide for Plant Identification and Use in the Coastal Landscape,“ focuses on the beaches, dunes, maritime grasslands, shrub thickets, maritime forests and salt shrub thickets.

The presentation is part of the organization’s annual public education program and will take place at the Crystal Coast Civic Center. The public is invited for refreshments at 9:30 a.m. before the lecture.

In Hosier’s work, he identifies invasive plants, landscaping with native coastal plants, native vegetation and coastal storms. He also addresses climate change and the flora on the coast, provides profiles for a variety of plants and where to view coastal plants and plant communities in the Carolinas, according to information provided by the Master Gardeners.

Hosier has a doctorate from Duke University and is professor emeritus in the Department of biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.  After 41 years of teaching at UNCW he retired in 2013 but remains an adjunct professor there. He has researched the impacts of off-road vehicles on shorelines and hurricanes on the vegetation of barrier islands as well as the ecological processes of barrier islands in the southeast.