![]() ![]() Just imagine the labor involved in shaping a canoe, chop by chop with stone axes and adzes not nearly as sharp as a garden hoe. Then fires were built on the flat top of the log and, using stone adzes, charred wood was hogged out of the center until the vessel was deep enough to carry passengers and cargo. The halves must have been left to dry for a year or two. While still green, the ends of each half were tapered, creating what would become the canoe’s bow and stern. Because of their long straight grain, poplars were fairly easily split in half. Native Americans felled poplars with stone axes. Long before the arrival of Europeans, Cherokee and other Native Americans prized poplar logs for their dugout canoes. Poplar is the most buoyant of mountain hardwoods. ![]() Dried wood varies in color from creamy white to almost-yellow and can be faintly streaked. In addition, poplar is known for its strength and resistance to warping, shrinking, and rot. Long runs of knot-free wood made poplar ideal for construction lumber. Relatively fast growing in moist soils, particularly in sheltered coves, trunks of mature poplars may reach twenty to thirty feet before sprouting branches. More common are trees of eighty to 120-feet high. Poplar can reach more than 200 feet in height with diameters up to ten to twelve feet. Tulip poplars may live for more than 200 years, and some make it past 400. As the climate warmed, it spread northward, repopulating terrain as far north as southern New York.Ĭall it what you may, Liriodendron tulipifera is a signature tree of the Southern Appalachians. During the ice ages, fifteen species of Liriodendron disappeared, leaving only one, which found refuge in the deep South. ![]() Liriodendron tulipifera is an ancient species dating back 70 million years to the Cretaceous age when warm shallow seas spread across the piedmont. Pure poplar honey, available from Asheville Bee Charmer (), is dark and richly flavorful, tasting faintly like fig jam. A bee can fill up with nectar with a visit to just one blossom rather than traveling to dozens of flowers before returning to its hive. One writer described the tulip poplar blossoms as colorful teacups prodigious with nectar. Birds spread the seeds of magnolias while those of liriodendrons are dispersed by wind. Magnolias are pollinated by beetles lirodendrons, by bees. The bases of tulip tree flowers look like they’ve been dipped in flaming orange paint. Petals range from light yellowish-green to almost-but-not-quite white. Those of tulip poplars are equally as dramatic. Magnolias, a tree forever associated with the South, have showy white flowers. Instead, the tallest and strongest of Southern Appalachian hardwoods is a member of the genus Magnolia not Polulus, the genus including black poplars, gray poplars, and the hybrid known as Carolina poplar. Missing from most everyone’s list will be the most heavily harvested hardwood-the one widely used by everyone from ancestors of the Cherokee people to makers of today’s most modern furniture-the tulip tree, aka yellow poplar, or just plain poplar.īut wait a minute-the ever-popular poplar Liriodendron tulipifera is not a poplar at all. They’ll talk of chestnut, oaks, maple, walnut, and maybe hickory. Modern furniture makers like Brian Boggs use a mixture of wood in their products, such as bar seats with maple legs and poplar tops.īar seats with maple legs and poplar tops by Brian Boggs.Īsk anyone to name the signature hardwoods of Western North Carolina’s mountains. Two-man cross-cut saws sometimes as long as eight feet were used to fell timber like this big poplar up in Linn Cove near Asheville's Reems Creek in 1937. Poplar and white pine boards scattered around the Laurel Elk lumber yard in Watauga County. Many the colonists who settled in the mountains built their cabins of poplar because its logs were easily squared by saw, axe, and adze. Tremont in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. left stumps of huge poplars throughout the headwaters of Lynn Camp Prong. Fashioned with fire, the largest of these canoes could hold up to twelve people. Known as the Bob Padgett Tree after the park ranger who saved the tree from felling, this massive tulip poplar can be found on Horse Cove Road near Highlands.Ĭherokee and their ancestors favored long, straight-grained poplar logs for their dugout canoes. ![]() Because of their girth and height before branching out, tulip poplar was the most heavily logged species in the heyday of logging before Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created in 1934. ![]()
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