Scuppernongs

 Ancient Algonquian speakers noticed the sweetbay magnolias and named the river in North Carolina askuponong, place of the sweetbay tree. In the early 1800s, Europeans noticed the bronze-colored grapes growing on the riverbank and called the grape and the river Scuppernong.

The grapes are muscadines. Most muscadines are purple to black. The coloring of the scuppernongs is the work of a recessive gene — as simple as blue eyes in humans.

Muscadines grow in states along the coast from Delaware to Texas. They grow up the Mississippi Valley to the Missouri. As I boy, I pillaged vines at my grandparents’ places in East Texas and West Tennessee. But I have never seen anything like the vines in the Georgia Piedmont.

I owe readers a clarification: I’d spoken of August as the peak month for wild muscadines here. The vines  are still producing. I have learned to think of peak months.

I’m interested in the grapes because the idea of “sustainability” has been spreading from biologists to farmers.

European grapes are wonderful, but they are susceptible to Pierce’s disease, caused by bacteria. Muscadines are naturally resistant, which is why an amateur naturalist like me is baffled by the bumper crop. If you’re a farmer, we’re talking about the lower costs of fighting pathogens and less chance of crop failure.

• Source: Peter C. Andersen, Ali Sarkhosh, Dustin Huff, and Jacque W. Breman, “The Muscadine Grape (Vitis rotundifolia Michx)”; askifas, n.d. The site is run by extension agents associated with the University of Florida.The article is here:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/HS100

Footnote, with skaters

 A showoff, a Greek statue and stooped man went skating.

It’s not a joke — just a footnote on American literature.

Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne lived in the same village — Concord, Mass. — and knew each other. Hawthorne’s daughter Rose Lathrop left an account of the three writers skating on the river.

 

Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice‚ very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. 

 

Lathrop thought her father would have liked to have been better friends with Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t much interested in Hawthorne’s writing.

Henry Seidel Canby says Thoreau read for knowledge and disliked fiction. Canby’s verdict:

 

There can be no other American man of letters who read so little American literature.

 

• Sources: The passage on the skaters is from Rose Lathrop’s “Memories of Hawthorne.” It’s quoted in Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 174. Canby’s note on Thoreau’s reading is on p. 188.

What book should be taught in schools?

 The Guardian, a newspaper that does interesting things, recently asked some writers to recommend a book that should be taught in schools. The writers were asked to pick a book they thought would inspire a lifelong love of reading.

No spoilers. No comments on the selections. A link to the list is below.

If I were a newspaper editor, I’d ask the question of political candidates.

In the old days, we used to send questionnaires to candidates for public office. We published the replies.

What book do you think should be taught in public schools?

An answer might tell voters about the kinds of things that are on the candidate’s mind.

• Source: Kate Mosse, “’Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach”; The Guardian, 5 Sep 2026. It’s here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/sep/05/bold-brilliant-thrilling-leading-authors-on-the-novels-every-school-should-teach

Book fair in Dahlonega

 We are at the Regional Book Fair at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a tabletop publishing company, this is one of the benefits.

If you’re a bookseller, no matter how small, you get to sit at a table and talk to people who love to read. Some are English professors and some are grandmothers looking for a children’s book. They will tell you what they like and what they don’t. I am taking notes.

Things I forget

 I forget details that you might not — that Thoreau was an experienced builder when he started his cabin at Walden Pond in 1845, for example.

Thoreau had been helping to build the family’s new house across the railroad in Concord. It was called the Texas house because of its distance from the Mill-Dam, which was reckoned as the center of civilization. Even then, “Texas” was another word for “backwater” or “wilderness.”

Henry Seibel Canby says the cabin was so well made that it survived two moves after Thoreau died and ended up as part of a garage.

Because he taught us to simplify our lives, I remember that Thoreau didn’t have to move much in the way of clothes, furniture and household goods. I forget that he had to haul his boat from the river to the pond.

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 209, 217.

The effort to know the world

 Wendell Berry wrote some things I argue with. But I’m not sure we’ve had a writer who was better at getting to a glaring problem with American life. This clear, brief summary is from his essay “A Native Hill”:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world … We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never fully understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

 

You can read almost anything and want to change our country’s miserable policies. Berry makes me want to change my own habits. He also gives me hope that if we learn to know the world a little better, something good will come of it. 

• Source: Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980; San Franciso: North Point Press, 1980. The quotation, from the essay “A Native Hill,” is on page 98.

Yellow River, early September

 We found a thick stand of beebalm, Monarda punctata, on the banks of the Yellow River on Labor Day.

The plant reminds me of those tiered trays that English people used to serve sandwiches on at teatime, at least in the movies. With beebalm, you have layers of yellow flowers with pink, purple and green bracts in between.

All those flowers attract pollinators, hence the common name. You can see plenty of bees in a stand of beebalm — but also hummingbirds, butterflies, moths and wasps.

Another common name, allegedly, is horsemint. The plant is in the mint family. If in doubt, crush a leaf and smell.

Also blooming in early September:

• Camphorweed is putting out scraggly yellow flowers. Talk about smell. Break a stem of Heterotheca subaxillaris and you’re in the medicine cabinet.

• The crownbeards in genus Verbesina are also have yellow flowers.

• Kudzu vines are putting out showy blossoms. I’d say the blooms are magenta, oxblood or purple, but I’m not good with colors. I wish I knew more about the variations within genus Pueraria.

• We also saw some fuzzybeans, in genus Strophostyles, which put out lovely soft purple flowers that remind me of pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana. Fuzzybeans are legumes and were used as food and medicine by the ancient peoples.

When you get to know a place, you have a sense of when it’s time to see a blossom of a peculiar shape or color. You start looking, and you might notice, as at the poet Franz Wright put it, “the unnoticed miracle of things precisely as they are.”