Distressed properties

 About a quarter mile from the house is a “distressed property.” I know, because the small sign from the county says that’s what it is.

County officials mean that someone owed taxes on this overgrown lot. At some point, the accumulating taxes exceeded the market value.

The small sign explaining the facts is five years old and was overgrown when I found it while poking around, looking at rattlesnake weed.

“Beneath everything is the profound science of geology,” my old professor used to say.

The geology of the Georgia Piedmont has something to do with why this region — which has been horrifically disturbed by humans — still has a forest canopy with diverse plant communities below.

There is no naturally level ground here. (I know I’ve said this before, but I’m a Texas boy and cannot quite absorb the fact.) That means that the elevation of the lot that our house sits on is not the same as that of any of my neighbors.

Rainfall is plentiful here, and the water must go somewhere. So little rivulets run between property lines, and feed into bigger runs, rills, streams, channels, branches and creeks.

The “distressed property” is at the bottom of a hill. It was probably just a low-lying lot when developers cleared it 40 years ago. It’s almost a creek bed today.

I can’t imagine wanting to build a house on such a lot. Other people have had similar thoughts through the decades. Meanwhile, the distressed property has produced mature trees, an impenetrable thicket of smaller stuff and some interesting perennials.

I was after the rattlesnake weed, Hieracium venosum, which allegedly grows in rattlesnake habitat.

The distressed lot at the bottom of the hill has a diverse plant community. And because the Piedmont is all hills, there are a lot of these lots that no one can build on. Nature recovers, and all our lots are reseeded with the plants that grow in these small, scattered nature preserves.

Where some people see distressed properties, others see small places that are our salvation.

Years ago, when scientific farming methods were overtaking Texas, Roy Bedichek made the same point in a pair of essays about fencerows.

• Sources: Bedichek’s essays are in Adventures with a Texas Naturalist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

Hieracium venosum, if you’re interested, has low-lying, ground-hugging leaves that are light green with deep green veins. It looks like an expensive indoor plant. In the spring, it produces a foot-long stalk with a yellow flower. It’s in the dandelion tribe within the sunflowers and grows mostly east of the Mississippi.