Diario de piedmontplants

For the sake of posterity and my own awful memory, I've decided to journalize some of my botanical adventures, but first I figured a brief account of how I got here might be appropriate.

I have been an arborist in the Alabama Piedmont for over 10 years. I have neither formal training nor relevant qualifications. I arrived in the United States from the United Kingdom approximately 15 years ago, and I started working with trees merely because my cousin-in-law needed help and I needed money--it was intended to be temporary. Before this, I had little to no interest in trees, and I had never so much as picked up a chainsaw. I grew up in the suburbs of London, but I had now moved to a very rural area with very many trees. My knowledge of botany at this time was paltry, and I mostly just believed what I was told about the local flora and fauna by the people around me.

Over a few years, I was gradually becoming more familiar with the local tree species, and I began to realize that there were very many more tree species than the locals had names for. With the help of a couple of tree ID books, I was putting the puzzle pieces together, but it was not a hobby at this time. An interesting tree might occasionally pique my curiosity and I would research particular plants, but progress was slow and inconsistent. However, I was beginning to realize that the Alabama Piedmont had a surprising diversity of trees, and the woods around our home seemed particularly impressive in that regard. Then I made, what at the time was, a fascinating discovery.

I was already familiar with the black cherry, Prunus serotina. It's common throughout most of the eastern United States, and it's also common in the Alabama Piedmont. I frequently found myself removing or pruning P. serotina at work and had come to recognize the leaves and bark. I was also aware that it was growing in the woods surrounding our home. One day, while outside with our dog, I leaned against a small cherry tree and became distracted by the leaves. The leaves looked irregularly shaped and strangely hairy. We had removed a large P. serotina tree the day before at work, and its leaves were fresh in my mind. Whatever this small tree was, it couldn't be P. serotina. I broke off some leaves and began looking for more cherry trees nearby to compare them against, and I discovered that there were apparently two different kinds of cherry growing around our home.

My initial attempts to identify the mysterious new cherry were unsuccessful until I read a passing remark about a rare variety of P. serotina called an Alabama black cherry, P. serotina var. alabamensis. However, the Alabama cherry was supposedly unknown in our county, and it seemed puzzling to me that both varieties should be occurring together in the same location. Nonetheless, after much digging, I resolved that these were indeed Alabama cherry. I also realized that P. alabamensis really ought to be considered its own species, albeit perhaps only recently and somewhat incompletely diverged from the P. serotina lineage.

This discovery was quite exciting. Here I had been living right beside P. alabamensis for years and failed to notice it, and I could find nobody else around who even knew this species existed, let alone could identify it. This event perhaps more than any other opened my eyes to the diversity hiding in plain sight, and it kicked me down a rabbit hole that I continue to delve deeper into today. Around this time, I resolved to not just learn all about the local trees, but about all the other flora in the surrounding area. However, it wasn't until early 2022 that I decided to finally put that plan into action--to make a hobby of botany--and to start learning and identifying all kinds of plants in earnest. Shortly thereafter I discovered iNaturalist.