Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va., Andy Thompson Column: OUTDOORS
By Andy Thompson, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.
Oct. 28–200 acres frozen in time When it enters the minds of most Virginians, Montpelier, they’ll tell you, is the home of James Madison, Founding Father and fourth president of the United States. Maybe they’ve made the drive to Orange County for a visit and wandered through the sparkling new visitor center, checked out Madison’s home and toured the formal gardens.
What they might easily have overlooked is the one true singularity on the sweeping historic property: The James Madison Landmark Forest, a 200-acre old-growth forest with trees older than the man himself and his beloved creation, the U.S. Constitution. The forest is considered by some to be the best example of an old growth, hardwood forest in the entire Piedmont of North America.
Montpelier horticulturist Sandy Mudrinich has been giving “Big Woods” tours of the forest for years. I met her last week before the rains returned to walk the few dusty trails she and others have created.
Autumn’s hues had just begun to seep into the surrounding hillsides and a coolness had finally settled over the region. Standing on the grounds, you could easily imagine Madison, 200 years earlier at the same time of year, taking stock of his forest and farm, preparing for winter.
We walked down the Mountain Mill Road Trail, a path used in Madison’s time to bring grains to a nearby mill, past the formal gardens, the education center and into the forest. These trails are always open for self-guided tours, but it was easy to see how the less intrepid tourist might not make it out this far. We encountered only two other walkers during our 1 1/2-hour tour even though the visitor center had plenty of business.
Of the 1,800 wooded acres in 2,700-acre Montpelier, these 200 are the only ones that haven’t been timbered, Mudrinich said, though no one is sure exactly why. She pegged the timber value of the Landmark Forest at around $3 million. When a white oak came down a few years back, tree-ring analysis showed the tree to be 310 years old, a child of the late 1600s.
“Because the Piedmont has such a long history of timber harvesting and farming, the primeval, original growth is pretty much gone,” said consulting forester Ches Goodall, who works on a number of forest-related projects at Montpelier. “It’s pretty rare to find old growth, upland hardwoods in the Piedmont.”
As you might expect, a forest that old has some enormous specimens. Towering tuliptrees predominate, but white oaks, red oaks, white ashes, pignut hickorys and beeches also share space at the top of the canopy. According to the Eastern Native Tree Society, the tallest tree in Virginia is a 158-foot tuliptree identified in the Landmark Forest in 2000.
Tuliptrees and a thick understory — made up mainly of spicebush and paw paws — are two things that set this old-growth forest apart from almost any others.
“Your typical view of an old-growth forest is one where you can get on a horse and gallop through because there’s nothing underneath,” Mudrinich said. “Those big old trees have shaded out so much that there’s really not much that grows.”
That’s not the case in the Landmark Forest, where the trees draw from an extremely nutrient-rich soil. It looks and feels like many others as you walk through it. You might see a few scraggly dogwoods and smaller beeches. Ferns and wildflowers carpet the ground. But when you stop and look up you realize that, unless you grew up among the Redwoods of northern California, this is much different. Your sense of scale changes immediately.
I found myself craning my neck constantly, letting out amazed “Wows.”
We followed the trail down a ravine to Poplar Run, which was bone dry. A few hulls of American Chestnuts littered the trailside. The American Chestnut thrived in woods like these up until the 1920s when chestnut blight wiped it out almost completely in the Appalachians. The wood is so resistant to rot that these hulls, which probably were last part of a live tree when the blight hit, looked they’d still be around in another 100 years.
The same could be said of the entire forest. Montpelier doesn’t actively manage the 200 acres besides removing invasives and maintaining the trail. What is now was a hundred years ago and will be in a hundred more.
Contact Andy Thompson at (804) 649-6579 or outdoors@timesdispatch.com.
Tides, Page C12
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