Field Guide: Southeastern Glades
An ecosystem overlooked
“Glade” is one of those fussy words. Makes me think of a storybook—the sort of place a woodsman might stroll through in the forest, on his way to rescue a princess out of a castle.
The sort of word that, as I type here, a grammar app is suggesting I swap out for a more familiar word. Back off, grammar app.
In the Southeast, a glade is a specific—and very special—sort of place, as I recently learned. That’s thanks to writer and ecologist Rob Langellier’s essay in the New York Times, mourning the decline of Southeastern grasslands. According to the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative, ninety percent of the region’s grasslands have shape-shifted into something else: forest, suburb, farm.
We’re here for glades in particular. So: these are basically rocky outcrops covered in herby plants. Flat or gently sloping expanses, atop cliffs or on valley bottoms or along mountainside slopes. The soils can be as thin as an inch, just enough to support grasses and herbs, lichens and mosses, even prickly-pear cacti. You might get a few scraggly trees rooted in pockets of soil wedged between the rocks.
Glades tend to turn wet in winter and spring, featuring pools and ponds, and then with into near deserts for summer and fall. They’re rarely more than two acres in size, tiny islands amid the forest—though once there were many more of them, a whole matrix of shifting habitat.
I can picture a glade—at some point in my wanderings, I must have been to one—but never before did I imagine such a specific name for the place. As I sought to better grasp glades, I found an online guide to mid-South grasslands. It broadened my language, and therefore my ecology: there are balds and barrens and riverscours. Don’t you want to go find them all?
Getting to the glades
I asked Rob to recommend some choice glades (and glade-adjacent grasslands) that are open to the public. A few spots to seek:
The White River Balds Natural Area, near Branson, in Missouri
The Couchville Cedar Glade Natural Area, just outside of Nashville
Pine Creek Barrens Nature Conserve outside of Louisville, Kentucky