After a long winter, the arrival of spring carpets Ohio with blankets of blossoms, festoons trees with brilliant buds, and sprinkles forest floors with spicebush splendor.
The pandemic has made people take a closer look at the ground beneath them.
“The pandemic gave native gardening another shot in the arm,” says Chris Chmiel, owner of Integration Acres outside of Albany in Athens County. “It’s a safe activity: Go out and do some foraging while social distancing.”
A professor of biology and ecology at Ashland University, Merrill Tawse has been running the same wild-bird survey route annually for more than 40 years. It’s not for his work, though; it’s purely for pleasure.
Before 1900, rural people engaged in a holiday tradition known as the Christmas “side hunt.” Sides (teams) were chosen, and team members fanned out through the countryside with their rifles and shotguns. Whichever team amassed the most feathered or furred quarry by the end of the day won the contest.
In Buckeye State forestry circles, having your woodlands named Ohio Tree Farm of the Year is a big deal. To have your woods named National Tree Farm of the Year is a really big deal. To garner both those titles in back-to-back years is simply off the charts.
The Clums are members of the Ohio Tree Farm Program — first organized in 1946 — a part of the American Tree Farm System. The goal of both the national and state programs is to assist private landowners with better managing their woodlands for wood, water, wildlife, and recreation.
Our state’s very name, translated from the language of its original inhabitants, means “Good River.” While Ohio is named specifically for the mighty waterway that forms its eastern and southern borders, that name serves as an apt description of the entire place.
Rivers, to me, are analogies of our humanity: They begin as spindly streams, unglamorous trickles, and, like people, they find their way — carving their character as they go, widening and deepening with distance. If a river can have such an ignominious beginning yet end with a glorious, glowing connection to something larger, then couldn’t that be a template for a life well-lived?
