Coosa Valley Prairies

What they are

Near Cave Spring, in Floyd County, the pine woods open into small meadows of tall grass, more than two dozen of them by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s count, each generally less than a hectare. The national vegetation classification describes the wettest of them as a grassland of little bluestem, big bluestem and prairie rosinweed on deep clay weathered from the shale and limestone of the Conasauga Group. The clay shrinks and swells. It lies saturated through the winter and in late summer it splits into deep cracks, and the classification credits the clay with holding the canopy open and strongly suspects fire of helping. Around the openings stands a thin woodland of shortleaf and loblolly pine in about equal parts, with scattered blackjack and post oak over bluestem and Indiangrass. Both communities are known only from Floyd County and from Etowah County, Alabama, and the classification ranks the open grassland G1. Among the plants it lists are prairie dock and Riddell’s goldenrod, the goldenrod a disjunct here.

Found again

The prairies came to notice in the early 1990s, when the botanist Jim Allison found them while searching for Mohr’s Barbara’s buttons, a threatened plant. In 1994 Richard Ware of Rome found the whorled sunflower there, a plant, as the Atlanta paper told it, thought extinct for about a century. Charles Seabrook, writing in 2012, counted 41 rare plants and animals on the prairies. Temple-Inland, the timber company that owned the land, gave The Nature Conservancy a 929-acre conservation easement over the best of them in 2002, and the Conservancy keeps the openings with prescribed fire.

What closes them

Without fire, the classification says, Berchemia and Cornus amomum move in. The Alabama counterpart, Tom Cat Prairie in Etowah County, has been nearly destroyed by planting loblolly pine, and few undisturbed examples of the surrounding woodland remain anywhere, lost to farming and pine plantations. Farther up the valley, the geologist C. W. Hayes noted in 1894 and 1895 that people burned the woods every autumn as ordinary practice, and that the burning kept down the coarser grasses.