Cove Forest

What it is

In the hollows where soil collects and water stays, the mountain forest grows tallest and most mixed. The Smokies count cove hardwood among the eight major forest types that cover nearly all of the park, and the Tremont institute’s teaching summary places it from about 1,000 to 4,500 feet, with eight species, hemlock and silverbell, buckeye and basswood, sugar maple, yellow birch, tuliptree and beech, making up most of the canopy. Robert Whittaker’s 1956 study of these slopes found that each tree follows its own needs for moisture and warmth, so a cove forest grades into its neighbours along the slope without a hard edge.

On the Cumberland Plateau the same kind of ground goes by another name. Ecologists there call it mixed mesophytic forest, and the federal ecoregion description confines it mostly to the deeper ravines and the escarpment slopes, with oak and pine on the dry tableland above. Hart and Clatterbuck, summarising Hinkle’s surveys, describe evergreen coves of hemlock with white pine, basswood, yellow-poplar, beech, umbrella magnolia and yellow birch over rhododendron. Tennessee State Parks describes most of Roan Mountain State Park as Appalachian cove forest, and Georgia ForestWatch records cove forests of very tall trees on Grassy Mountain, just outside the Cohutta Wilderness.

Two old stands

The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in the Unicoi Mountains is, by the Forest Service’s description, a cove hardwood forest of rich soil and plenty of water, dominated by tulip-poplar. Its largest poplars are more than twenty feet around, and the Forest Service gives their age as up to about 450 years. The splash dams begun to float its logs down to the Cheoah were never used. After lumber prices fell in 1929, Andrew Gennett sold the tract to the Forest Service at $28 an acre, in 1935 or 1936 by different accounts.

In Savage Gulf, on the South Cumberland, about 500 acres of old-growth mixed mesophytic forest stand in the Savage Creek gorge, described by Elsie Quarterman and colleagues in 1972 and named a National Natural Landmark in 1971. By the Grundy County historian’s account it escaped the saw because Sam Werner’s railroad could not cross the disputed titles between his mill and the gulf.