Oconee Bells

In the field

In March, before most of the woods have leafed out, Oconee bells puts up single white flowers about an inch across, each on its own bare stalk above a mat of shiny leaves. The North Carolina flora gives the bloom as March and April. The rest of the year you’re looking at leaves: evergreen, glossy, roughly square with rounded corners and toothed margins, turning a deep bronze-red in winter. Galax grows on the same kind of ground and fools people regularly. Its leaves are rounder and thinner.

The plant wants cool, wet, shaded ground: rocky stream banks, deep ravines and steep slopes under evergreen rhododendron, usually in what North Carolina botanists call acidic cove forest. In North Carolina it’s fairly common in one small part of Transylvania County and very rare everywhere else. The range runs from there into Oconee and Pickens counties in South Carolina and Rabun County in Georgia, and records from other states are likely plantings. Lake Jocassee flooded much of the population, and digging for gardens is still counted among the main threats. Admire it where it grows.

Lost and found

André Michaux collected it near the headwaters of the Keowee River and carried it to Paris. The year is given as 1787 by the South Carolina Encyclopedia and as 1788 by NCpedia and Harvard’s Donald Pfister. P. A. Davies, writing in 1952, would say only that it was probably one or the other. Pfister places the spot in North Carolina, and Davies and the South Carolina Encyclopedia put it in South Carolina.

The specimen sat unnamed until 1839, when Asa Gray turned it up in Michaux’s herbarium in Paris, in fruit, labelled from the high mountains of Carolina with a note wondering whether it was a pyrola or a new genus. Gray decided it was new and in 1842 named it for Charles Short, a Kentucky botanist. Taking the label at its word, he searched the high country, northeast of Asheville, in 1841 and again later, and came home empty-handed.

In 1877 George Hyams, the seventeen-year-old son of an herbalist, collected it on the banks of the Catawba River in McDowell County, about five miles north of Marion. Gray had the specimen by 1878 and in the spring of 1879 went to see the patch. That McDowell plant is the northern form, which the North Carolina flora now follows Alan Weakley in treating, provisionally, as its own species. So the find that ended Gray’s search may not have been quite the plant he was looking for.

Michaux’s ground turned up in 1886, when Charles Sprague Sargent, following Michaux’s journal in search of a magnolia, found Shortia where the Toxaway and Horsepasture rivers meet. NCpedia gives the year as 1888. That junction went under Lake Jocassee, in 1973 by NCpedia’s date, and plants were dug and moved before the water came up. The South Carolina Encyclopedia puts the loss from Jocassee and Keowee at about sixty percent of the known populations.