TROY -- The N.C. Zoo, known around the world for its animal conservation work, is quietly expanding its efforts to care for endangered and unusual plant life as well.
The zoo is buying a 113-acre tract of land in Montgomery County that's home to a stand of thousands of old-growth longleaf pines, some of which sprouted two centuries ago.
"It's a pretty special place," said Nell Allen, rare plant curator for the zoo, as she pushed aside prickly underbrush Wednesday at what's being called the Arnett Branch Piedmont Longleaf Pine Forest. Using a handheld global positioning system, Allen walked less than a hundred yards from a house on the property to one of its "granddaddy" trees, a specimen too big for her to wrap her arms around.
The zoo has been working to buy the property for a couple of years through its Plant Conservation Program, part of the state-owned facility's mission to provide recreational and education opportunities for North Carolina residents while also preserving space for native plants and animals.
Using grant money, private donations and help from land conservation groups, the zoo has developed a small network of preserve within 30 miles of the park in Asheboro, where it does plant conservation work.
On the Arnett Branch pine forest, the zoo worked with the LandTrust for Central North Carolina, which helped secure an option on the land from the Nichols family, which has owned it for more than 100 years.
Margaret Nichols' legacy
Crystal Cockman, a conservation specialist with the LandTrust, said the old pine trees were a favorite feature of the once-sprawling farm where Margaret Nichols grew up.
"She was kind of a naturalist" who insisted that her father not clear the trees for farming or cut them for timber, Cockman said.
Researchers say some of the trees bear scars from being tapped for their sap, once used to make the tar and pitch that caulked the seams of ships.
Nichols so loved the forest setting, Cockman and Allen said, that she lived there alone until her death a couple of years ago, when she was in her early 90s. Her body was cremated and her ashes scattered on the grounds.
For much of her life, Nichols lived in the original farmhouse on the property. That burned and was replaced in the 1970s with a modest structure faced in stone gathered from the property. Here and there, the walls are embedded with quartz crystals.
The zoo will try to preserve the house, Allen said, and use it as a visitors center.
The forest itself will require a little more work to restore it to the way it might have looked before European settlement, when longleaf pines reached from the coastal plain well into the piedmont. Stands of longleaf can still be found nearer the coast, and the U.S. Forest Service has a stand of old longleaf pines in the area. But the Arnett Branch is the last known large old-growth stand in private hands anywhere in the piedmont, Allen and Cockman said.
Like much of the land the LandTrust has worked to keep from being developed, the Nichols tract is an unusual mix of ecosystems, Cockman said. While the longleaf pine found a way to grow in the clay soil of the area, the wire grass that usually grows at its feet in the coastal plain can't survive. So the ground cover would have been Indian grass and a plant called little bluestem.
Over the past hundred or more years, hardwoods and other species have crowded between the longleaf pines, and a deep padding of leaves and needles has accumulated. At one time, Allen said, nature would have kept the area clear by burning it through wildfires, often started by lightning strikes.
Tree experts say the longleaf pine requires fire, but these trees haven't experienced a burn since around the 1930s, Allen said.
Once the state takes over the land, trained zoo horticulturalists will conduct controlled burns to clear out the hardwoods and other growth. When they do, Allen and Cockman said, dormant seeds of yellow fringed orchids, Piedmont indigo bush and other plants that require more sunlight than they have seen in decades might sprout.
Working to find funds
After Margaret Nichols' death, her survivors met with the land trust to look for a way to save the trees she loved. They agreed on a price of $430,000, about $3,800 an acre. The LandTrust got $50,000 in private funding to secure an option on the land while it worked with the zoo to find the rest of the money.
So far, the N.C. Natural Heritage Trust Fund has given the partnership $282,000. The LandTrust has put in $11,800, and the zoo, $2,000. The group needs another $124,000 or so, including money for survey and legal work, which it hopes to get next year either from the Natural Heritage Trust Fund or another state source, the Clean Water Management Trust Fund.
In the meantime, the group will go ahead with the purchase of as many acres as it can pay for with money in hand.
Visitors will include students on field trips as well as landowners who might like to learn how to grow the majestic longleaf pine instead of the less resilient loblolly, which is planted by the millions on tree farms across the eastern part of the state.
Ever mindful of the animals, Allen notes the land is home to several interesting species, such as timber rattlesnakes, Kentucky warblers and spotted salamanders.
Like other flora and fauna the zoo has helped shelter, these still have a home, Allen said, because a woman was willing to share hers.
"This forest is only here because one person put her foot down," Allen said.
