Georgia Coast

Vegan cattail recipes:

Cattail-Wild Rice Pilaf

This recipe can be made with brown rice, but the wild rice adds a special dimension to it.

1 cup dry wild rice (4 cups cooked)
2 Tbsp sesame oil
½ cup chopped green onion
2 cups cattail shoots, sliced (about 30 cattails)
2 tsp salt
½ cup slivered almonds
1. Cook the wild rice until tender.
2. Sautee onion and cattail shoots in sesame oil until tender and translucent.
3. Mix the rice and the sautéd cattail shoots and onion together.
4. Add salt and slivered almonds.
5. Serve hot.

Source: http://wildfoodplants.com

Cattail Wild-Rice Soup

1 cup dry wild rice (4 cups cooked)

2 Tbsp sesame oil

½ cup chopped green onion

2 cups cattail shoots, sliced (about 30 cattails)

2 tsp salt

1. Cook the wild rice until tender.
2. In a heavy-bottomed soup pot sauté onion and cattail shoots in sesame oil until tender and translucent.
3. Add the cooked wild rice, salt and 4 cups of chicken broth or other soup stock of choice.
4. Simmer together for 15-20 minutes and serve.

Source: http://cattails.info/Cattail_Recipe.html

Saw Palmetto, Serenoa repens

The trail beyond the saw palmetto leads to a secret skate spot we frequented as kids called the “Indy Wall.”

It’s an old concrete drainage ditch with seven foot banks and a tight four feet of flat bottom.

Now long faded, the first piece of graffiti was a large Independent Truck Company symbol on the far wall.

With two skateparks in the county, once treasured spots like these are now mostly neglected.

Crooked River State Park

I knew a girl who spent the first few years of her life on Cumberland Island among the dunes and mangle of maritime forest. On our first visit to the island together, she showed me how to eat saw palmetto. Grab ahold of the center-most spike of a young plant and give it a tug. The soft, lower few inches taste a bit like heart of palm.

The USS George Bancroft is a decommissioned nuclear submarine now half-submerged in front of the main (Franklin) gate of Kings Bay Naval Base. At the age of eleven, I begged my dad one day to let me join a raucous group of Greenpeace activists and Hare Krishnas in the same spot. Today children climb on the US monument to mass murder.

Air Plants, Epiphytes

Epiphytic plants obtain water and nutrients from the air. They use other plants or structures, such as fences, for support.

Oconee National Forest

Oak Grove Cemetery, St Marys, Georgia

White Trail, State Botanical Gardens of Georgia

Sea Oats, Uniola paniculata

According to Georgia code 12-5-311, “It is unlawful for any person to cut, harvest, remove, or eradicate any of the grass commonly known as sea oats,” while tens of millions of dollars are spent on coastal development contracts on Jekyll Island’s fragile shore.

Georgia Beach
By Margaret Atwood

In winter the beach is empty
but south, so there is no snow.

Empty can mean either
peaceful or desolate.

Two kinds of people walk here:
those who think they have love
and those who think they are without it.

I am neither one nor the other.

I pick up the vacant shells,
for which open means killed,
saving only the most perfect,
not knowing who they are for.

Near the water there are skinless
trees, fluid, grayed by weather,
in shapes of agony, or you could say
grace or passion as easily.
In any case twisted.

By the wind, which keeps going.
The empty space, which is not empty
space, moves through me.

I come back past the marsh,
dull yellow and rust-colored,
which whispers to itself,
which is sad only to us.

Jekyll Island, Georgia

Hibiscus, Hibiscus rosa-sinensis

Questions to a Grasshopper

By Janisse Ray

Grasshopper, do you have a husband

waiting for you at home, under some sumac

roof? Or a son who yet needs you?

In the grasshopper bank, is your account

low? Is the Times waiting on an article

that you must squeak up out of your armored

head and from what you have deciphered

with those waving wands?

Is the rent do on your leaf, and do you

have to pay somebody for the water that falls free

from the sky? To whom do you owe your food?

Are you paying for grasshopper roads and

grasshopper schools and grasshopper hospitals

and grasshopper police and some kind of insect

library filled with wondrous leafy scrolls?

Do you have a president? Are you asked

to fight, to kill your own? Must you pay for it?

Or are you free, as you seem, to go

bursting through the stalks of dry grasses,

among strawberry leaves and yarrow,

curious and flippant, without direction,

unwary, obligated to nothing?

Carrion Plant, Stapelia gigantea

While writing on the porch last October, I sensed movement behind me. The twisted tip of a large, light yellow carrion flower pod began to unravel. I watched as four slits widened a few centimeters at a time. Over the course of forty-five minutes, it splayed wide open in a ten inch base jump from the shelf.

Within minutes, a large black fly arrived to sample the thick white chunks in the center of a flower that smelled like three-day-old roadkill in late July.

The squatting stink bug delivers the stink eye.

Pedagogy of the Plants