Dire warning, indeed!

The last few days have been very busy.  We are building a new home, as you already know if you have read much of this blog at all.  And when a few days of lousy weather are followed by clear and sunny days, you can bet we take advantage of that to try to get as much done on the construction as we can.

Ultimately, the house is intended to look like a sort of medieval European manor house.  We've been searching for an appropriate door, and finally we found a company near Alpharetta, Georgia, that makes the kind of door we want in a very low-maintenance version.  We visited their showroom this past week to see firsthand what their products look like, and we were very pleased.  We'll be getting our front doors from there, and they look VERY Middle Ages European.  So much so, in fact, that I'm thinking of hiring a few serfs to hang about the place when it's done, just to give it color and so forth.

The drive back was through some beautiful mountain countryside, along Georgia Highway 140 through Canton and Waleska.  It's one of my favorite drives at this time of year--actually, just about any time of year--and we stopped at one of our favorite spots to soak up a bit of the lovely scenery.

There it was: a clear and rushing mountain stream, cascading and tumbling over boulders, making beautiful watery music.  The steep sides of the rocky gorge the stream had cut over thousands of years, were covered with rhododendron (alas, not in bloom) and mountain laurel.  But there was a new element in the picture, a somewhat forbidding one.

Every fifty feet on the trees beside the roadway were signs.  The signs read:

POSTED
NO TRESPASSING
Warning: This area infected with
Liquidambar styraciflua.

Keep Out!

Now, I could see that there were poison ivy plants growing along the edge of the defile, but there was no warning about the poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans).  My wife and I, both interested in plants, looked at each other with puzzlement.  She is more acquainted with the scientific names of plants than I, but this one seemed to be familiar to me even though I could not immediately place it.

"Do you remember what this is?" I asked her. "Is it a plant or a plant disease?"

Lara shook her head. "It sounds familiar, though." She shrugged. "We'll look it up when we get home."

After arriving at the homestead, we took one of the tree books from the shelf (yes, we did that instead of using Google!) and we found the answer immediately.

The area is infected with the (GASP!) Sweetgum trees!

Now, there is no danger from the sweetgum tree, unless you happen to step on one of its seed pods when barefoot.  That would probably result in a little bit of an impromptu dance and perhaps some colorful language, but no lasting damage unless you happened to fall down while prancing about while holding one foot.  Here is a picture of several of the seed pods, which are about the size of golf balls.

Lara and I discussed this, and the only conclusion to which we could come, was that the owners of the land had tired of people holding picnics on their lovely stream, afterward leaving behind lots of trash.  So, they came up with this way of playing on the ignorance of most folks.  And they weren't lying--there were several sweetgum trees growing all along the roadway.  In fact, in the essence of irony, some of the signs were themselves tacked firmly to sweetgum trees. 

But the warning of possibly contracting the dangerous "virus" Liquidambar styraciflua would probably discourage most people from traipsing through the woods to the stream. I can see it now...

Him: "Hey, honey, let's stop here and eat those sandwiches we brought along.  The kids would love to wade in that creek."

Kids in chorus: "Yeah!  Yeah!  Wade in the creek!"

Her: "Oh, okay George.  Pull over."  She opens the door.  "Oh, Lord!  Honey, let's get out of here!  That sign says this area is infected with some sort of disease or something!"

Him:  "Huh?!?"

Her:  "Get moving!  We don't want the kids to get that... that... styrack flu or whatever it is!  Lester just got over the chicken pox last week!"

They roar away in their minivan.

Nature can be a dangerous place, you know.