Central Appalachia is often called “the coalfields,” but a group in Southwest Virginia is working to celebrate another thing that makes the region unique: it’s one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. In Norton, a new interpretive nature trail opened this week, highlighting plants that can be used for medicine and food.
Dozens of people walked along the forest trail at Flag Rock Recreation Area. Ten interpretive signs are sprinkled throughout the two-mile hike, which is filled with medicinal plants, including elderberry, black cohosh, and Solomon’s seal. The plants grow here naturally, as they do in much of Southwest Virginia.
Victoria Persinger Ferguson is a member of the Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia and helped write some of the plaques.
“If you tell a story, I think people will pay attention more than when you don’t get to tell the story,” Ferguson said.
As Indigenous people were pushed off their lands, Ferguson said they lost some of their practices for using medicinal plants.
“As our elders die, very often knowledge has died with them about these plants, and what these plants were used for,” Ferguson said.
This project, called the Forest Botanicals Region Living Monument, also plans to unveil a statue here in Norton next spring, to honor forest botanical stewardship in Central Appalachia.
Appalachian Sustainable Development worked with the City of Norton and Virginia Tech on this storywalk. It’s funded through Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia, which partners with community groups to tell stories across the region that are often overlooked.
Shannon Bell is a professor of sociology at Virginia Tech, and is one of the organizers for the project.
“I think this is a really neat opportunity for people to learn about medicinal plants but also about the relationships that many different Appalachians over thousands of years have had with these very special forest plants,” Bell said.
She explained she had initially considered planting medicinal plants along the trail, but when she saw the rich diversity of species that already grows here, she realized the trail should be a living trail, in the wild.
She said the first inspiration for the project stems from something she heard from a woman named Lorelei Scarboro in Raleigh County, W.Va. twelve years ago. Bell recalls Scarborough saying “you know, I really wish people would stop calling us the coalfields. There is so much more that’s here in my community. And by only calling us the coalfields all of that is erased.”
“I really thought, well, this could be the forest botanicals region,” Bell said. “Not as the only way to think about the region, but as an alternative, another way.”
