The loblolly bay flowers in summer, the blooms are produced on new wood. The flower has five sepals, five petals, and numerous stamens. The petals are fused together at the base and form a bowl around the stamens. After pollination, the petals fall as a single unit.

The loblolly bay is a member of the Theaceae, the tea or Camellia family. It is one of the several anomalous groups of woody plants in eastern North America; the remainder of the tea family is in eastern Asia.

It is thought that after the Chicxulub [cheek' shu lube] asteroid set the world afire 65 million years ago, a new forest, temperate and broad-leaved, replaced the ferns, cycads, and conifers of the Cretaceous. The new forest of the Tertiary spread over the Northern Hemisphere covering Europe, Asia, and North America. After another age, the forest remained only where the climate allowed.

The cooling and drying climate permitted the grasses to claim the plains creating savannahs, steppes, and prairies. The loblolly bay, along with the Franklin tree (Franklinia) and silky camellia (Stewartia) are relicts of the tea family trapped in the eastern forests of North America.

(Compiled from: Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida, Richard P. Wunderlin, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1998; An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States and Canada, N.L. Britton and A. Brown, Dover, NY 1970; "Evolution of Eastern Asian and Eastern North American Disjunct Distributions in Flowering Plants", Jun Wen, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 30, Nov 1999; and "Temperate Broadleaved Deciduous Forests", S.L. Woodward, Radford University, Radford, VA, 1996)

In 1775, William Bartram was hiking across western North Carolina. He wrote in his journal "...I began again to ascend the Jore Mountains, which I at length accomplished, and rested on the most elevated peak; from whence I beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains."

Two hundred and two years later, eleven people formed a society to rediscover and build the trail William Bartram walked when he explored these North Carolina mountains. The trail has seven sections, one can hike the entire 80 miles or any one of the sections; mountain bikers can pedal a 14 mile bike trail or canoeists can float 9 miles of the Little Tennessee River in section 3. The trail (section 1) connects to Bartram's trail in Georgia. The trail runs to the Cheoah Mountains north of Robbinsville.

Two hundred members of the North Carolina Bartram's Trail Society keep this trail well marked and in good repair. To learn more about this society, to join, to help maintain the trail, or to spend your vacation seeing the wilds William Bartram saw, click on the link:

http://www.ncbartramtrail.org/index.htm

Maps of the trail can be ordered at http://www.ncbartramtrail.org/maps.htm