Native Flowers Near the Landfill

One of the richest deposits of irony paradoxide in the Ellerbe Creek watershed is at the Durham city landfill, which was closed some years back and planted with grass to protect the clay cap carefully spread over several decades' worth of Durham's garbage.

People tend not to have fond associations with landfills, but this one is an extraordinary landscape. Essentially a mountain, it boasts an extraordinary panoramic view of Durham county. Watching a glorious sunset there years back, I saw fifteen wild turkeys foraging just down the slope. Many years ago, during a tour, while the landfill was still in operation, a city councilwoman who had recently returned from Africa gazed out across the side of the landfill, turned bronze by broomsedge grass in the winter, and said it reminded her of the Serengeti. At the time of its closure, residents living nearby had requested that it be turned into something akin to a botanical garden. Currently, the landfill is not open to the public.

Though the landfill is a profoundly altered landscape, along its edges are some of the best preserved remnants of Durham's natural heritage, as can be seen in the first photo. Looking across a beaver pond, you can see the landfill rising in the distance. But in the foreground is a pinxter azalea, a beautiful native shrub that is rarely seen in the watershed.


Growing near the azalea is a patch of blue crested iris, which, if one can judge by the ten foot wide clone, has been growing there a very, very long time.


Viburnum dentatum (3rd photo) is another of the less common natives growing there. Their prevalence suggests that the small slope next to the beaver pond was never plowed.


Very close by is another rich remnant of native plant diversity, also on city land. Though it looks like a plain bit of roadside grass under a powerline (fourth photo), it in fact harbors 111 native species of wildflowers and grasses, including big bluestem--the dominant grass of the tall grass prairies in the midwest.

Most people don't know that bison once lived in what is now North Carolina (traces of a bison migration route can still be found north of Durham), or that in precolonial times the piedmont was a mosaic of forest and prairie.

Remnants like this one near the landfill, which survives only because roadsides were left unplowed and trees are prevented from growing under powerlines, serve as valuable windows into an extraordinary past. Because this remnant is biologically special and irreplaceable, ECWA officially adopted it some years ago, through an arrangement with Duke Energy, to prevent it from being sprayed with herbicides. ECWA maintains the site by cutting down any tree growth.


One of the unusual wildflowers growing in this roadside prairie remnant is leather flower (Clematis ochroleuca). Unlike the clematis we're accustomed to seeing, this species is not a vine but instead stands erect. Leather flower is one of a number of rare wildflowers in the piedmont that only grows on a soil called diabase, named for the characteristic rock from which it forms.

The sustainability of this site's rich botanical legacy would be greatly enhanced by expanding it into the adjacent city-owned land.