Plants that are signs of former human settlements | Hacker News Reader

Plants that are signs of former human settlements

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Discovery Park in Seattle is built within an old Army base dating back to 1920 or so.

While exploring some hidden corners I ran into a metal detectorist, and we got to talking about other fun places in the park.

His best tip for finding the site of old military housing was to look for yew trees. Apparently it's a very old tradition.

Sure enough, you go back and look at old photos, and there's a yew tree outside every door.

Edit: another one from the PNW; holly trees oftentimes coincide with the location of old logging roads. The berries have a size which would easily lodge in cat tracks and other nooks within earth movers and were easily transported among sites.

In geography class in college, the teacher talked about identifying old house locations sites in the Caribbean. I've forgotten the details over the last 30-odd years, but what they did was look for a place with multiple tree species with edible fruit. The idea was that if you found a small area containing, say, an orange tree, an avocado tree, a mango tree, a guava tree, and a lime tree there was probably someone living there.

(I picked those tree since they were the trees closest to my childhood house in Miami, not because I remember what the teacher said.)

I'm from the Caribbean and my backyard has orange trees, a mango tree, a guava tree, a lime tree and others (but no avocado tree). So your choices were pretty spot on.

I was cheating about the orange tree. That was the neighbors', whose tree came into our yard and we could get those oranges. They also had banana plants. My grandparents (across the street) had a huge grapefruit tree in their backyard.

I was happy when the guava tree blew down in a storm. Bugs got into the fruit so quickly, and I was the one who had to pick them up when I mowed. Yech! Mangos took longer to get to that state. And people would come into the yard to grab newly fallen mangoes, leaving less to deal with. A bit rude to do so without asking, we thought, but we couldn't them all anyway.

Also interesting, the smell of rain is a real thing[0] and it seems humans evolved to favor it as it meant a favorable place to settle.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/37648-good-smells-rain-petrichor...

Similarly, in the Pacific Northwest, patches of berries and other edible plants may be remnants of Indian/First Nation settlements:

https://www.science.org/content/article/pacific-northwest-s-...

So… the entire PMW near water?

Much of the Pacific Northwest (coast, including lake coast) is extremely rocky with scant amounts of sand. Much of it, heavily wooded, even today. A number of invasive species (like the Himalayan Blackberry) have muddled sites, that would have been obvious, based solely on plant sign.

Damn Luther Burbank[1]!

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/29/491797791/th...

wow, i always thought that park just had low effort landscaping, but i guess the dense thorny thickets are intentional

More recent but one can see lots of daffodils around old homestead sites in various places in the Willamette Valley. Also old apple trees in the middle of nowhere .

Way more recent, but if you see forsythias in the Midwest without a house around, there was a settlers home there at some point.

We found an old foundation after digging around where there were forsythias growing in the woods on our place after being keyed into that one.

This is particularly noticable along the Pony Express Trail in the desolate areas of the west. Everywhere there is water there is a big patch of currants or chokecherries

You can look for palm trees in French Polynesia, they're a good sign that someone settled there at some point in the past. The first thing the polynesians would do is plant palm because that brought coconuts and the fibers can be used to make a variety of things.

They did, but generally didn't have to. Coconuts floated to all the islands and grew by themselves. Of course they took coconuts for them on their voyages for food, and when they arrived, planted them if they were unique varieties.

The list of canoe plants are here: https://www.canoeplants.com/contents.html

The mustard blooms in spring here in California are closely tied to Spanish mission settlements.

Here's a bit of local history, for those of us in the Bay Area.

https://gilroydispatch.com/the-mustard-king-of-san-juan-baut...

I think I heard somewhere that when the Hopi drove out the Spanish missionaries they kept their fruit trees.

In Big Sur you can find prickly pears and sweet lemon trees at old homesteads.

In the southern Appalachians a strip of rhododendrons running up a mountain is a good sign of water. It's especially noticeable in spring because rhododendrons are evergreen, and they stick out among all the deciduous trees that haven't yet leafed out.

This may hold true elsewhere; that's just where I noticed it.

In Alaska, I was told to never camp near where blueberry bushes were widespread. "It's like camping near a watering hole," I was told. "Every damn animal in the area likes blueberries, including bears and wolves."

I think an equally interesting point might be why Daffodils tend to outline the foundation of where a house used to be. Yes of course because people planted them there but then you'd expect wild animals to eat and carry the seeds away. Which would mean that the daffodils would expand out adding some background noise; this doesn't happen though. My theory is it's because not many animals eat daffodils and spread the seeds around.

Do daffodils propagate underground via "runners" or some means like that?

Bulbs divide.

They're toxic - people plant them because they're one of the only things deer won't eat. No need for a theory, this is common knowledge to this day.

The reason you see this around old homesteads is that daffodils have bulbs and propagate much more easily that way. One daffodil will turn into many after some years

Why don't the spread by just naturally dropping seeds around? Or is it so slow that it hasn't happened yet for a ~hundred or so year old settlements?

Garden hybrids

The cultivated varieties rarely seed, and being toxic nobody wants to dig them in any case. Studying the grow I assume that you could even estimate the planting year with a plus/minus reasonable interval.

> Fields turn into forests in less than a generation, if properly neglected.

There's a place near where I live that's government land according to the parcel map but used to be a golf course and a private home. Now both are abandoned and there's a thick, nearly impenetrable forest between them. I went on Google Earth to look up historical imagery, and back in 1990, that forest was an empty, plowed field.

I've been referring to the 'potato forest' in my garden, and that's just months & not neglected - just not all harvested yet - so I can readily believe it!

Young forests are actually more impenetrable than mature ones, since the keystone trees haven't had enough time to shade out the scrubby stuff.

> It may not hold in the rest of the South, but periwinkle in Virginia very often co-occurs with cemeteries.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/africanamerican-grave-...

In New Zealand, a row of poplars or a large Monterey cypress or two on a river flat is often all that's left of an old farm homestead or goldrush settlement, so for antique bottle collectors, they're a good indicator of where to start looking for Ye Olde Rubbish Pit.

Peach grove road, Hamilton (Aotearoa/New Zealand) - named after the grove of peaches local Maori had planted.

Jamestown, NZ. All that's left are some apple trees.

https://www.hollyfordtrack.com/our-story/history/

I had never heard of a honey locust tree. Those things look like they have really nasty thorns.

I grew up with a mature locust tree in the backyard. They are nasty thorns, over a foot long on the trunk (article said as large as a hand, but they can be as long as a forearm), and many inches long on all the branches. They go out in every direction too, like caltrops. I played baseball in the backyard without shoes exactly once.

I never even considered eating the pods.

Yeah, honey locusts are pretty wicked; their thorns have thorns. I first met them on a trip to Utah, where they commonly occur in urban settings. They aren't native to Utah, so I imagine some brilliant city planner must have really hated the idea of children climbing trees. Which doesn't really explain the delicious mulberry trees of a similar age that I encountered.

Any decent landscaper knows about a special group of plants that have the so called architectural trait. Those aren't necessarily colorful, nice or covered in big flowers. They stand among other as a living sculpture.

Strongly geometrical plants are useful to integrate the rigid shapes found in man-made garden objects. We can culture a snow white Onopordum thistle near to a light-grey granite pavement, and it creates a subtle reverberating effect that is very desirable, both in color and in geometry. The horizontal lines on the pavement are balanced by the strong vertical lines of the thistle creating a structure that people often find pleasant, even if they don't know why. If well done, it just feels right.

Honey locust are cultured because they are hard and tolerate neglect, but they are not unique trees in this sense. What made them stand among other are its beautiful uniquely-shaped architectural spines.

And they are beautiful indeed. Locust trees are winter actors. The combination of clusters of black spines covered on ice, under a winter morning light can bright a long winter season when there is not much more to see. Connoisseurs appreciate it as a certified way to introduce drama and contrast in a garden that otherwise would feel bland, dull and uninspiring.

On the other hand finding this trees on riverbeds don't whisper to me "navajo settlement" necessarily. It speaks: "floodings and vegetative multiplication by roots".

We had one in our yard in north Texas years ago. It had been intentionally planted by the original owner of the property next door when he built his house in the late 1920's. He said that he thought it was a pine when he planted it. There was also an ailanthus, a true trash tree known as the "tree of heaven" for some ridiculous reason. These were planted in the strip between driveways and together with the other trees offered abundant shade.

When we bought the house the tree was more than 45 feet tall and had these awesome thorns all the way up the truck to the crown and along the branches. Squirrels would hang out sunning themselves on the branches.

Of course those thorns will dry out and drop occasionally so you did need to watch as you turned into the driveway to make sure there wasn't a huge thorn in the way. One day for reasons lost to history I decided to climb that honey locust as high as possible without using any ropes, moving hand over hand and carefully placing feet as I climbed.

I found that it was actually pretty easy to climb the tree as long as you verified that the thorns bunches were alive and strong since they would be well attached to the trunk. I found that I could carefully grab hold of multiple thorns or if a limb was available I could firmly grasp the limb between thorn bunches and move myself up. The hardest part was preventing being impaled by those long thorns as you tried to stay near the trunk. It was a balancing act of locating a competent foothold higher up the trunk, locating open spots for each hand with as few thorns as possible and weaving my fingers between protruding thorns to gain the best grip and then slowly and gently easing my weight onto the upper foot while I maneuvered my midsection around the worst of the thorns or eased into them so that they were bent away from me as I climbed.

I ended up making it over twenty feet to a large limb where I cut some thorns out of the way so that I would have a place to sit. I sat there for a few minutes admiring the view and lying to those people on the ground about how easy it was. Then I carefully examined the trunk, the limbs, and the thorns so that I could select a path down before slowly twisting myself into position for the slow descent.

Other than a few shallow punctures and some scratches I had no injuries of note. I was wearing my old Vasque Sundowner hiking boots and the rubber on the toes was pretty helpful.

If you ever decide that you would like to try climbing one of these trees I found that the old, dry thorns should be avoided if possible since the sharp point of the thorn tends to dry out first and if you get punctured it will break off under the skin and may become infected if you don't remove it. It would be hard, and very painful, to get a deep puncture wound from one of those thorns since they rapidly narrow to a sharp point and the older thorns are thick. Newer growth can be thin enough to go pretty deep like a mesquite thorn. All things considered you should avoid driving over or steeping on these honey locust thorns.

I also took a elective archery class in college and one project we all had to do involved making a recurve bow and at least one arrow with a hand-made arrowhead or other type point. I tipped one arrow with a flint arrowhead that I knapped myself and the other with a honey locust thorn hardened over a fire. Both my arrows flew towards the target but the honey locust point flew straighter probably because it was lighter and more aerodynamic so I ended up with a good grade.

Honey locust are beautiful trees. The ailanthus was a PITA with all the seeds it dropped. Every year there were hundreds of sprouts threatening to fill the yard with those damn trees.

If I’m not mistaken those trees are planted as living fence posts. I could also be confusing it with the black locust.

> Their preferred ecological niche involves poor, salty soil.

I looked at Wikipedia, to see what is a honey locust and Wikipedia (that arguably is not a grear source) says that those trees are "mostly found in the moist soil of river valleys". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_locust )

So it seems wikipedia says something else than the article? The self named researcher is confused why trees that like water grow near water?

His point was that it isn't the trees "natural" placement? That's kind of the theme of the post?

> His point was that it isn't the trees "natural" placement?

And is wrong

> Their preferred ecological niche involves poor, salty soil.

This is misunderstood.

Is the same with pines. We see pine forests in terrible windy places, sandy places near beaches and chill snowy mountains. We could conclude that pines "prefer" this areas but is not totally true. Pines grow perfectly in fertile soils, but saplings can't compete and after some time are displaced by other trees.

Conifers are very old plants and survivor masters that can stand bad lands that no other tree can endure. Poor soils equals often land-scars by old wildfires, so pines adapted to fire to spread its seeds and feel at home there even if they grow at a slug pace until eventually making a pine forest. they even evolved to promote fire as defense against competitors. When planted in rich soils pines grow perfectly well and fast, but a pine forest is just "a normal forest without everything else".

Honey and black Locust trees are tolerant to poor soils because they can fix air nitrogen and have deep roots, but when allowed to run free are invasive and deliberately look for riverbeds with fertile soil and plenty of freshwater. In that places they regrow from roots again and again and are practically indestructible.

I used to poke around ruined castles (just a few walls left) in the UK and they were typically a sea of stinging nettles.

Also, stinging nettles make wonderful soup.

Nice "nut" aftertaste, yup. With a mashed potato and some onion makes a very decent cream.

From what I have read, a red fern is sometimes a sign that the humans possessed domesticated dogs.

In addition to fruit trees, I was told that finding lilacs growing in an unusual spot might mean there used to be an outhouse or waste pile nearby: they planted lilacs to mask the smell. No idea if it's true or useful.

not really useful

Lilacs season is very short, between two to four weeks each year. If the winter is warm they don't even flower at all.

Even using different varieties to spread the season to six weeks you would still have 11 months to enjoy the smell of manure. if is the unique candidate, is a poor choice.

So, nope. Definitely not useful. We have much better options

In the winter, it's cold outside, and everything is frozen. So you don't need to hide the odor. Same with the fall. The lilac is easy to grow, and nice in the spring. So that just leaves the summer, but not many bushes are producing scent in the late summer, anyway.

If an outhouse was nearby in the past, there was a pretty big hole associated with it which may still be around. Might not be pleasant to discover by accident...

Lilacs or hollyhocks in my experience.

I have seen this at the site of my great grandparents home. The only sign that you're in the right location are weeping willow trees and spring bulbs.

Same can be said of Eucalyptus trees in California coast

These are mentioned in the article (“gum trees”):

> Maybe the ruins of a city will be denoted by the descendants of trees planted for shade: pin oaks, gum trees, sycamores.

IIRC, these were planted as potential wood for railroad tracks, but ended up proving too fragile.

Too flammable, and the wood twists too easily with the coastal humidity.

If you find a giant Lilac bush on an old farm, it's probably where the outhouse was. The fragrant flower was used, to try and hide the odor.

A couple brewery owners up in the Sierra near Truckee CAlifornia have been finding old hops fields.

It’s not uncommon to see abandoned old orchards in places.

Tamarinds can be found in the coast of Northern Australia, a sign of Macassan traders setting up camp in the region: https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/01/09/3666902.htm

Mennonites looked for black walnut trees, as a sign of fertile soil, suitable for farming and starting a settlement.

Plantago major, European plantain, is thought to be one of the first species brought to America by the European migration. It is still known by what the natives called it - 'white man's footprint'.

The European elder can also be a sign of former human settlements, at least here in Europe.

Indirectly as it marks the presence of stabled cattle.

Elders (and nettles) signal Nitrogen in the soil.

Kind of surprised no one's mentioned English ivy in the Northeast U.S.

ivy is propagated by birds like a hailstorm

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