July 26, 2025

 July 26th tour with Jeff starting at , sign-up here --> link

Meet at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We will walk for 1 1/2 hours, covering 1 mile of the Beltline, ending at Ponce City Market. (In fact, you can park near the end and walk to Inman Perc...if you want to end the tour near your car).

May 18, 2025

This Week's Tour...

...met at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We spent 90 minutes together, the majority of which was a great discussion of history, urban tree management, and weather while waiting out a deluge under the Freedom Parkway bridge!

"The Tourists"...
What a great group! Braved the downpour! I hope I earned the privilege of your time.

April 12, 2025

This Week's Tour...

...met at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We walked for 1 1/2 hours, covering 1 mile of the Beltline, ending at Ponce City Market.

"The Tourists"...
What a great group! Braved the brisk spring weather! Especially those Florida transplants! I hope I earned the privilege of your time.

Thanks for a great tour!

Pic of the week...
...is a tree that’s easy to “love”…one of many with “heart” shaped leaves…the American basswood or linden.

The American basswood is a medium-sized to large deciduous tree reaching a height of 18 to 37 m (60 to 120 ft) exceptionally 39 m (128 ft) with a trunk diameter of 1–1.5 m (3–5 ft) at maturity. It grows faster than many North American hardwoods, often twice the annual growth rate of American beech and many birch species. Life expectancy is around 200 years, with flowering and seeding generally occurring between 15 and 100 years, though occasionally seed production may start as early as eight years

Thanks, Wiki!!

Tree of the week...
...is going to be ALL OF THEM.

One of our intrepid tourists was interested specifically in growing her tree identification knowledge. It can be tough during the winter, since leaves are such an integral part of identification, but here is the list of the trees I pointed out along the trail:

• Fringe trees (Chionanthus retusus)
• Chickasaw plum (Prunus angustifolia)
• Shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata)
• Cathedral live oak (Quercus virginiana)
• Georgia oak (Quercus georgiana)
• American Beech (Fagus grandifolia)
• Sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima, non-native)
• Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides)
• Pignut hickory (Carya glabra)
• Blackgum (Nyssa sylvatica..not sweet gum...ew)
• Lots of oaks (genus Quercus), including white swamp, southern red, chinquapin
• Carolina and Canada Hemlocks (Tsuga caroliniana and canadensis)
• Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)
• Southern red oak (Quercus falcata)
• Scarlett oak (Quercus coccinea...remember Cochineal bugs...a source of red dye)
• - ...and then oak hill with all 33 native oak species

...and follow this link to Trees Atlanta's "Interactive Tree Inventory Map" to see them all!

Pignut Hickory

 Carya glabra

"Stump" of the week...
...featuring a question raised during the tour that Jeff couldn't answer.

Stone Mountain, Georgia

Q1: What is the etymology of the word monadnock?

A1: From the name of Mount Monadnock in New England, which derives from an Abenaki word, perhaps menonadenak, menonadenek (“smooth mountain”) or menadenak, menadenek (“isolated mountain”),[1] from aden (“mountain”)

Q2: Great…then what is “Abenaki”?

A2: Western Abenaki was spoken in New Hampshire, Vermont, north-western Massachusetts, and southern Quebec.[4] Odanak, Quebec is a First Nations reserve located near the Saint-François River—these peoples were referred to as Saint Francis Indians by English writers after the 1700s.[5] The few remaining speakers of Western Abenaki live predominantly in Odanak and the last fully fluent speaker, Cécile (Wawanolett) Joubert died in 2006.[4] A revitalization effort was started in Odanak in 1994; however, as of 2004 younger generations are not learning the language and the remaining speakers are elderly, making Western Abenaki nearly extinct.[6]

Eastern Abenaki languages are spoken by several peoples, including the Penobscot of what is now Maine. The last known natively fluent speaker of Penobscot Abenaki, Madeline Shay, died in 1993.[7][8] However, several Penobscot elders still speak Penobscot, and there is an ongoing effort to preserve it and teach it in the local schools;[9] much of the language was preserved by Frank Siebert.[10] Other speakers of Eastern Abenaki included tribes such as the Amoscocongon who spoke the Arosagunticook dialect,[11] and the Caniba, which are documented in French-language materials from the colonial period.

February 8, 2025

This Week's Tour...

...met at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We walked for 1 1/2 hours, covering 1 mile of the Beltline, ending at Ponce City Market.

"The Tourists"...
A beautiful day for a Beltline tour with folks from Tampa, Boston, and all over Georgia...including recent Atlanta arrivals! Welcome to the ATL!!!

SEVERE WEATHER CANCELLATION!!!! January 11, 2025...Happy New Year

 

December 14, 2024

This Week's Tour...

...met at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We walked for 1 1/2 hours, covering 1 mile of the Beltline, ending at Ponce City Market.

"The Tourists"...
A beautiful day for a Beltline tour with folks from all over Georgia...including a recent New York transplant, a returning/repeat Beltline enthusiast, and my mom!

Thanks for a great tour!

More cool tour-related stuff!

As we approached the massive art piece  "Wake" near the Fourth Ward Skatepark, I was trying to geek out on the meta-ness of it all - that this sculpture represents a ship and figurehead that represented the famous opera singer Jenny Lind and that we might be more familiar with as a character in the Hugh Jackman musical "The Greatest Showman"...all of which represent different types of mass marketing...but my brain completely blanked. Below is a  better description of the art itself.

"Wake is a large-scale installation modeled on the structural ribs of the nineteenth-century clipper ship U.S.S. Nightingale that rise up from the ground and frame a 21-foot-tall figurative sculpture. The carved sculpture, derived from a figurehead on the prow of the Nightingale, represents the opera singer Jenny Lind. Lind, the first international “superstar” to tour America from 1850-1852, was a spectacle orchestrated by P.T. Barnum and is considered one of the first examples of mass marketing. Subtle animatronic motions allow her to slowly breathe and scan the sky, adding a contemporary upgrade. The Nightingale clipper ship was captured by the Union Army in 186o, ending an attempt to transport enslaved Africans. Specifically for its Atlanta presentation, the figurehead casts her gaze toward 501 Auburn Avenue, the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wake forms a quiet space for the public to consider the past and future. This work was originally installed in Times Square in New York in 2018."

November 10, 2024

 This Week's Tour...

...met at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We walked for 1 1/2 hours, covering 1 mile of the Beltline, ending at Ponce City Market.

"The Tourists"...
A beautiful day for a Beltline tour with folks from all over Georgia!