Where the Wild Things Are

“Look … over there … see that?” I looked at the surface of the pond and saw widening arcs of ripples spreading across the water, but I couldn’t feel the breeze. 

“It’s not the wind. It’s the fish. They know we’re coming to feed them when they feel the vibrations of the cart, and they’re swimming to the edge of the pond for their meal,” explained David Johnson, my guide and one of the third generation of Johnsons to care for Briarwood Nature Preserve in Saline, Louisiana, since Caroline Dormon passed stewardship to his grandfather Richard Johnson in 1971. (Richard’s son, Rick, is the property’s current curator.)

If any one thing defines the Briarwood experience, it is that convergence of seen and unseen forces working beneath to create a harmony between all the living things that thrive there. You can’t see the fish, and the fish can’t see you; but they know when you’re coming, the raccoons know when the paw paw fruits ripen and where they fall, and they all find shelter under the longleaf pines that Dormon, or “Miss Carrie,” did so much to save.

[For another floral frolic, read Riding the Wild Azalea Trail]

Briarwood was originally the name of the property belonging to Dormon’s mother’s family, the Trottis, in Barnwell County, South Carolina. After moving to Louisiana they kept the name for their new property, farmed much of the land in cotton, and by the time Caroline Dormon was born in 1888, the family lived just north of the new Briarwood in the town of Arcadia, where her father practiced law. Each summer they loaded up wagons and drove them down to spend six weeks at Briarwood. Dormon and her brothers and sisters hunted, fished, climbed trees, stole eggs out of bird’s nests—in short, all the things that country children do, but for Dormon it was more than just fun. It was the perfect education for a future naturalist and training for a job that didn’t exist until she invented it.

Her subsequent university degree in art and literature proved to be the perfect complement to her passion for conservation, since she was able to professionally illustrate the books and articles she wrote during her life. Following graduation from Judson College in 1907, Dormon began a short teaching career that brought her to various locations across the state. Boarding with a family in Provencal, a village in Natchitoches Parish, she made the trip to Kisatchie School in a mule-powered wagon that crossed what is now, thanks to her efforts, part of the Kisatchie Ranger District of the Kisatchie National Forest. (The forest was named after the Kichai Indians, part of the larger Caddoan group, whose arrowheads and pottery are abundant there.) In her off hours, Dormon continued to explore the area on foot and on horseback, marveling at the highest land in Louisiana, with its stone bluffs, waterfalls, wild azaleas, and longleaf pines. Acutely aware of the threat of clear-cutting forest and determined to save a part of this unique area, she decided to act.

She even spearheaded a “Save the Holly” campaign to limit holly cutting during the holiday season. Nothing, it seems, escaped her notice.

Full-time conservation work involved leaving the school system and moving back to Briarwood to live in a cabin with her sister. In 1920 she traveled to New Orleans to attend the Southern Forestry Congress, where she lobbied hard for preservation of select portions of what then was called the Kisatchie Wold; later that year she was appointed to the Legislative Committee of the Louisiana Forestry Association. The preservation plan consisted of a multi-pronged effort including writing articles for newspapers statewide, examining titles to identify desirable tracts of land, and raising funds for its acquisition. In 1921 she became the first woman hired by the United States Forestry Service, and by 1930 the Kisatchie National Forest had been established. In her book The Kisatchie Wold, she wrote that “I could relax at last, for my beloved Kisatchie was safe.”

But of course she didn’t relax. What could have counted as a life’s work for anybody else was just one accomplishment as she powered through the next few decades. “I bit off more than I could chew when I was young and I’ve been spitting it out ever since,” she said.

Her commitment to native plants led to a friendship with Lady Bird Johnson and the eventual founding of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas. She also consulted with the Louisiana Highway Department on native plants to place in highway medians. She authored a bulletin titled “Forest Trees of Louisiana and How to Know Them” in an effort to encourage people to plant native trees that were in danger of being replaced by generic nursery imports. She even spearheaded a “Save the Holly” campaign to limit holly cutting during the holiday season. This might seem quirky, but berry-producing trees are few, since the male and female flowers are borne on separate trees, and mass pruning for decorative purposes can kill these beautiful trees. Nothing, it seems, escaped her notice.

[For another Natchitoches adventure, check out From Nagocdoches to Natchitoches]

If you are lucky enough to visit Briarwood in the spring, you won’t want to miss her Iris Garden—“a time capsule for irises that were being hybridized in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” said Rick Johnson. Follow a deeply sunken path that once was an old buffalo trace dating back hundreds of years, cross a wooden bridge, open the gate, and prepare for a slow, squishy ramble up and down rows of every kind and color of native Louisiana iris there is: big ones, tiny ones, purple ones, orange ones, red ones. Not for nothing did they call her an “Irisiac.” She had people all over the country sending her specimens, most of which she coaxed into bloom. The garden faded in Dormon’s later years but was restored by Richard Johnson and his wife around 1973, with help from the Society for Louisiana Irises. Summer attractions include the wildflower meadow and the red plumleaf azalea.

Her big cabin, built in 1950, houses books filled with her drawings and watercolors of many of the plants you see in the preserve. The back porch has a wonderful collection of nineteenth^-century farm tools along with the side saddle ladies of her generation still used. There is also a portrait of Emma Jackson, a Biloxi-Choctaw woman who made the elbow basket hanging in the log house museum. Dormon kept notes on all the basket patterns: “turtle’s necklace,” “blackbird’s eyes,” and naxtua-ahki, or “alligator entrails.”  All this and much, much more benefitted from love she had for the “wild things” of Louisiana. Her fingerprints are invisible, but they are to be found all over the state.

If you go: If the nature preserve isn’t a day trip, you will definitely want to stay in Natchitoches unless you’re camping. In addition to the peaceful river views and historic architecture you’ll find the state’s oldest continuously operating hardware store, Kaffie-Frederick (ground zero for Magnalite cookware and BBQ paraphernalia), and venues for live music and good food like Lasyone’s Meat Pie Restaurant and Maglieaux’s Riverfront Restaurant, with its Italian-Creole offerings. The visitor’s bureau also has maps available if you want to tour the nearby antebellum homes or the old Spanish Fort at Los Adaes in Robeline.  

Briarwood Nature Preserve

216 Caroline Dorman (sic) Road

Saline, La.

(318) 576-3379

briarwoodnp.org

This article originally appeared in our June 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.