page_title: Smoke Hole Canyon
section_title: Flora
hierarchical_section_title: Smoke Hole Canyon / Ecology / Flora
caption_attribution_description: English: Area of juniper barrens on a spur of North Fork Mountain in Smoke Hole gorge, West Virginia, USA.
context_page_description: Smoke Hole Canyon — traditionally called The Smoke Holes and later simply Smoke Hole — is a rugged 20 miles long gorge carved by the South Branch Potomac River in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia, United States. The area is rather isolated and remote with parts accessible only by boat or on foot.
  Defined to the east by Cave Mountain and to the west by North Fork Mountain, Smoke Hole has been part of the Monongahela National Forest's Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area since 1965, although some of it is still private land. Formerly, the area was home to a scattered community of family homesteads, storied for their isolation, traditional lifestyles, and skilled production of the illicit liquor known as "moonshine". Today, The Nature Conservancy considers Smoke Hole and the surrounding mountains to be "one of the most biologically rich places in the East", especially as regards its rare plant communities. It included the Canyon as part of the greater Smoke Hole-North Mountain Bioreserve during its "Last Great Places" campaign.
context_section_description: Trees
  
  The dominant trees covering the Canyon's wooded slopes are oak, black walnut, ash, mulberry and hickory; also abundant are ironwood, linden, flowering dogwood, eastern redcedar, birch, aspen, American beech, tulip poplar and six varieties of pine. The fruit-bearing common pawpaw (Asimina triloba) grows at river level in great profusion, especially in the lower gorge. Before the early-20th-century chestnut blight, the American chestnut was also common here.
  Shrubs
  
  The understory of the Canyon woodland includes such low-lying, fruit-bearing vegetation as huckleberry, blackberry, raspberry, teaberry, and wild grape. Other undergrowth includes crab-apple, witch hazel, rhododendron, sumac, pussy willow, spicewood, dog rose, sloe, chokecherry, haw, and honeysuckle.
  Herbs and wild flowers
  
  The biological richness of Smoke Hole's plant communities was demonstrated by a botanist in 1933 who documented 283 species of flora on the 4-acre Hermit Island alone. The earliest spring annuals to emerge in the Canyon are bloodroot, followed by the yellow dog-toothed violet. Spring beauties, bluets and dandelions are not far behind. Other violets along with the buttercups follow. Summer brings jack-in-the-pulpit, trilliums, anemones, wild geraniums, wild roses, lady slipper, wild columbine, rhododendron, black-eyed susans, field lilies, and ox-eyed daisies.
  The prairie-like regions and associated cedar glades around the Smoke Hole Canyon are the largest groupings of such habitats in the Central Appalachians, and a number of unusual disjunct or regionally endemic plant species are known from the Smoke Hole. The Smoke Hole bergamot (Monarda fistulosa var. brevis), a member of the mint family, has some of its few worldwide occurrences within the Smoke Hole area. Virginia nailwort (Paronychia virginica var. virginica) is another rare plant known from the Smoke Hole. This species is so uncommon that the few small patches found among the rocks of the Canyon walls are thought to be the largest population in the world. The prairie flax (Linum lewisii) is a widespread western species quite rare in the east. Sometimes called "Lewis flax", it was originally discovered during the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–06), and not known wild east of the Great Plains until it was found in the Smoke Hole.
caption: Area of cedar barrens on a spur of North Fork Mountain in Smoke Hole
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