Plants

The varieties of Plants found along the Appalachian Trail are too numerous to list. One section alone, the section through Smokey Mountain National Park contains enough to keep a botanist busy through several lifetimes. The following paragraphs come from a brochure I picked up about the park.

The Smokies have more old growth or "virgin" forest than anywhere else in the East, more than 100,000 acres, despite the fact much of the park area was timbered prior to becoming a park.

The Smokies have more types of flowering plants than any other North American national park. The number is always growing as field botanists record a half-dozen or more new species in the park each year. At last count, the total was 1,489.

The park has more than 130 species of trees, more than in all the countries of Europe. It also has 50 different ferns and fern allies, 330 mosses and liverworts, 230 lichens, and 1,800 fungi.