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If you feel cramped or overwhelmed, you should visit the Congaree National Park right outside of Columbia. Of its 26,000 acres, the core protected area is fifteen thousand acres.

I attended an outdoor lecture at the Congaree National Park last month, an appropriate site as Dave Stahle, Professor of Geography at the University of Arkansas, and the world’s authority on bald cypress gave the talk, and the Park is home to the state-record holding cypress tree. Stahle takes very small and minimally damaging core samples from trees and studies them to age trees and document climate change -- he has sampled trees that are two thousand years old. The science of dendrochronology is studying information derived from tree ring growth. These ring samples allow to date exactly what years had normal, above normal, or subnormal rainfall as the rings are larger or very small depending on how much the tree grew. In our part of the country, bald cypress are the oldest trees and provide the most information.

You can easily see large majestic bald cypress trees if you walk the boardwalk at the Congaree National Park. But retired DNR wildlife biologist John Cely who has explored the Park extensively, you might enjoy his blogs (at Friends of the Congaree Swamp) had found large cypress inaccessible except by boat and took Professor Dave Stahle, the world’s expert on bald cypress, to that area. Professor Stahle took tree cores from the largest of those trees to get information on their age and the climate they had grown in for probably over a thousand years. The oldest cypress trees Dr. Stahle has found are in the Black River preserve in North Carolina and are over 2,000 years old. The size of bald cypress doesn’t necessarily indicate their age; ones that grow in nutrient poor wet soils grow slowly.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed someone from our next guest’s organization about a free software coding education platform for adult residents of our state. That program is still up and running and they have now started a first-of-its-kind software development fellowship program in their continuing effort to find solutions to the tech workforce gap here in South Carolina. Mike Switzer interviews Katie Miller, program director at SC Codes in Greenville, SC. New program: www.developcarolina.org

Ever since the pandemic started we’ve been hearing about supply chain issues, most famously beginning with the toilet paper shortage. While we have been back in the saddle again (so to speak) as far as toilet paper goes, there are still problems, most notably with microchips. Our next guest says that the situation is less of a ‘supply chain’ problem and more of a ‘supply web’, or ‘network’ problem. Mike Switzer interviews Dr. Hee Yoon Kwon, assistant professor of Supply Chain Management at The Citadel in Charleston, SC.

A listener finds a brown water snake sunning... in December!

Exidia recisa (common name willow brain or amber jelly roll) is a jelly fungus in the family Auriculariaceae. It is a common, wood-rotting species throughout the northern hemisphere, typically growing on dead attached twigs and branches of willow and other broadleaf trees.

The southern house spider is a species of large spider in the family Filistatidae. Currently given the scientific name Kukulcania hibernalis, it was formerly known as Filistata hibernalis. Found in the Americas, it exhibits strong sexual dimorphism. It is occurs in the southern states of the USA, throughout Central America and some of the Caribbean, to southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

Dendrochronology is the study of information obtained from tree ring growth. It is used in several different fields – archaeologists can date wooden artifacts, dendrologist – tree scientists – can use tree rings to determine the local climate. But perhaps the most interesting is climate science. Professor Dave Stahle of the University of Arkansas told us at his talk at the Congaree National Park that the Lost Colony, called that because none of the original settlers survived, was ill-fated due to several factors but one fact that scientists have established is that those people who were trying to grow crops to feed themselves had no chance of a good harvest as they sadly were dealing with the drought of fifteen eighty-seven through sixteen hundred. Tree ring analysis shows that fifteen eighty-seven was the driest year in eight hundred years.

Mike Switzer interviews John Warner, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Innoventure in Greenville, S.C. who tells us about Jasmine Kitchen, a social enterprise lunch cafe designed to provide employment to abused women. Also: Jasmine Road.