Natural Virginia
Photography by Ben Greenberg
Writing by Deane Dozier
Click on these sections for text of Introductions:
Natural Virginia: Introduction
Tidewater Virginia: Introduction
Piedmont Virginia: Introduction
Western Virginia: Introduction
Introduction to Natural Virginia
By Deane Dozier
In the sweeping full-color panoramas of Natural Virginia, photographer Ben Greenberg celebrates the diverse beauty of the state's outdoors—from ancient and venerable mountains through gentle river valleys, farms, and fields to rich marshlands and estuaries and on to the open waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic.
The book is organized into three sections showcasing the state’s personalities: Tidewater, Piedmont, and Western Virginia. The Tidewater and Piedmont sections each represent a single distinct land form, or physiographic province, whereas the mountainous Western Virginia section includes three physiographic provinces—Appalachian Plateau, Valley and Ridge, and Blue Ridge.
While Natural Virginia is first and foremost a pictorial documentation of Virginia’s extraordinary beauty, it can also serve as a guide, suggesting what to look for and where to go. The photographs are selected to represent Virginia’s tremendous variety of natural habitats and geologic diversity. But the book is also a keepsake, articulating in its images what thousands of words could not say. This collection of photographs is a reminder to us all—whether residents of Virginia or travelers from other places—that what we have is part of who we are. Over the eons, the age-old mountains fashioned by fire and time have become ingrained in our spirits. The brackish marshes stir us and the salty seas run in our veins. The sunny meadows and sheltering woodlands embrace us. The coursing rivers and serene lakes reflect our energy and bring us peace. We protect them because we love them—and because their preservation is key to our own survival.
The Artistry Behind the Images
Armed with a camera, a commitment to dramatic imagery, and more than a dollop of wanderlust, Ben Greenberg has been absorbed for many years with capturing the disparate faces of his home state in pictures. So familiar is the camera in his hand that it is an extension of his mind and heart. His finger has grown numb on the cold camera button waiting for an egret to raise its head above the grass in the low-lying tidal areas of the Eastern Shore peninsula. He has made repeated visits to capture the character of saltwater marshes and maritime forest habitats, and he has climbed to the take-your-breath-away summits of the mountains on Virginia’s western border, where the snowshoe hare and red spruce are reminiscent of Canadian boreal forests. On ventures to the southeast corner of the state, he has photographed bald cypress trees in a swamp, a species typically associated with the Deep South. While driving the Ash Lawn-Highland Road in his own area of the state in Central Virginia, he has captured the sentinel-like quality of an impressive line of old trees, and on Pantops Mountain in Charlottesville, he found the perfect frame for a landscape in the overhanging branches of a snow-laden tree. His images are as much an artist’s rendition of the scene as they are documentary photography.
When he finds a favorite setting, Ben studies the variations in appearance through the seasons. He returns in early spring to the Tidewater marshes as the migratory waterfowl appear. He makes repeat visits to the Jefferson National Forest to photograph young maples greening up along a rambunctious Little Stony Creek in Giles County, and to portray the more subdued falls in the dryer conditions of late summer and autumn. He observes the pattern of rhododendron blossoms as they fall to the ground at Grayson Highlands State Park in southwest Virginia, and the changing colors as lush summer moves into autumn along the Maury River at Goshen Pass. He’s on hand again when an early snow dusts the fall foliage along the Blue Ridge.
In a pay-off for Ben's patience and persistence, one stunning photograph depicts a full moon rising on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where the waning light of day combines with rippled waters, sandy beach, and sky to produce a mesmerizing scene of lavenders, pinks, and blues. His camera lens is already focused on an osprey when it swoops down to pluck a fish from the waters of the Potomac River. And he is present at water’s edge, camera on tripod, as the day fades to dusk, the last breeze subsides, and only streaks of shimmering light remain—a last loving touch on the face of a lake.
Sometimes—many times—the scene doesn’t develop the way Ben anticipates, and hopes. But in those lucky, patient moments, something wonderful happens, and there is a serendipitous splashdown of two ducks on Pope’s Creek, or dramatic shafts of sunlight breaking through clouds to light up farms in the Shenandoah Valley.
There is the click of a camera shutter. A beautiful moment has been preserved.
The Panoramas
Viewing an entire collection of images of Virginia’s natural beauty in panoramic formatting delivers a compelling experience. The photographs in this book are almost three times as wide as they are high, a format well suited to the linear lay of mountain ranges interspersed with river valleys, or a country road angling off into the distance along a rail fence. Bucolic pasturelands and fields folded into the rolling countryside, two ducks leaving a long wake as they paddle along a shorefront, expansive salt marshes and stretches of coastal beaches—all these examples of Virginia scenery are natural candidates for panoramic composition.
Other settings, however, may not appear suited to panoramic formatting. Waterfalls, stands of tall conifers rising out of the mist, an impressive rock cliff—these scenes seem to demand a vertical image. Photography becomes art when the man behind the camera observes the rosy glow of early morning light on Nelson County mountains and stops to consider the possibilities. The colors reflected back in a mirror image on a lake are perfect, with judicious cropping, for a Greenberg panorama. Waterfalls create new interest in a panoramic image of Upper Cascades on Little Stony Creek, where the softness of flowing water contrasts with stark, angular layers of rock shelves. Sometimes, what is vertical in a sweeping panorama is what draws the eye: a lone heron on the James River against the blue-gray mist of pre-dawn; dead trees, stark white, jutting above the waterline at Briery Creek Wildlife Management Area; an iconic weathered pine emerging defiantly from the rocky outcrop of Ravens Roost on the Blue Ridge Parkway, backdropped by horizontal ridgelines and puffy summer clouds.
Beyond the Photographs
It’s best to move through these pages slowly. Study the images. Many of them create immediate first impressions, but there are also discoveries to be made in the detail. Perhaps there will be happy recognition of places already visited: the deep ravine of the Russell Fork River at Breaks Interstate Park, the rocky James River in the Richmond area, or the wild horses at both Grayson Highlands State Park and Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. You may find yourself dusting off your own photo albums and realizing there are slots yet to fill. Ben’s photographs may suggest different angles for capturing a waterfall or a new composition for a familiar lake, or they might inspire you to consider going back to a favorite destination in a different season.
While this is one photographer’s record of the land he loves—and his stories of capturing these images—it is more than that. Natural Virginia is a celebration of the abundance of Virginia’s natural heritage, ever changing through the days, flowing through the seasons, offering up a kaleidoscope of new images there for the taking by any of us who prepare, who pack up and go, who are patient, and who love the reward when the shortening days tint the forests with yellow-gold, the mist gathers, and a single leaf drifts down to ripple still waters.
Open the pages. Smell the Eastern Shore salt marsh. Breathe in the Virginia mountain air. Feel the swelling of the heart at the expanse of mountain ranges fading to soft blues in the distance. Then go. Go to the mountains, the waterfalls, the trails, the hills, the back roads, the marshes, the coastal beaches. Take the kids, the camera, the peanut butter sandwiches, and follow the bread crumb trail to wherever the images lead you.
Savor the experience of Virginia’s natural beauty. It resides within the images.
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Tidewater Virginia: Introduction
By Deane Dozier
Rappahannock. Tangier. Chesapeake, Chincoteague and Chickahominy. Back Bay and Great Dismal Swamp.
For Virginians, the very words can summon the smell of salt air or stir up memories of poking around the tidal ooze, searching for clams with their toes. Say “Sandbridge” or “Assateague” and just the names recall the sound of waves rolling into the Atlantic shoreline, sizzling up the beach, dissolving into foam.
Tidewater Virginia is rich in rivers and wetlands where ospreys and eagles nest, wide expanses of marsh grasses where wild ponies graze, and tidal waters where fish with an urge to spawn follow the paths of early explorers upriver to the fall line. Time spent savoring a salt breeze, watching porpoise roll through breakers along the coast, poking about a Chesapeake Bay tidal gut in a small boat, listening to songbirds in a marsh—all these have a way of seeping into the very marrow of a Virginian.
To geographers, the state’s Tidewater has a less poetic and more specific meaning. It’s the area east of the fall line—the physiographic demarcation where rivers from western counties meet the Coastal Plain and become tidal. In the following pages the area covered lies east of Interstate 95 and includes the Northern Neck (the local name for Virginia’s upper peninsula), the Middle Peninsula, and the Lower Peninsula on the west side of the Chesapeake Bay, the Bay itself and the tidal stretches of its tributary rivers, and Virginia’s portion of the Eastern Shore, as well as the entire southeastern corner of the state down to the North Carolina line.
As one of the world’s largest estuaries, the Chesapeake Bay is a focal point of the Tidewater area. The body of water itself lies entirely within the borders of Maryland and Virginia, but its importance can be better understood by considering that rain falling over a 64,000-square-mile area in portions of six states ends up in the Chesapeake. Individuals and organizations such as the energetic Chesapeake Bay Foundation are geared up to work with homeowners, farmers, business leaders, and governments at every level in this huge watershed to protect the fragile bay ecology and restore it to something nearer its incredibly healthy and productive state at the time the first European settlers arrived.
South of the Chesapeake Bay is the Dismal Swamp, which contains one of the largest blocks of forest in the Coastal Plain of Virginia, supporting more than 200 species of birds. All of Virginia’s national wildlife refuges—a total of 14—are sprinkled through the Tidewater region, as are 30 natural area preserves, 5 state parks, 9 state forests, 11 state wildlife management areas, and several important privately owned preserves of The Nature Conservancy. Some of these protected areas feature significant wetlands for marsh birds, or they may contain pristine shorelines, low dunes, and salt marsh habitat. The Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve on the Eastern Shore sets aside the longest expanse of coastal wilderness remaining on the eastern seaboard. Others provide protection for some of the oldest and tallest trees in Virginia. All of them beg to be photographed, and with their ocean horizons, beaches, wetlands and marshes, maritime forests, estuaries, and broad tidal rivers, they lend themselves perfectly to the panoramic photography of this book.
But even when the light is not right for photography, or the wild ponies can’t be located, or the egret takes flight before the camera is focused, there is the pure serendipity that occurs just by being in the Tidewater. In the marsh where you had hoped to spy wild ponies, you may find instead an osprey diving repeatedly along the surf’s edge until it comes up with a fish. That great blue heron you hoped to spot may be nowhere to be seen, but while searching for it, you might come across a diamondback terrapin or a clapper rail foraging on the mud flats for mussels and snails. Or you may run into a group of dedicated birders on the lower Eastern Shore, banding warblers and other migratory birds as they rest before crossing the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. You might happen upon a spring celebration of Estuaries Day at York River State Park north of Williamsburg. A canoe trip into the unique wetland communities and forested swamps of North Landing River Natural Area Preserve near the North Carolina line could get you and your camera close to wintering waterfowl. Armed with binoculars and a field guide, you could take one of the 18 loops in the Coastal section of the Virginia Birding and Wildlife Trail. This statewide trail—the first of its kind in the United States—also has 13 Piedmont loops and 34 loops in the Mountain area.
Even without planning ahead, you may come upon a wildlife photography festival or a decoy carving competition as you poke around the little towns of Tidewater Virginia—towns with names like Urbanna, White Stone, Kiptopeke, Wachapreague, and Chincoteague. The raw beauty of the area is fodder for creative people of all stripes—carvers, artists, photographers, crafts people, and even cooks who use their various tools and skills to concoct eye-catching and mouth-watering creations.
There is magic in stepping out of the normal workaday world and allowing impulse to lead you. Perhaps you are inspired to start your day in the window seat of a local café watching pelicans on a nearby dock. You may find yourself at midday allowing the tide to carry your canoe at its own pace as you study tracks of muskrat and raccoon along the banks of a tributary river. At day’s end, you might be lulled by the gentle slap of water against a small pier where watermen are stacking crab pots. In these moments of quiet thought, good things happen within. The photographer, the meanderer, the wanderer becomes more than a viewer of a scene, and instead shares it, becomes part of it.
The symbiotic relationship between land and water, things wild and things human, is what Tidewater Virginia is all about. The interaction of shallow bodies of water with land creates wetlands and marshes and woodlands that were home to Native Americans as far back as 17,000 years ago and are still home to descendents of the once dominant Powhatan chiefdom, as well as great varieties of fishes, amphibians, crustaceans, mammals, insects, and birds. And despite the many environmental assaults on the wetlands, marshes, and dunes, the Tidewater area is still a wonderful place to spend a morning, an afternoon, an evening…a week if you can spare it. Birds still fill the marshes with song and osprey still dive for fish. The illustrious blue crab still comprises the most valuable fishery in the Chesapeake Bay, and there are even signs of recovery of suffering oyster populations, previously so decimated from historic highs in the days of Captain John Smith’s explorations.
Tidewater Virginia—a fantastic place to bring a camera and a sense of adventure ... but leave your watch at home. Time and the tides will reward you.
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Piedmont Virginia: Introduction
By Deane Dozier
The Piedmont, which takes its name from the French word meaning “foot of the mountains,” is the largest of Virginia’s physiographic regions. This land of rolling countryside and river valleys in the middle portion of the state is bordered on the west by the Blue Ridge and on the east by the fall line, a zone of waterfalls and rapids characterizing all the eastward flowing rivers of the state and roughly paralleling Interstate 95.
Despite the now gentle appearance of its undulating foothills and peaceful river valleys, the Piedmont is geologically complex, shaped and molded by prehistoric oceans and continental drift, and deeply weathered by time. Its ancient rocks are enduring support for the soils, woodlands, lakes, and rivers that are home to bobcat and beaver, smallmouth bass and bluegill, white-tailed deer and black bear, great blue heron and eastern bluebird.
Over time, three major rivers from the western region of Virginia managed to carve their way through the Blue Ridge range, carrying their sediments eastward across the Piedmont toward the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Long before Native Americans roamed the woodlands and European adventurers attempted to find westward passageways for exploration and commerce, the mountain barrier had been breached to the north by the Shenandoah River where it joins the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and farther south, by the James River and the Roanoke River. But even with the breaks in the mountains, the Blue Ridge proved to be a barrier to European settlement from the east for hundreds of years, so that the mountains and valleys to the west were mostly settled by German and Scotch-Irish immigrants taking the easier route down from Pennsylvania, while the Virginia Piedmont was settled primarily by the English adventurers, colonists, and their slaves.
After the western rivers enter the Piedmont through breaks in the mountains, lovely tributaries that arise here make their own contributions or form other rivers as they meander in broad curves slowly eastward, widening into large pools at times, or hurrying on their way in more narrow stretches. Then, as they approach the fall line, their waters turn white and ferocious in their last stands as Piedmont entities, churning past boulders and around rocky islands before finally mixing with tidal waters at the fall line.
The most dramatic fall line marvel in the Piedmont is the Great Falls of the Potomac in Northern Virginia on the border with Maryland. Just above Washington, D.C., the turbulence of the falls makes a final energetic statement before the river becomes tidal. Surging on to the southeast, the great Potomac fans out into Tidewater, ultimately forming a watery chain linking Virginia’s Piedmont and mountains with the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean beyond. Local, regional, and national parks and preserves are located along both sides of this wild 15-mile stretch of the river, including the National Park Service’s Great Falls Park near McLean.
Slide a canoe down a shady bank on a summer’s day into the Roanoke or the James, or the Rivanna or the Rappahannock, and the current will carry you along waterways largely unseen from highways, where Monacans or Manahoac tribes once fished. You’ll glide past turtles sunning on logs and curious river otter surfacing to watch as you drift through woodlands where Occaneechi and Saponi tribes hunted centuries ago. Grassy fields and languid farmlands slip by as your canoe passes quietly beneath overhanging branches of sycamore and tulip poplar whose treetops fill with birdsong and the raspy rhythm of cicadas.
A drive through the central and northern portions of the Piedmont will take you through the heart of horse country, with its zigzag of fences surrounding pastures where sleek horses graze. Or you can bike alongside fields of alfalfa and down wooded lanes, the scent of honeysuckle or wild roses in the air and the sun warming your back.
In the state parks sprinkled across the region, you could take an early morning walk to identify the bird life, or explore woodland trails on horseback. At Occoneechee State Park in the southern Piedmont, you can admire the vibrant butterfly population, or you might happen upon a twilight program to educate youngsters about the natural world at Smith Mountain Lake State Park in Bedford County. Hikers and bikers enjoy crossing the restored railroad trestle high above the Appomattox River at High Bridge Trail State Park as they follow the 31-mile former railroad bed through three counties.
If you prefer having the outdoors largely to yourself, the state forests of the Piedmont promise solitude, and many of them also have trails to walk and waters to fish or canoe. The Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest contains nearly 20,000 acres that are open to the public. Quite a few of the state’s 39 wildlife management areas are also located in the Piedmont for outdoor enthusiasts. Weston Wildlife Management Area near Warrenton, with its extensive trail system and meandering stream, has been called a forgotten jewel. Located in the heart of horse country, it offers excellent opportunities to observe a white-tailed doe and fawn, photograph bluebells, or fish for redbreast sunfish and smallmouth bass. Those who enjoy quiet study of nature may also be interested in discovering preserves protected by The Nature Conservancy, such as Fernbrook Natural Area on the North Fork of the Rivanna River, where hikers might hear the raucous call of a pileated woodpecker or even catch sight of an elusive bobcat as they wander through this southern Piedmont forest.
Virginia has only two natural freshwater lakes—Mountain Lake in Southwest Virginia and Lake Drummond in the Dismal Swamp—but most every river and its tributaries have been dammed at various points to form reservoirs, recreational lakes, and community ponds. Some of the best known lakes are the larger ones, such as Philpott Lake, Lake Gaston, and Buggs Island Lake (also known as John H. Kerr Reservoir) in the southern Piedmont and Lake Anna in the central Piedmont. But a myriad of smaller lakes such as Lake Nelson, Lake Albemarle, and Lake Orange offer their own charms for those who take the time to discover them.
While providing a graceful transition between western mountains and eastern tides, Piedmont Virginia finds its own identity in serene lakes, winding rivers, inviting back roads, shady woodlands, and pastoral countryside. Whether you follow a river or a highway, canoe a lake’s edges or meander down a sun-dappled trail, the Piedmont has natural beauty that begs to be photographed, shared and enjoyed.
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Western Virginia: Introduction
By Deane Dozier
High meadows, rolling sunlit pastures, moody evergreen forests, rhododendron thickets, rock cliffs, placid lakes, tumbling waterfalls, pastoral countryside, expansive vistas—mountainous western Virginia is rich in sheer variety of natural wonders. Why the diversity? The answer lies in the geology.
Three of the Commonwealth’s five physiographic provinces make up the western portion of the state—the Blue Ridge, the Valley and Ridge, and the Appalachian Plateau—and all three are part of the greater Appalachian Mountains that extend from Newfoundland to Alabama.
Built by the movement of the tectonic plates that underlie the Earth’s crust, the mountains took shape as these plates inched forward over eons, colliding in what geologists call orogenies—slow-motion fender benders that have changed the shape of continents and oceans. After the mountain-building events, the crumpled and folded layers of Earth gradually eroded over the millennia as water drained the softer rock away to create verdant river valleys between mountain ridges that were composed of rock more resistant to erosion. Virginia’s Valley and Ridge Province—by far the largest of the three western physiographic regions—is a perfect example of this process. Its long, linear mountain ranges trend southwest to northeast, with river valleys in between. To the west—and appearing in Virginia only in the far southwest corner and in one edge of the central western border—is the expansive Appalachian Plateau, which was too far west to be much affected by the latest collision of continents.
To the east of these interspersed valleys and ridges, separating the Valley and Ridge Province from the Piedmont, is the ancient backbone of the Blue Ridge. North of Roanoke the Blue Ridge range is narrow, but to the south it widens into a high plateau, culminating in Virginia’s highest peaks—Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet in the extraordinary Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, and nearby Whitetop Mountain at 5,520 feet. As spectacular as the views are from summits along the entire Blue Ridge range, their heights are much subdued by erosion and time. In fact, earth scientists believe the weathered slopes of Virginia’s present-day Blue Ridge once rivaled the Himalaya in height.
North-south travelers on Interstate 81, which follows what was once called the Great Wagon Road through the valleys of Virginia, are treated to valley and mountain views for the entire Virginia part of their trip. The panoply of rolling hills, pastures, woodlands, and rivers of the legendary Shenandoah Valley stretches from the Potomac River to the James River Valley just north of Roanoke. Then the Roanoke, New, and Holston River Valleys add their charm to the scenery. But when time permits, there is good reason to strike out from the main highway and follow a back road up into the hills. Virginia’s mountains are laced with serpentine roads that lead to summit views of layered mountain ranges that fade to pale blues on the horizon. The vast George Washington and Jefferson National Forests encompass an impressive swath of western Virginia mountains—over 1,664,100 million acres. The Appalachian Trail, one of the world’s longest footpaths, extending from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine, has more than a fourth of its original 2,175 miles in western Virginia, crisscrossing the state to touch all three of the physiographic provinces of this region. Numerous state parks, nature preserves, and wildlife management areas provide lakes, rivers, and trails leading through shady woodlands and across sunny fields, with endless opportunities to hike, bike, ride a horse, fish, and canoe.
The rugged terrain of the Virginia mountains inspires hikers to appreciate the challenges faced by Native Americans who hunted these woodlands and the difficulties confronting early explorers as they blazed trails into unknown territory. The famous Wilderness Road, a steep and rough path blazed by Daniel Boone in 1775, led through the Cumberland Gap at the far southwest tip of the state, luring some of the earliest settlers to build their homes west of the Appalachians in what is now Kentucky.
Roughly paralleling the valleys to the east along the crest of the Blue Ridge is a highway in the sky. From Front Royal in Northern Virginia south to Afton Mountain near Waynesboro, the highway is known as the Skyline Drive, and it bisects the famous Shenandoah National Park, where overlooks offer stunning vistas and trails lead off into wilderness areas, to waterfalls, and into wildflower meadows. Leading south from Afton Mountain, the highway is called the Blue Ridge Parkway. Begun in the 1930s as a New Deal project, this 469-mile-long scenic corridor roughly follows the dips and curves of the ridge as it links Shenandoah National Park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.
While the natural features of Virginia have their geographic and visual differences, all the parts form overlapping ecosystems that work together, just as in all of nature. Much of the state’s land west of the Blue Ridge is actually part of the huge Chesapeake Bay watershed, for instance, so that good farming practices and protection of forest lands and wetlands from development can have positive benefits for all creatures that depend on the Bay’s clean waters. A drop of rain that falls on the rare natural communities that are within The Nature Conservancy’s Warm Springs Mountain Preserve in Bath County on Virginia’s western border trickles into Warm Springs Run, dancing in sun-dappled shade alongside highways and though woods and fields until it flows into the Jackson River, where fly fishermen cast to brook trout and raccoons forage along the banks. Boaters dip their paddles in the water as it enters beautiful Lake Moomaw. Emerging as the Jackson again below the dam, the river winds around mountains, defines the edges of Covington and Clifton Forge, and even determines the course of a stretch of Interstate 64 before it teams up with the gentle Cowpasture River at Iron Gate to become the James River. Feisty now, the historic James cuts its way through the Blue Ridge, splashes between rock boulders at Balcony Falls, slides past Lynchburg, churns through the fall zone at Richmond, and finally, after a 340-mile journey, empties its watery cargo from 39 counties and 19 cities and towns into the Chesapeake Bay at Hampton Roads.
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In western Virginia, natural beauty is spread like a smorgasbord for those who would search for mushrooms, catch a fish, photograph a butterfly, or take notes during a hawk migration. Some of the parks and trails and lakes and rivers are well known and well loved, while others remain to be discovered. There is so much to see and do in the hidden folds of Virginia’s mountains and valleys that a day is never enough. Nor maybe a lifetime.
That’s a good thing, though.
~-Deane Dozier