Land clearing in Nashville, TN

Where the basin runs into the rim

Davidson County is two kinds of ground pushed against each other. The middle sits in the Central Basin on limestone. The ridges around it are the eastern escarpment of the Western Highland Rim. Chert, shale, acid soil, not much depth. Elevation runs from 385 feet at the Cumberland to 1,163 feet in the hills at Radnor Lake. One property is white oak and tuliptree on a slope you can hardly walk. The next is flat bottom in sycamore and hackberry.

Out past Joelton the county goes quiet

Toward Joelton, Whites Creek and Bells Bend there’s still real acreage. Most of the Highland Rim forest on that side of the county is privately held. Joelton is the rugged end. Steep hills, bedrock close under the surface. Whites Creek runs north and south along US 431 and holds the only rural historic district Nashville has. Leave that ground a few years and it comes back in saplings and briars.

Creek bottoms and old fields

Richland Creek and Mill Creek drain to the Cumberland. Those bottoms grow privet the season after somebody quits mowing, thick under sweetgum and pin oak where a saw crew has no room to swing. A mulching head has room. Privet cut at the stem comes back off the root crown, so it has to come out at the root. In the basin half of the county it’s cedar, what an old field turns into if it’s left alone.

A short run west down I-40

It’s about thirty miles from Lebanon, straight down the interstate, and US 431 runs north to Whites Creek and Joelton. Shaun walks the ground with you before he says anything about it. How steep the pitch is, how thick the privet got, whether the bottom stays wet. One machine, one operator, his son alongside. On the Rim side the mulch is worth leaving where it falls. That chert soil is thin and sour, and takes all the cover it can get.