A publication about a forest

Laurel Park Inn is a publication, not an inn. There are no rooms here, no rates, and nothing addressed to a visitor.

The subject is one range: the Southern Appalachians, the oldest, wettest and most crowded mountains in North America. They are the ground-down remnant of a range once Alpine in scale, they were never glaciated, and they have been continuously forested for a very long time. Everything in these pages follows from those three facts.

Entries are grouped into seven sections, and the whole index is printed in the header of every page: sections and entries visible at once, with nothing to open. If a reader cannot see where a piece of writing lives, the index is not doing its job.

What this publication will not do

It does not give locations at a resolution anyone could collect from, and it never describes a salamander or a plant population as findable. A lineage confined to one slope can be removed from the world by a small number of people with jars.

It does not present unsettled science as settled. The grassy balds are the clearest case: fire, grazing, indigenous management and frost disturbance each explain part of the pattern, and the entry says so rather than choosing between them.

It carries no dates on entries. This material changes on the timescale of forests and of research programmes, not of news.