Daily News | 🌻 Frolic through the flowers | Outdoorsy Newsletter
A mason jar stuffed with a bouquet of tawny cottongrass sat on a table in a historic general store in the heart of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
William J. Lewis, 49, knows the plant by another name. It’s the name his father learned from his late grandfather, Joseph ‘Roy’ Lewis, a lifelong plant gatherer and tinkerer educated in the Jersey woods, called it. “I’ve always known it as cat’s paw and there’s probably still a few people out there who call it that,” Lewis said Friday morning in Buzby’s General Store. “I don’t want people to forget those words.”
Lewis, a lifelong resident of New Egypt, is a self-professed “piney,” a word that’s been used as both a putdown by outsiders and a badge of pride by locals over the last couple centuries. He spent childhood summers in Browns Mills and Chatsworth, deeper in the Pinelands. He’s spent the last couple of years trying to reclaim the word “piney,” to expound on it in ways he feels John McPhee, author of the seminal “The Pine Barrens” didn’t in the 1960s. Like most others, Lewis feels McPhee’s book helped save the Pine Barrens from development, but it was the first time he’d seen the word “piney” used in a negative way.
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