Maybe at one point they were more widespread, however, and perhaps crusaded against in a mad dash by the people of our continent to cultivate and develop every last inch of land they could find. This sort of thing has happened to many of our regional botanical gems, including mangroves in Florida, Longleaf Pines (Pinus Palustris) throughout the southeastern United States, so many prairie plants in the interior of the continent, cactus and sagebrush species in the west, and everywhere, the towering trees that had caused reluctant second born North Americans to stay in their experimental colonies.
Believe it or not, until the industrial way of the world got well underway in the later part of the nineteenth century, complete with great lumps of immigrants to power the factories and mills, the main commercial attraction of these shores would be the vegetation. Rough winters and ideological uncertainties were harsh selling points for Europeans thinking about having a go at a venture in Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Quebec. Mexico and Cuba long had a stronger advantage over such places in terms of climactic desirability, even after the allure of potential easy gold had dimmed to mere cantina discussions over the old days of legends and legendary explorers. But in all of these places, a rather incredible, and tough, world that was nearly unspoiled lay before astonished Europeans. For the English and Dutch, and far more so the French, the economic attraction of these unspoiled lands was great. One of the stars of the show were the pines, conifers that seemed to be an inexhaustible resource of legendary, yet living, proportions.
The trees made the colonies possible. They allowed for ships to be built for large Spanish fleets to defend the interests of a nation where the domestic supply of forest was growing very thin. They allowed the Puritans of New England to sustain a colony founded on ideological grounds by selling their lumber into the great circle of trade between them, England (who sought out ships of her own), Africa, and the Caribbean. They made for wonderful habitat for the fur bearers pursued by the French who traveled as far as the western mountains on canoes made by their unsurpassed timber. More so than any of this, though, the trees and plants were unlike anything they had seen back in a depleted mother land. Once the initial economic foundations had been laid and the New World took on a separate life of its own, the colonies stopped being viewed as a savage frontier. The vegetation of the continent started becoming every bit as desirable and aesthetically pleasing as it was already quite valuable for utility. The gardens of Europe were getting more formal, more refined, and needed new sources of excitement to be dressed up into the realm of the exotic.
Enter then both the old aristocracy and the new upstarts with names such as Washington and Monticello. Like most good aristocrats, they loved beauty but preferred to pass on the work to subordinates. Their carefully cultivated plant museums were stocked and maintained by botanists both domestic and imported. Men such as John Fraser, Francois Andre Mirchaux, and many others before and after them glided into the western frontiers of the dark forests and found and returned with amazing plants for the rich gardens. North American flora became a very hot commodity, but this it remained, a mere commodity. The founding fathers and founding scientists took pride in the powerful, seemingly indestructible vegetation that was as much responsible for creating a mysterious and seemingly dangerous frontier as any of the native peoples helped to produce. For the most part, though, they were absorbed in the economic value of these home grown things.
The common people of the era were much more concerned with clearing out and selling the pine forests and rhododendron thickets they came across. To them, the most valuable plants were not ones that could provide for grand specimens in huge gardens, but rather apple trees which could produce safely drinkable cider and fruit or cash crops such as cotton and tobacco. The great pines were amazing, but considered commonplace and inexhaustible. The rhododendrons and other such non-lumber plants were just a mess to get out of the way of room meant for fields. The small gardens which took up residence near domestic quarters were filled with familiar garden plants often imported from Europe, planted in an attempt to push off the frontier and create some sense of "civilized" tranquility. The frontier moved on, eventually, but the wilderness which created it in the first place would slowly grow back; any glace at a map to this day will still show grand areas of green surrounded by cultivated miles upon miles, and this of course would be Appalachia.
Well over a century would have to pass before people started thinking of the local plants as symbolic of what a truly different world North America had remained to exist as. As economic opportunities shifted from into diverse fields of opportunity beyond natural resource extraction, and especially as the emotionally detached Enlightenment thinkers and encyclopedic intellectuals faded into memory during the Romantic ascension of the nineteenth century, North Americans started valuing their landscape on a different level. North American art became dominated at certain stages by naturalist painters who thrilled in dramatic landscapes. People trying to find a renewal of the spirit by departing noisy, polluted city life sought to try and conserve the land, its vegetation, and animals first in societies, then in zoos, and finally in reserves and parks.
The damage had long since been done, however, and things such as rhododendrons, cacti, grasses, and even pines were reduced in territory to land that was considered less desirable for cultivation and development. In short, there might have been a time where rhododendrons would have spread throughout Ontario and Michigan, cacti would have been common as far east as dunes lapped at by Lake Champlain, and an Eastern White Pine putting up a brave, if stunted, front on the tallgrass prairie of Nebraska would not have been entirely unthinkable. The damage is still being done! One is hard pressed to find people in the south planting, let alone remembering, their amazing Longleaf Pines. The last sanctuary of the rhododendrons is being shaved away as mountain tops are entirely removed to get at a wimpy little layer of coal within. Ranchers and home owners in Texas and Oklahoma still drag chains on their land to rip out anything resembling a cactus. Nature, especially here in the demanding New World, however, has ways of showing just how tough and devil-may-care our plants, like our people, can be:
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| Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina. |
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| Same as above |
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| Great Smokey Mountains National Park, North Carolina side. |
That's right. Barely any soil to speak of except that made by otherwise beautiful and delicate Rhododendrons. This is a New World which does not give up without a fight!
Thanks to all my viewers for taking a stop here on the blog and making this the most viewed month ever. I'm glad to see that the spirit of exploration and a desire for learning can still be found in an age of reality television.
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