Rhododendrons And The Potency Of Native America

I often spend a lot of time on this blog touting the benefits and perhaps even superiority of native plants.  This is not to say that I think imports and exotics don't have their place; where would we be without wheat, rice, etc?  My house garden is actually quite full of foreign and distantly native things like western lupines and sagebrush, southern trees, that and I really have a thing going for portulacas and rare hostas, and... of course I just adore Rhododendrons.  Truth be told, they are a "distant native" here too.  Michigan has only one species of a native Rhododendron, Rhododendron Groenlandicum, which is found mostly in the northern reaches of the state where bogs are a regular feature of the landscape.  The species that I have elaborated on last week are all Appalachian beauties that come close only as near as Ohio.

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:

Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina.

Same as above

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.

So Wet That Things Are Dry

Dump a garbage can full of water on a dry load of top soil.  You will find that it runs off in all directions and some of it turns into sand; the organic components of the soil having washed away and the bare mineral contents of what consists of ground becomes exposed and featured as the star of the show.  So it is even in the rainiest parts of the world, and indeed our wonderful continent.  The banks of the Amazon are routinely inundated and then exposed and often leave lovely beaches in the wake of the emptying river.  The edge of the rainforest becomes a desert of sorts.  So too does the edge of the sea, with wave action constantly moving around large quantities of the prime material component of our lovely beaches. 

In general, North America starts out very wet on the west coast, with quite dry patches south of Monterrey Bay in California, and then turns bone dry past the mountains which trap the Pacific moisture dead in its tracks.  Eventually deserts, more mountains, grasslands which are nearly deserts, and then the edge of a grand forest progresses eastward and southward.  The Gulf of Mexico sends its bounty west and north into rainier lands of less extreme temperatures and we have our grand forests both tropical and temperate.  Still, this is a pretty dry place.  Even in the humid Gulf Coast one can have many cloudless days and rather arid conditions here and there, especially on beaches and riverbanks.  So it is that we can have cacti even in Florida and New York, far from where we envision they properly belong.  One only imagines what the first settlers thought of such plants, but we know for sure that wherever their descendents found them, they considered them to be a nuisance to draft animals and weeding hands alike and many were removed. 

The best places to find them in the moist east these days would thus be their most practical locations, those dry and sunny places where other plants tend to give up the ghost, the dunes of beaches.

Here we have some Eastern Prickly Pear (Opuntia Humifusa/Compressa), found on the sandier reaches of Hunting Island in South Carolina.  Too dry for the coastal marsh species, too exposed for other island denizens, too much beach and not enough ocean.  Beside them lie cones of the local Slash Pines (Pinus Elliotii), destined to be food for some sort of creature or another, unable to seed properly in a place more suitable for the desert junks that either gets ignored or detested.  The naturalist on staff at the state park noted that no one usually notices them, much less asks about them, despite how exotic and unique they seem to be this far east.  Nevertheless, our dry land has cacti nearly north to the arctic treeline, and yes, right next to both oceans. 

Saguaros!

This picture, a lovely gift from a friend in Utah, was too good to not pass along here.

No clue where this is from, other than somewhere near Phoenix, Arizona.

Here we have a nice northwestern Sonoran Desert scene, complete with Saguaro cacti (Carnegiea Gigantea) and Green Paloverdes (Parkinsonia Microphylla), along with some blurry other cacti and shrubs.  Saguaros tend to be found in the wetter portions of the Sonoran Desert, where they can establish easily in the double feature winter and summer rains.  They are also a bit cold sensitive, being killed if freezing temperatures persist more than 30 hours or so.  This largely accounts for their distribution in Arizona and Sonora.  Paloverdes are also interesting species, having bark which can act as leaves do and photosynthesize for the plant.  They actually lose their leaves (which are not really big anyway) in summer and grow them back in the wetter winter and spring.

Though the scene above does not look very alive at the moment, in a few months it will be rejuvenated by winter rains and wonderful sunny spring days.  The ground will be green with grasses, flowers will carpet the land as far as the eye can see, and the place will look like an exotic paradise.  Perhaps the best feature of a place like this is the smell, especially right after a rain.  It's so indescribable that you really have to go there and experience it to understand how this might be one of the best smelling places on the planet.

Oh, and nothing is cooler than Saguaros.  They just look awesome.

Sunday Afternoon Post: Exotic North American Prickly Pears in Southern California

While not exactly a place where you can grow everything (no true tropicals or cold weather species), southern California is the next best thing to heaven when it comes to gardening potential.  Inland parts of the coastal basins border on desert conditions while still having enough rainfall and lower temperatures to keep everything from looking like the land over the nearby mountains.  One of the hallmarks of the inland regions would be the numerous cacti grown in most yards, most of them exotic introductions that grow far to the north of their usual haunts, but do just fine here because of the mild winters reasonably devoid of frost that such places experience.

In the spirit of Cactus Weekend (who knows, it could become a real thing one day), here are two such beauties that qualify for inclusion on a blog about things of natural North America.

Indian-Fig Prickly Pear (Opuntia Ficus-Indica) taken in a private garden... er... mess in Fontana, California.  

This pear, as you can see, is quite capable of trunking.  Its pads cup a little bit, and you can see one in flower here.  This cactus is native to central Mexico, and gets planted anywhere warm enough not to hurt it with bouts of cold less than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.  They seem really fond of them in Virginia Beach, and they can handle moist as well as desert conditions.

Wheel Cactus (Opuntia Robusta) taken in a private garden in Claremont, California.

This cactus also trunks and features striking pale blue pads.  I have never seen one in flower, but apparently they send up bright yellow blooms.  They are native and endemic to the southern Chihuahuan Desert in central Mexico.  In my travels I have only seem them cultivated in southern California, and only in the Los Angeles basin and surrounding basins and valleys.  

Stop by tomorrow for a change into something non-prickly.