Residents Of The Piney South: The Loblolly Pine

Sometimes a tree is just considered a weed with a trunk.  In much of the South, pines are considered to be simply background material, stuff that grows in the way of development and agriculture.  A friend I met back in college, a Carolinian in fact, told me that pines were sometimes even considered to be more than just a weed but a real nuisance.  "They don't take too well to storms and hurricanes, and leave a tangled, sap-filled mess to clean up".  Pines are nothing if not sap-filled, but I hardly considered that to be problematic.  After all, they are just as ubiquitous in Ontario as they are in the Carolinas and we go out of our way, occasional tornado or violent microburst aside, to pay vast sums of money to get mature ones in our landscape if they are not already present.  In mostly deciduous SE Michigan and NW Ohio, nearly every public works landscaping project includes at least shelter-belts of pine, usually Scotch (Pinus Sylvestris) or Austrian/Black (Pinus Nigra) but often the native reds and whites.  Mile after mile of I-75 is lined in such a way up in these parts.

I-75 in Georgia or I-95 anywhere south of central Virginia look like such a landscaping project put into years of growth, and a nearly solid wall of Loblolly Pines (Pinus Taeda) screen off the northern tourists and other thru-travelers from the local world.  Janisse Ray even insisted that this was their purpose in her masterpiece Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.  Janisse, you see, loves all the spires of her native forests down in Georgia, but just as I have a particular weakness and reverence for the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), so does Janisse look upon the noble Longleaf Pine (Pinus Palustris) with grand esteem.  To her, is the Loblolly a seemingly unworthy also-ran that has filled a niche that the Longleaf once dominated?  Without a doubt, she considers it an important and lovely tree, but it is just in so many ways ordinary and second-fiddle to the monarch that was once the Longleaf.  This is not to say that Loblolly Pines are bad trees, just that they are an unfortunate sign of the times wherein entire ecosystems have been disrupted and trees such as this one find a place in an ever-changing world made by humans that lets such highly adaptable species thrive.  The Loblolly is one such tree.

The Lobolly, you see, does not mind getting its feet wet, unlike most other pines.  It can tolerate being at the margin of a swamp better than most of its genus, even while it can handle the harsh, alkaline conditions of an abandoned clay-soil farm field baking in the sun.  Surprisingly, it does not take well to the pure prairie environments found scattered in the South, notably the eastern extensions of the central prairies into the Louisiana coastal plains and the Black Belt, an arching area of prairie (that can now be seen on physical maps as a dense concentration of farmland) stretching across central Mississippi and Alabama.  Like most established prairies, the incredible roots of the grasses and forbs have contributed to the formation of a rich, dark mineral soil.  Likewise, rich soils can be found in the Mississippi valley, an area which forms a significant gap between the eastern and western portions of the Southern forests.  While the Loblolly does tolerate getting its feet wet, it does not like them soaked.  Such land is instead reserved for incredible stands of tupelo, cypress, cottonwoods, and willows (along with the lovely Red Maple <Acer Rubrum>).  In short, we can see that it dislikes certain ecological extremities and even in its very broad choice of tolerable situation is still... average.  Simply put, the Loblolly is a common tree that you will find across much of the South, from Texas clear to southern New Jersey. 

That's the direction I became inspired by when writing this post.  You see, I have so very few specimen pictures of the Loblolly because of how "common" they really are.  Most of my shots incorporate the sentiments of how they get viewed by Southerners, as background scenery behind modern development.

There they are, filling up the backdrop in Santee, SC, just off of Loblolly-framed I-95.  I witnessed very few trees, except maybe old survivors that were big enough to not be considered "weeds", used in a landscape around homes or businesses.  That honor instead went to cold hardy palms (like that lovely Pindo Palm, Butia Capitata) and magnolias fighting with crepe myrtles for places of honor on the front yard.

 In fact, aside from the photo of your typical "it was too big to just yank out" Loblolly back a few posts ago, this is the only canopy or crown shot I have of them!  I regret this, as a stand of Loblollies (and do they ever make fine stands, just like the Red Pines do up north) is a wonderful wall of green, a wall which I remember fondly as a child welcoming me to a South that otherwise felt so very distant from my far north.  I always tried to squint deeper into those dense growths along I-95 and wonder what the forest was like inside them.  Even at that age I figured that this was not a natural situation, that there had to be more in the forest besides a single giant plantation of one tree.  For the life of me though, even as common as they were, they were a tree that seemed to outweigh all the other elements of the landscape.  Only after a half day of Loblolly wonder would I notice the subtle changes that happened in Georgia as Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) started carpeting the understory and Slash Pines (Pinus Elliottii) started to take over, especially into Florida.  The bigger needle globes of the Slash Pines were part of the very different world of the Deep South and Florida, not a Red Pine look alike that the Loblollies were.  The Loblolly fit perfectly into a Canadian child's image of what the South looks like: the same as the north, but with even more pines, palm trees, and a night time that was as hot as a Northern day time, complete with some buzzing outdoor light illuminating this mysterious pine that grew even in such a hot land. 

I was too young to imagine that things had not always been this way.  This is not to say that I had no imagination or that I knew not what a wilderness was (I grew up in one), but that I was simply ignorant of the fact that the Loblolly would have been truly an "also ran" back in the days when the Longleaf was king of the forest and savanna.  The settlers who followed the First Born would have seen that very different world of an incredible arboreal diversity, with towering pines stretching forth above grasses and flowers stretching as far as the eye could see, kept open by the same agent of nature that made lower Michigan, Ohio, and Southern Ontario into a natural park of oak openings, fire.  I imagine, as Janisse Ray does of a South long past, settlers living among these giants, every bit as transfixed upon them as... a child doing the same thing when confronted by the inheritor pine, the Loblolly.  Maybe it is not, after all, such a common tree as it is a survivor and a triumph of nature trying to cope with human development.  I consider the Loblolly to be an arboreal emblem of the modern natural South, in which nature still manages to rebound like, well, a weed!  Even in farm country down there you can't help but run across a tree every few hundred feet, and often enough it will be a Loblolly.  In truth, I have never seen the ancestral forest with my own eyes, and I can only imagine the grandeur of the Longleaf Savanna.  The Loblolly, though, has managed to welcome me home every time I have come back to this land of the South, which holds such an irresistible lure to a botanist who is still a child at heart. 

A part of me wonders what life was like where this tree held its own once against the broad rule of the Longleaf.  Perhaps places like Jamestown, places where the continent started to forever change into the modern land it has become, are places where one can still find a forest of curiosities otherwise stepped quickly past by human advancement.  Here maybe can be seen not some oak or pine parkland that provided an irresistible lure to colonial settlement, but a needle carpeted half-forest, half-opening maze of strange trees that grew beyond the landings of mushy cypress forest infested with mosquitoes.  Would the first Virginians have tried to press on toward higher ground capable of more agricultural wonders and either ignored or found inconvenient the odd forest that was too open to give good shade, yet to thick to plop a house on?  What would they have made of this place come winter when even the leafy shrubs beneath the pines would refuse to surrender their greenery, like the Red Bay (Persea Borbonia) or the Loblolly Bay (Gordonia Lasianthus)? 

Both of these delightful messes were captured at Historic Jamestowne, in the drier center of the swampy hook of land that John Smith and company tried to give Virginia a decent go at.

Were such forests taken in by the colonists like the Red Pine forests of wonderful blueberry (Vaccinium Augustifolium) and Wintergreen (Gaultheria Procumbens) understory of an otherwise grand White Pine dominated North, which together with the more open Jack Pine (Pinus Banksiana) openings on sand and granite (depending on what side of Lake Huron you would find them on), and considered second fiddle and scrubish by their northern settling counterparts (compared to the valuable timberlands of the White Pine supercanopy forest)?  We may never know.  After all, we don't even notice the trees around us these days...

But what about that Longleaf?

12 Years A Slave In Review

\Last post I promised some palm trees, and I do not intend to disappoint, but I would also like to serve up a review of a film I saw last night, namely 12 Years a Slave.  It's an incredible film with art direction that puts director Steve McQueen into the same artistic pantheon as Rossellini or Bergman and is a much needed dose of reality in an age when popular images of the plantation era are given off as something of slapstick racism at best or a romantic confession at worst.  As we celebrate the victory over chattel slavery won at Vicksburg and Gettysburg this very year, we ought to be mindful that such fighting was far from merely over some sick, twisted defense of States' rights.  Yes, there were many underlying causes of friction between Union and Confederacy, but ultimately, to claim that slavery was not the source and summit of cause for a nation being torn apart is a fundamental disrespect to a very painful and sacred chapter in the history of humanity.  

And oh yes, there are palm trees, and an absolutely incredible look at the American Southern landscape, or at least the low country therein.  In following the kidnapping and enslavement of freedman Solomon Northrup, the film takes us from the upper Hudson Valley in New York down to Washington (past an incredible shot of a human being made into property, fittingly, under the shadow of the temple of the United States Congress.  From then on we get to see quite a bit of the Deep South in low country Louisiana, complete with palms of the Sabal genus, magnolias, baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana), and an absolute TON of Spanish Moss (Tillandsia Usneoides).  Now normally, this is among the most lovely setting of vegetation anywhere on this earth.  Everything is green, lush, luxuriant, and yet not overly confining so as to create an overbearing jungle.  

A street somewhere in Beaufort, SC.  While this is a semi-cultivated landscape (I noticed that among ordinary neighborhoods gardens and planting were allowed to flow without a lot of pruning), you can tell from the trees and shrubs that neither canopy nor sky reign supreme on their own.  We will revisit the general concept in a later post.  Everything just looks organic, flowing, and relaxed really, like much of the South.

Yet for the most part in the film, McQueen has set out to have the camera fix on a focus and lighting that makes the whole thing look sickly and tired.  Instead of incredible drapes of moss, we see trees festered in it along with baldcypresses, tupelos, and magnolias that are defoliated and gangly.  This compliments the plantations where Solomon, now re-named Platt (which can mean, for Louisiana especially, flat in French or alternatively an old word for silver in English), gets pushed around to.  With the exception of Mr. Ford's manse, we hardly see grand, polished estates.  The houses are dirty, the interiors are sparse, and even the masters of the manor are looking a bit disheveled.  There are stomping forced dances rather than graceful ballrooms full of lovely dames and debonair gentlemen.  The whole set up does little to implore the viewer to lament the tragic romance of a soon-to-perish Antebellum South.  Once Mr. Ford is removed from the scene, any semblance of that lovely imaginary world vanishes, house, people, landscape, and all.  

But we did see a little bit of that in this film, which McQueen uses to great effect to prove a point.  Solomon gets treated well, the landscape looks a bit more inviting (even while things are in a swamp along the Red River and we see little of cotton picking, cane gathering, or other typical agricultural ventures).  We see the slaves clearing a little land, constructing buildings, even encountering some of the First Born who were wandering the last vestiges of what they could find before Europeans totally changed their world.  The action is that of exploration, encountering a new, albeit uninvited world.  Things look more exotic than sedate New York or distressingly urban Washington, and definitely more relieved than stressful slave market New Orleans.  We see a decent plantation with a well-mannered Ford and a true-to-form, if insensitive, lady of the house.  Solomon's talents are appreciated, and he sets into survival mode while also thinking about escape.  Overall, it seems as if things could be a lot worse.  We see construction and creation.  Feeling complacent?  We are reminded very sharply that for all his generosity of spirit and apparent gentility, Ford is still a slave owner who treats people as property.  As such, we also see our first overseers and start hearing "Nigger" almost every other line.

The swamps then start looking less luxuriant and more nauseous, those broad-limbed oaks start looking more like little other than convenient lynching posts, and the moss and palmettos start reminding us that this place is hot, uncomfortable, and malarial.  Moving on to the next plantations, we see less of a settlement with slavery-made-possible ornamentation and more of a series of work farms meant to use humans purely for profit.  Notably, in the shabby houses and clothing of the owners, we see very few fruits of such overwhelming profit, as if to say that even could slavery be economically justifiable, it simply has not fit the bill even then.  Speculatively, this makes one question just how much wealth really got passed around at the expense of an entire race.  We see a lot of labor, poverty even in the middle man plantation owners, and the fancy scenes of Gone With the Wind left only in the hands of a select few at the very top.  There is possible political commentary on present economic conditions here, but more than likely, this truly is reaching (this is slavery, a bit more intense than a wage issue...  right?)  Instead we go for less speculation and more reality and see that even the master of the house does not put on his Sunday best every day when things are 95 and dripping.  The house might afford a little mess during the cultivation periods.  See how many different ways things are already being twisted? 

If anything, that is what is supremely brilliant about this film.  Yes, we do see a lot of brutality and a cold bucket of water thrown at us in the face of a disconnect of 150 passing years of fading memory.  More so, however, we also see attempted justification for the rape of not just an entire people, but all peoples.  We get to see peace feelers trying to pave the road for a defeat for humanity.  Even when we see Patsy constantly dragged into the mud and slashed open within an inch of her life, completely broken and crying in some of the most emotionally honest acting ever seen...  we try to rationalize.  We can't though.  The music alone keeps reminding us that we are faced with something first and final about the way things are between people.  In the end we see one human being turn another one into something less than animal.  In the end, we have hope.  The moss looks graceful again and whitewash covers blemishes and dirt.  A man's soul stares into our own through eyes that should cause anyone truly humble to melt onto the floor.  My readers, go see this film.  Take your older children, or any children, that will understand even the mere difference between right and wrong.  I dare say it will awaken in all a new spirit of seeking understanding and exploration into not just North American, but human history in general and sympathy, if not empathy, for the suffering.  Would that there were films of this caliber for the other darker places in our continental history.  

In the meantime, check around here more frequently for a bit more of a look at the better side of the South.  If you do see the film, this might give you an appreciation for how McQueen managed to strip the veneer off the image.  After all, as God created her, the low country is a truly amazing place.