A little interlude before we head back to Charleston. In fact, this sort of sets up that post, trying to look at Southern Gardening from a different historical background and responding to a very serious question/accusation that I received e-mailed to me about recent posts on the South:
Q: Surely you are aware of the intense racism and inhumanity that plagues your beloved Southern "culture", polite gardens or architecture or otherwise? The South is an embarrassment on this country and you are exposing some personal racist tendencies toward history here.
The South has amazing agricultural and gardening potential. The lowcountry affords a long growing season which can account for the vast majority of the year, while the backcountry offers moderation in the region's otherwise blistering summer sun and enough winter chill to permit northern delights to slip in the scenery. Naturally speaking, there is so much of everything right in soil, sun, and moisture that nature can run rampant here given the chance to. This can result in seemingly unstoppable plagues of kudzu, but it can also result in an incredibly potent power behind natural reclamation.
American Voyages has thus far taken us on a tour of the landscapes of the South and the sentiment they have held for the region's inhabitants, both first and second born. In some cases, the flora and fauna are beloved and considered quintessential to understanding the character of the culture which has developed here. In others, such as with the many pines of the region, the backdrop has been simply wallpaper and, at best, a bonus feature. Here, as in so many other places, exotic species often have taken center stage in the hearts and minds of those controlling the landscape. And why not? Especially in an age where so many pleasures are deemed to come best from artificial sources, reveling in biological beauty and charm is hardly something to be looked down upon, exotic or native model notwithstanding. If I lived in the South, I would surely experiment would any number of palms, broadleaved evergreens, azaleas, amaryllis, hardy citrus, etc. The attraction is hardly a new one, either. Compared to the continental winters experienced in New England and as far south as Philadelphia, the Virginians and Carolinians found that when they had acquired enough security and basic economic vitality, they could start living dreams perhaps even out of the reach of their rank back in England.
Of course, some of these dreamers did so at the expense of their fellow, enslaved, human persons, but there were also those who did not. The ordinary Virginians and Carolinians, and certainly almost all of the Georgians found that while they might not have had the same amount of leisure time to devote to gardening as their richer social masters, gardens here could sometimes take off on their own with just a little bit of prodding. Grand, cultivated estates of said social masters were concerned with mimicking the fancy Stuart-era estates back in England, complete with more boxwood hedge than is healthy, but these estates do not live on in modern gardens the way that the organic development of the common man's garden would. As for the ranks of slaves which made the great estate grounds possible, they too would leave an indelible mark on gardens and agriculture, often in the work of very famous individuals like George Washington Carver. Carver, in fact, was my first real exposure to Black anything. Yes, there are Black Canadians, and in fact we even have national historic sites dedicated to Black Canadians over yonder, but I did not grow up in any particular part of Ontario where I came across a Black person short of seeing a film clip of Martin Luther King Jr. marching across the bridge at Selma.
When I was 12 we moved to southeastern Michigan, but perhaps in preparation to understand my new surroundings, my parents took me to the Henry Ford Museum and associated Greenfield Village. At the time, there was an extensive exhibit on the work of Carver, along with a very excellent actor portraying the man in the next best thing to his flesh and blood presence. Together with some of the people also on the tour, who happened to have dark skin, I saw my first Black people, and my impression was that they were pretty amazing with plants. Since that time I have come to learn that no small portion of the agricultural prowess of this nation is in part to the work of men and women like Carver, and many of them, White or Black or whatever, have brought us to where we are today. In spite of poverty, slavery, and denial to expensive formal education, these people, many from the "horrid, racist South" delivered to the rest of us from their situations complete gems.
That said, gardening and agricultural history is still an unfurling topic of discovery for me. Perhaps I should have become an ethno-botanist instead of the direct variety, but I find myself hungry as heck for an area of ethno-botany that does not get a lot of press these days, that of the common people of the South. Yes, there are giant confederate flags painted on top of gas stations near airports in Atlanta and Memphis. Yes, there are people who think that the world revolves around their little patch of free, white Alabama. Guess what? Those types also live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even (gasp) Southern California. We ought never to throw out the blessings of an entire region because of a few dull stars out there in the human firmament. In the meantime, I'm going to remain interested in Southerners like Elvis Presley and Jackie Robinson who helped to kick the crap out of the underlying racism in this country. I'm going to remain curious about settlement patterns of Mississippi and Alabama by ordinary settlers not intent on setting up huge plantations or killing any Creek or Chocktaw in sight. Finally, to quote Janisse Ray, I'm definitely going to be interested in gardens with subtropical elements and growing seasons that I absolutely drool in envy over.
The South, you see, was saved not by some post-bellum Yankee restoration plan or home-grown politician trying to reclaim a ridiculous sense of false inheritance, but by the White, Black, or Native person next door.
Always to the frontier
Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Monday, December 9, 2013
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.
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)?
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?
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. |
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. |
But what about that Longleaf?
Friday, June 1, 2012
Q and A Session Four
This Q and A session is dedicated to the concept of not taking your backyard for granted. I was lucky to get three questions that worked well this way.
Q: Why so many posts about prairies and savannas?
A: Grasslands are the most common ecosystem across the entire continent. They can be found in nearly every state, province, and territory of our three nations, albeit in different forms. In pre-colonial times, they were far more extensive than in the present day, engaging neighboring ecosystems in a battle royale of wildfires, rains, and herd grazing patterns. Grasslands are extremely resilient and adaptable ecosystems that define the wild nature of our continent on the whole: a fairly warm, windy place that is full of water and yet also remarkably dry. They can handle the worst weather we get, including extremes in temperature and precipitation, and manage to survive. Conversely, they are among the most productive and diverse lands on the entire planet, positively exploding with life and beauty with just a little bit of rain and warmth. They can be found at the edge of deserts, in meadows high atop mountains, far north in the tundra or far south in the leeward slopes of tropical Mexico, in sandy expanses left behind from the last glaciers melting away over the Canadian Shield, amidst the pines and palmettos of Florida, in patches of "barrens" surrounding the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, in clearings amongst great forests, and of course, in the great central plains that stretch from Alberta to Coahuila.
What's more, in addition to being emblematic of the frontier and survivalist spirit of this continent, they defy simplification, and are often the most misunderstood ecosystems out there. North American grasslands are often thought of like so:
When in fact they are often wonderful worlds bursting with life like:
In short, they are often far more than meets the eye. On the whole, nature has so many wonderful surprises awaiting for those willing to take the time and explore it. Our hectic world these days is so caught up in activity for the sake of self-benefit that we often overlook the concept of self-improvement, and definitely leave wonder and exploration out of the equation. Quite literally, we cannot see the forest for the trees! Grasslands are wonderful places where we are forced to pay attention to what is underfoot and seemingly invisible to the glancing eye in order to fully appreciate what they have to show us. This was certainly true for my development in observing and understand ecosystems. After I gave the Great Plains a chance, I never looked at a forest the same way again.
Speaking of that, to respond to the question on a more personal level, I had always wondered where the forest stopped and the prairie began. When I was a kid hungry for travel with that dog-eared and bent atlas in my hands, I always envisioned everything from Regina to Dallas to be one giant flat expanse of lawn. I could not help but imagine what the line between this lawn and the forest to the east looked like, and I pictured a dark, lush forest somewhere in Missouri that all of a sudden petered out into the endless prairie, a wall of tree meeting a sea of grass. The search for this grand line of division, though largely dispelled when I started to read about the places in that atlas, has always been a bit in the back of my mind even recently. Whenever I head out west, when driving through Iowa and Missouri, I always take in the scenery with even more intensity and detailed interest than I do elsewhere ecological transitions, or ecotones, occur, expecting to find that line one day. I wanted to know where the forest turned into the plains which gave way to the mountains which became the desert which... you get the point. Ecotones are fascinating worlds of connections between diverse areas, both because of the contrast between life zones they display, and because of the shared features between regions they represent. This dovetails into the next question:
Q: What are some places you have not yet been to in North America that you would put on your "bucket list"?
A: That would make for a very interesting post, and I say that because there are so many places I would want to see before I give myself back to the soil. I suppose here I can cheat and qualify that question with a specific direction: what places would I put on my list of places I am most ecologically curious about? I would say that have to do with transitions, and finding more of my great wall of forests. Specifically, I would give my right eye to see (or rather have seen) where the boreal forest transitions into the central grasslands. Picture an arc stretching from Edmonton to Winnipeg and down towards Minneapolis. The biologist-powers that be call this "Aspen Parkland", where the great forests of spruce, fir, poplars, birches, and pines dance and meet with the prairies. I have always wondered what an outcropping of Canadian Shield granite looks like emerging from tallgrass. Yep, I have very simple desires and plans in life, a man who wants to find a rock sticking out of a field. I imagine very little of this landscape survives intact in the United States, and the best bet would be to find it in Canada in some of the national parks set aside to preserve such a landscape, but the remaining ecotones in Minnesota hold a particular fascination for me because they share many species in common with the lands next door in Michigan and Ontario that I love so much. Algonquin meets the prairie, I can only imagine it!
I would also love to see the Black Hills, as they are the easternmost extension of the great western mountain forests, one of the few places where elements of eastern, western, and northern forests come together, stuck in the middle of hundreds of miles of the Great Plains. Again, I like putting the puzzle together as much as seeing the finished map.
On the same general note:
Q: You seem to be passionate about much of the country (I assume this is referring to the United States specifically), finding something nice about everywhere. Is there any place you could not live? I mean, could you actually live in a desert or on the plains?
A: Probably somewhere in the Deep South, and not out of a cultural bias that leaves me with a raised eyebrow and open mouth whenever I encounter "rednecks" (but when it comes down to it, I find all sorts of people to be far more interesting than undesirable). The Deep South is exotically lovely, what with magnolias, live oaks (Quercus Virginiana) and balcypresses (Taxodium Distichum) dripping in Spanish Moss, and palmettos making the most of the steamy landscape. All the same, it is, well, a steamy landscape. I don't do heat and humidity in combination very well. I would imagine parts of Mississippi would be my least desirable place to live, owing to the conditions and the fact that anything resembling a mountain would be at least a half day drive away. Then again, the flora is lovely, the music is great, and the river and Gulf are never far away. As for the desert and plains, as per my response to the first question, they are not as desolate and devoid of life as they seem to be. They also both tend to be close to mountains, so if I wanted to, I could easily get my fill of some pine forest for a bit. I like both snow and palm trees, so the desert or the southern plains could work nicely, sure. St. George, Utah comes to mind, as they have both.
It also helps to have friends there. The western migration trend never really has stopped, it seems. Anyway, I would probably be most at home in northern Ontario or western Quebec, which would be outside of the United States, but you get the picture. That would be the heart part of my "home is where the heart is" even if I could adapt to any place fairly well. Even if circumstances forced me to live in Jackson, Mississippi, I would hardly consider my life shot to hell, but would get a really powerful air conditioner as soon as possible, or at least a nice ceiling fan. I would explore every nook and cranny of my new home and get to know its flowers, trees, history, and way of naming soft drinks rather well. The Creator left us a nice world to live in, and the least I can do is come to know and appreciate it.
Q: Why so many posts about prairies and savannas?
A: Grasslands are the most common ecosystem across the entire continent. They can be found in nearly every state, province, and territory of our three nations, albeit in different forms. In pre-colonial times, they were far more extensive than in the present day, engaging neighboring ecosystems in a battle royale of wildfires, rains, and herd grazing patterns. Grasslands are extremely resilient and adaptable ecosystems that define the wild nature of our continent on the whole: a fairly warm, windy place that is full of water and yet also remarkably dry. They can handle the worst weather we get, including extremes in temperature and precipitation, and manage to survive. Conversely, they are among the most productive and diverse lands on the entire planet, positively exploding with life and beauty with just a little bit of rain and warmth. They can be found at the edge of deserts, in meadows high atop mountains, far north in the tundra or far south in the leeward slopes of tropical Mexico, in sandy expanses left behind from the last glaciers melting away over the Canadian Shield, amidst the pines and palmettos of Florida, in patches of "barrens" surrounding the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, in clearings amongst great forests, and of course, in the great central plains that stretch from Alberta to Coahuila.
What's more, in addition to being emblematic of the frontier and survivalist spirit of this continent, they defy simplification, and are often the most misunderstood ecosystems out there. North American grasslands are often thought of like so:
When in fact they are often wonderful worlds bursting with life like:
In short, they are often far more than meets the eye. On the whole, nature has so many wonderful surprises awaiting for those willing to take the time and explore it. Our hectic world these days is so caught up in activity for the sake of self-benefit that we often overlook the concept of self-improvement, and definitely leave wonder and exploration out of the equation. Quite literally, we cannot see the forest for the trees! Grasslands are wonderful places where we are forced to pay attention to what is underfoot and seemingly invisible to the glancing eye in order to fully appreciate what they have to show us. This was certainly true for my development in observing and understand ecosystems. After I gave the Great Plains a chance, I never looked at a forest the same way again.
Speaking of that, to respond to the question on a more personal level, I had always wondered where the forest stopped and the prairie began. When I was a kid hungry for travel with that dog-eared and bent atlas in my hands, I always envisioned everything from Regina to Dallas to be one giant flat expanse of lawn. I could not help but imagine what the line between this lawn and the forest to the east looked like, and I pictured a dark, lush forest somewhere in Missouri that all of a sudden petered out into the endless prairie, a wall of tree meeting a sea of grass. The search for this grand line of division, though largely dispelled when I started to read about the places in that atlas, has always been a bit in the back of my mind even recently. Whenever I head out west, when driving through Iowa and Missouri, I always take in the scenery with even more intensity and detailed interest than I do elsewhere ecological transitions, or ecotones, occur, expecting to find that line one day. I wanted to know where the forest turned into the plains which gave way to the mountains which became the desert which... you get the point. Ecotones are fascinating worlds of connections between diverse areas, both because of the contrast between life zones they display, and because of the shared features between regions they represent. This dovetails into the next question:
Q: What are some places you have not yet been to in North America that you would put on your "bucket list"?
A: That would make for a very interesting post, and I say that because there are so many places I would want to see before I give myself back to the soil. I suppose here I can cheat and qualify that question with a specific direction: what places would I put on my list of places I am most ecologically curious about? I would say that have to do with transitions, and finding more of my great wall of forests. Specifically, I would give my right eye to see (or rather have seen) where the boreal forest transitions into the central grasslands. Picture an arc stretching from Edmonton to Winnipeg and down towards Minneapolis. The biologist-powers that be call this "Aspen Parkland", where the great forests of spruce, fir, poplars, birches, and pines dance and meet with the prairies. I have always wondered what an outcropping of Canadian Shield granite looks like emerging from tallgrass. Yep, I have very simple desires and plans in life, a man who wants to find a rock sticking out of a field. I imagine very little of this landscape survives intact in the United States, and the best bet would be to find it in Canada in some of the national parks set aside to preserve such a landscape, but the remaining ecotones in Minnesota hold a particular fascination for me because they share many species in common with the lands next door in Michigan and Ontario that I love so much. Algonquin meets the prairie, I can only imagine it!
I would also love to see the Black Hills, as they are the easternmost extension of the great western mountain forests, one of the few places where elements of eastern, western, and northern forests come together, stuck in the middle of hundreds of miles of the Great Plains. Again, I like putting the puzzle together as much as seeing the finished map.
On the same general note:
Q: You seem to be passionate about much of the country (I assume this is referring to the United States specifically), finding something nice about everywhere. Is there any place you could not live? I mean, could you actually live in a desert or on the plains?
A: Probably somewhere in the Deep South, and not out of a cultural bias that leaves me with a raised eyebrow and open mouth whenever I encounter "rednecks" (but when it comes down to it, I find all sorts of people to be far more interesting than undesirable). The Deep South is exotically lovely, what with magnolias, live oaks (Quercus Virginiana) and balcypresses (Taxodium Distichum) dripping in Spanish Moss, and palmettos making the most of the steamy landscape. All the same, it is, well, a steamy landscape. I don't do heat and humidity in combination very well. I would imagine parts of Mississippi would be my least desirable place to live, owing to the conditions and the fact that anything resembling a mountain would be at least a half day drive away. Then again, the flora is lovely, the music is great, and the river and Gulf are never far away. As for the desert and plains, as per my response to the first question, they are not as desolate and devoid of life as they seem to be. They also both tend to be close to mountains, so if I wanted to, I could easily get my fill of some pine forest for a bit. I like both snow and palm trees, so the desert or the southern plains could work nicely, sure. St. George, Utah comes to mind, as they have both.
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| Well, actually, this is Washington, Utah, but that is right next door. |
It also helps to have friends there. The western migration trend never really has stopped, it seems. Anyway, I would probably be most at home in northern Ontario or western Quebec, which would be outside of the United States, but you get the picture. That would be the heart part of my "home is where the heart is" even if I could adapt to any place fairly well. Even if circumstances forced me to live in Jackson, Mississippi, I would hardly consider my life shot to hell, but would get a really powerful air conditioner as soon as possible, or at least a nice ceiling fan. I would explore every nook and cranny of my new home and get to know its flowers, trees, history, and way of naming soft drinks rather well. The Creator left us a nice world to live in, and the least I can do is come to know and appreciate it.
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