Wednesday Filler: Philadelphia's White Pines

Like D.C., Philadelphia is a city where one can encounter southern botanical elements such as evergreen magnolias and hardy palms next to a few northern ones like the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).

At Penrose ave. and Homestead st.

At Gloria Dei National Historic Site.

Unlike those zone pushed plants, however, the White Pine is actually native, albeit at the edge of its range, to the cities.  It found quite a bit of use as a landscape tree, often planted in more open situations to take advantage of the bold sweeps of its unrestricted form.  In the wild around these parts, it grows with a decent amount of vigor and majesty, and has enough of a winter chill and less than brutal summer heat in order to reproduce decently.  From here southwards, however, these conditions are only met in the Appalachians.

The Garden Spaces Of Philadelphia

Last year we explored the garden and green spaces of historic Charleston and found a subtropical paradise seemingly imposing itself, sometimes orderly, sometimes not, on a city.  Like downtown Charleston, downtown historic Philadelphia is a lot of stone and brickwork and various kinds of paved streets.  This was apparently not William Penn's intention, but the early settlers who came to Philadelphia for reasons other than religious freedom were merchants and tradesmen, and all of them wanted easy access to the river.  As a result, the rural flavored, open setting that was in mind for the city went by the wayside as it grew progressively denser.  To this day, people are crammed into homes side by side.  In contrast to the larger homes of Charleston, which had courtyards and exposed back gardens, much of Philadelphia is arranged more with a combined desire to be close to the water and close to the street. 

This is not to say that the modern city is lacking in greenspace, or that even the historic core is without gardens and peaceful areas:

I forget where this is, but it's pretty much in or near the big attractions of Independence National Historical Park.

That's Carpenters' Hall, home of the First Continental Congress.

 The city is, however, much more closed in than Charleston and even New York was in the same era.  Washington might have been developed according to a more open plan under possible direction from politicians used to having the seat of government in both cities.  As noted in the last post, many politicians ducked in and out of the city whenever possible, feeling it somewhat cramped.  This was probably in large part due to the fact that some of them were less than democratic and did not enjoy proximity to the average citizen, and/or the fact that many of them were used to a more open and rural existence, especially the gentlemen of the South.  Cramped or not, the city certainly has its fair share of things paved and bricked, and the side streets off the historic core are certainly more restrictive of viewpoints than colonial Georgian or Regency era surviving cores like Charleston, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Cooperstown, and especially Williamsburg. 

But as you can see, the streets are not devoid of life.  In fact, Philadelphia does individual specimen trees remarkably well!

This is a very old American Sycamore (Platanus Occidentalis) growing in the cemetery of Gloria Dei National Historic Park.  The guide told me it was either there already, or that it had been planted during the building of the church.  Considering as how, either way, that was 1700, this is a very old tree.  The church is on an ecotone bordering the bottomland of the Delaware River, so a natural origin is not out of the question.  Come to the site just to see this beauty!

Two lovely Sweetgum (Liquidambar Styraciflua).

In short, Philadelphia is all about trying to fit life back into whatever available spots there are.  In contrast to Charleston, which I keep comparing to as it was indeed the competing botanical export center, Philadelphia is less a city seemingly overtaken by the wild as it is a city containing or built around and over top of it.  This is in part due to climate; Charleston gets a lot more rain and heat.  Still, there are the odd spaces where nature looks like it explodes.

The next three photos were taken along a little side alley off of Elfreth's Alley, a very scenic little part of the old town that has remained largely unchanged since colonial times.

But there are also many places where it is bricked and potted in. 

This should not be seen as a reflection of the attitudes of a citizenry who wished to dominate nature so much as find a place for it in a place where space was at a premium.  Cities like Chicago and New York took time to become as dense as they are, but Philadelphia started out that way, if much smaller in vertical scale.  Like Charleston, however, the surrounding environment never became as much of a secondary feature but got slowly reabsorbed into the setting.  There are many gardens, some restored, some surviving, that attempt to capture the changing face of the populace and its relationship with its environs.  The best way to see them, or any city, really, is to walk around and take in the sights. 

The Magnolias Of Philadelphia

When I was first learning about various trees of the continent back in my idealistic youth, I was blessed to come across a free copy of Audubon's Field Guide to North American Trees (Eastern Region).  This was a marvelous book full of fun things like maps, pictures, and even illustrations of trees in silhouette, with the evergreens being nice and full, and the deciduous trees shown in their bare winter glory.  Now and then, I came across a remarkable leafy tree... with leaves on it!  I knew about them before, of course, being a traveled veteran of Southern Florida, but what really impressed me was the fact that some of them could be found very north, namely the American Holly (Ilex Opaca) and above all else, the majestic Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora).  In specific, the guide noted that the beauty is noted for hardiness "north to Philadelphia".

In gardening circles, people are lately growing fonder of the art of "zone pushing", which is to say that they, ahem, we, like to grow things far north of where they are considered hardy.  Gardeners in Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, and Cleveland (and associated friendly cities) have long since considered anything that retains leaves in the winter to be of high prestige and a reminder that life goes on during otherwise snowy and cold dark months between November and March.  Alright, so October and April...  Anyway, its a hard thing to take even a cold hardy palm or broadleaved evergreen and expect it to dance for you while the blizzard rages, at least this far inland.  Philadelphia, on the other hand, is perhaps in one of the perfect situations for attending to a variety of cultivation.

While it has far more in common with the ocean than the Appalachians, it has elements of both; pine species form extensive barrens in nearby rural areas in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as more mountain species like rhododendrons in surviving woodlands.  It's not too hot, it's not too cold, and due to an atmosphere of tolerance, it was the American city that got the most brains to boot.  Massachusetts was all about religious agenda/freedom, New York was all about commerce, Charleston and Williamsburg were all about slave-powered farming, but Philadelphia was about letting you pray how you wanted, letting you argue with people over politics, and, surprisingly, letting you talk about what academic subjects were currently in vogue.  Alexander Hamilton of the spice islands by way of New York tried to get finance to set up a crown here too, but ultimately the city is still best remembered as more of a home to the Benjamin Franklin type.  This is a city of books, trees, and people who still like to read newspapers on a park bench.

One such popular academic interest was plants.  Aristocrats in Europe went crazy over trying to acquire New World vegetation for their estates, especially in England.  Various botanists made quite the name for themselves detecting and acquiring such treasures, and Philadelphia's own John Bartram earned the respectable but low paying title of the "King's botanist".  While Charleston, under Michaux, served as a secondary port for the thriving plant and seed trade, the varieties of climate and plant life meeting here, as well as the royal connection, ensured that Philadelphia would remain the chief point of departure for the finest trees finding their way to the finest clients.  Unlike Charleston, however, Philadelphia grew up much more snug and dense, seemingly paved over, much to the distaste of the founders and succeeding generations of planners in the city who wanted everyone to have a growing space.  Thomas Jefferson disliked the environment, and like many other politicians, wanted to try to escape to greener pastures when possible, which usually meant taking a trip to Bartram's house (which I regret upon regret not stopping at).  There they talked about plants.  No, really.  Jefferson and Washington were plant geeks.

Philadelphia has since greened rather nicely, even if the concrete which has replaced the brick is still the dominant feature everywhere.  The riverbanks are lush, there are parks and green spaces never far away, and the city is home to the United States' first urban national wildlife refuge.  Out of all this, however, what caught my eye was, well, the magnolias.  My little guide book did not disappoint.  I can't remember where half of them were taken at, with the exception of the line of tall ones at Betsy Ross House.  They are not hard to find, though.  Just wander through the historic core and you will find quite a few, some very impressive in size.

Yeah, that's a Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) intruding on the top left.  Pretty cool seeing them together!

These last fellows were at the Betsy Ross House.

There is also a garden consisting almost entirely of imported magnolias which, while not the majestic Southern Magnolia, do put on quite the show in spring.  I ran into some volunteers at the garden who gave me the unofficial history of magnolias in the city, as well as the intent behind the creators of this garden.  They explained that Washington, plant geek, wanted to green up the city he had to spend so much time in as president.  He was particularly fond of magnolias, which the ladies and I deduced to probably be his proud Southern Magnolias, arboreal symbols of American robustness.  As a symbolic tree, Magnolia Grandiflora is much more associated with the deeper South and with Andrew Jackson, who planted them at the White House as they were his wife's favorite tree.  Nevertheless, Washington probably would have run into plenty of them in his boyhood tidewater stomping grounds, as the tree was already making quite the impression in the trans-Atlantic trade and was already being cultivated as an ornamental in the southern lowcountry.  He probably enjoyed seeing a tree as robust as this in remaining green even in colder winters, and as a horticulturalist probably thought about bringing them further north with him into his presidential exile from Mt. Vernon.  The creators of the garden, acting 150 years later, apparently did not have the same design in mind, which the volunteers and I grumbled about.  The Asiatic magnolias, they said, are nice, but they only flower in the spring, and, well, are not very American.  At the risk of sounding like an ecological imperialist, considering the intent of the design of the garden, I have to agree.

Still, it's a nice garden (with a fountain, which I did not take a picture of), a quiet space of reflection surrounded by quiet streets (Locust between 4th and 5th streets) and various quiet places of worship.  There are thirteen flowering trees and shrubs which represent the thirteen colonies, but most of them are imports, and ironically, two of the species are iconic of England!  I'm a proud subject of the Commonwealth myself, but the concept seemed rather nutty to me.  If I had to guess, I would think that the creators wanted to put on an incredible burst of spring and early summer color, and to be fair, the garden was set up long after the colonial era passion for natives had faded and the Victorian and Imperial passion for exotics had become the rage.  Remember what I said about zone-pushing?  That's something fairly new, the current emerging vogue.  People maybe just weren't planting southern trees here back in the day, just as they weren't planting palms in Vancouver or London until fairly recently.

The worm has since turned, and the National Park Service tends toward at least the homegrown and preferably native ecological restoration as much as possible (and to be fair, as much as they work here and are not too distantly native, Magnolia Grandiflora is native no further north than the central Chesapeake, if I am allowed to make such a bold statement).  In the garden we get to see shifting trends in horticulture presented as a history lesson about a history lesson.  I have to admit, regardless of my angst, I stopped and enjoyed the patch of green for a while.  Washington probably would have done the same.  Jefferson would have turned cross, purchased nearby land, and started over on a superior garden.  Bartram would have sold him the plants.  All of them probably would have been in awe of the many Southern Magnolias found through the rest of the city.  I have to admit, seeing them together with so many other trees, including my favorite Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) gave the city a pretty interesting arboreal landscape.  You can do that in DC too, but then you have to pay for it with hot, muggy summers that do not get nearly as bad here.

What's the rest of that city treescape look like?  Come on by next post for a tour. 

Sunday Afternoon Post: Really Small Town America

Smithfield, Pennsylvania, is one of those towns where if you hold your breath you can make it through by the time you need to exhale.  They do have a traffic light there, though, at the corner of Church and Morgantown. 

Its not that I am not used to small towns, I've lived in and around them most of my existence, but this particular traffic light reminded me that while this was still a full functioning town, it was also a very... small one.  There it was, standing all by itself, like a toll collector at a bridge that never gets used.  It seemed very superfluous, as if to say to the odd out-of-towner that Smithfield was something to notice while passing by, maybe even a nice community to live in, but that it would not be surprised or upset if you just kept passing on through.  That's the sort of feeling I got from that off the beaten path part of Pennsylvania in general.  Sure, Pittsburgh and even Morgantown were nearby, as were notable attractions like Fort Necessity, but this is one of those parts of North America that seemingly got skipped over for the next level of frontier. 

Northern Lush

In the last post we looked at a rather handsome trees and shrubs from the American South.  It felt wrong not to also give something of a shout out to the greenery farther north, specifically that in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, or Alleghenies.  Northern forests can be very thick and have fun, acid-loving, evergreen foliage too!

This particular scene is representative of the Laurel Highlands in Pennsylvania, and is actually on the site of Fallingwater.

There we have Rosebay Rhododendron (Rhododendron Maximum) in the lower foreground and shooting up on the right.  The darker green spruce looking trees on the right and left sides further back are Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis).  There is a huge variety of hardwoods at various stages of growth here, including oaks, beeches, maples, etc.  This is a very dense forest, albeit a healthy one with various levels of canopy.  The Hemlocks here have not yet been assaulted by the Wooly Adelgid (Adleges Tsugae), an invasive insect which has otherwise been murder on the majestic Hemlocks.  In former times, before the bug and logging had seen that many Appalachian forests looked nothing like their former glory, the above scene would have been typical of the deep woods that at once both encouraged European exploration and kept colonials back on the cultivated lower ground.  They also would have had less mosquitoes in these parts; they do not seem to swarm that much around the Hemlocks.

Like the plants in the last post, these fellows are also the in-between crowd.  They don't like to keep their feet soaked, but they don't do well with hot and dry either.  This is a forest of comfortable heat in the summer, despite the lack of breezes in the dense growth.  Things are moist, but not wet, even though the region receives plenty of rainfall like the southern one previously seen.  The soils help in that regard, holding on to what they need to with their thick layer of organic matter, while also draining relatively well.  All in all, a rather pleasant environment to live in, but still relatively unsettled.

Wednesday Filler: Philadelphia's Environmentalist River

The Schuykill River was, like the Juniata spoken of yesterday, a major conduit for colonial expansion deeper into Pennsylvania.  The Lenape people, re-named the Delaware by later Pennsylvanians, formed part of the central portion of their nation around the banks of this and the Delaware River.  Unlike the Haudenosaunee who lived further west in the mountains, the Lenape spoke an Algonquian language, like many other nations along the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Maine.  The Lenape were pretty knowledgeable farmers, and readily understood the ecological importance of fire; the local pine barrens naturally renewed with periodic fires.  The banks of the river itself were, and are, largely lush, owing to the humid and mild climate of this part of Pennsylvania.

Looking north off of the bridge carrying US 30.  As one can tell from the exposed banks, the tide is low (this lower part of the river is influenced by oceanic tides, like the lower Delaware which it flows into).  A weir runs across the length of the river beyond the next bridges.  That classical looking building on the right is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Rocky the steps.

The river has seen not so natural history, of course, being torn apart and polluted by some of the earliest activity of the Industrial Revolution in North America.  The river was of immense fascination for naturalists such as both Bartrams and Audubon, and was later the focus of one of attempts to ensure cleaning drinking water for Philadelphia.  In the last century, it has been largely cleaned up, and much of its banks are incredibly natural, rather than developed right to the water's edge.  Today the river retains its traveler focus, thanks to such environmentalist foundations and concern, and serves as an incredible place to canoe or kayak while taking in scenes of nature in the midst of a cosmopolitan, yet very American, city.

Juniata Sunset

As I was searching for pictures for yesterday's post, I ran across some particularly memorable scenes taken during sunset while driving along US 322 on the banks of the lower Juniata River in central Pennsylvania.  I've been through there several times, and while the area is pretty lovely during the day, it is absolutely stunning at sunset.  In the last post I mentioned that Pennsylvania has its share of farmland and open fields, but the Juniata is Pennsylvania in a more primal form.  Much of the river area is forested, and even though the valleys have featured settlement of both Iroquoian peoples and colonials, it was a staging area and frontier area, respectively. 

Daytime, July of 2011.

Like many rivers in the region, the Juniata allowed for easy connections between the Appalachian interior and the Atlantic coastal lands, and the river is notable for being oriented east-west, like the Potomac, rather than north-south like most of the other waterways.  In addition to long since providing the First Born with connections to the interior, it provided early drive for colonial explorers wanting to press further west into the otherwise difficult terrain of the Appalachians.  Pennsylvania's lower easy Atlantic facing lands penetrated pretty far inland; Chambersburg, for instance, is halfway west into the state.  The Juniata, which is thirty miles north, provided a tempting path to get lost on.  Canals and Railroads would later follow, notable the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, which bridged the Allegheny divide by means of a portage railroad.  Dear portage nps site, I regret not stopping there last summer!  


The canals and railroads ultimately never dominated those in New York or along the National Road route, the former a path the Haudenosaunee were also keen not only on maintaining, but also settling as the heart of their confederacy.  Colonial peoples were also more keen on moving on to the Ohio country; the Juaniata was the scene of frontier settlement in the early 18th century, but the area remained sparsely populated and is still very much verdant and sylvan to this day.  In some ways, its not hard to see why.  Typical of regional rivers, the river cuts through the imposing ridges of the Appalachians, and in some places the slopes come right down to the water's edge.  Dense riparian forests of willows and friends cover the shores, things are rather rapid and rocky in the river itself, and the upland forests have thick underbrush of rhododendrons and other typical Appalachian plants in many places.  Like the canyons of southern California, the Juniata and other regional valleys can provide for some very natural America not far from densely populated America.  The sense of passage and frontier is still very much obvious, especially when the sun disappears over the western horizon. 

And since I did label the post as such...

July 2014.

Hope you enjoyed it!  Sorry for blabbering on so much, but the colonial era frontier has always been very interesting to me.  It easily gets lost behind the later romance of the distant western frontier, and is often ignored by intelligent people otherwise trying to rediscover how the relationships between native and colonial peoples evolved in the middle stages of the modern American story.

Where Is This?

Like yesterday's post noted, sometimes we have conceptions about places that unfortunately prevent us from exploring them and enjoying them.  Take California, for instance.  Most people see it as the beach, maybe some mountains and tall trees, maybe a little desert sprinkled in.  They see a superficial culture of surfers, media and film industry types, and aloof people in general.  In reality, the variable geography of California made for extremely diverse First Born cultures living in close proximity to each other, and the state features a colonial history (some good, some not so good) that stretches as far back as the 16th century.  This is all set against a backdrop of just about every sort of ecosystem one can imagine short of pure tropical, but also featuring the very rare one of Chaparral shrub land.  You can read a little about this natural California in one of my oldest posts, here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/01/remnants-of-natural-california-canyons_10.html

Moving further east, I have found that some of the biggest misconceptions come from those who live in the larger cities and often groan when thinking of having to travel between them.  In particular, most east coasters seem to view everything beyond the Appalachian Mountains as being pretty much beyond the pale, with such people deriding said territory as the Midwest, a title that locals in the great unknown rush to embrace with equal fervor.  Such lands are unbearably flat (or maybe slightly rolling), covered in nothing but cornfields, and full of people more concerned with family values than with international affairs.  You know, some place like this:

Which is funny, because that was taken not ten miles slightly out of Appalachian valley and ridge country.  Yes, that is pure Pennsylvania right there, taken looking north off of the westbound lanes of PA 283 near Elizabethtown.  Pennsylvania is indeed pretty mountainous, but it also has its far share of rural farmland that could easily pass for something as different and distant as Ontario or Kentucky.  The colony itself, like the other North American European ventures, could not survive without resident farmers and ordinary settlers who came to simply live as much as many would come for various idealistic reasons. 

Here we go about 15 miles more down the road and find those mountains, and thus enter into more forested land and familiar scenes (never minding that Harrisburg is hidden behind the trees).

US 22 North; the ridge ahead slopes down towards the Susquehanna River.  This is in the north of Harrisburg.

Of course, even within those mountains one finds valley floors where rich, alluvial soils have long since been cultivated; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had done so for centuries in Pennsylvania and upstate New York before European settlers found such places equally agreeable. 

Maryland 495 south, not even 10 miles south of Grantsville.

And sometimes, they cultivated up the more agreeable slopes, too.  I have to admit that I did not expect to see such a scene in extreme western Maryland, which is otherwise pretty vertical and sylvan as a default setting.  This could just as well pass for something in rural southern Michigan or Indiana, and judging from left over campaign signs I saw in the area, the locals probably vote for similar end goals.  Labels can be a tricky thing, though, as can misconceptions.  Why not take a trip down some seemingly boring back roads and be surprised now and then?  Just a few miles down the road was enough to turn that landscape into this:

That was taken on the same day, within a few minutes, and the sky was largely blue just like in the other picture.  It was almost surreal how majestic those blue and misty Allegheny Mountains looked...

Wednesday Filler: The Capture Of Philadelphia

One of the nicest features about a tourist side trip to Pat's King of Steaks, which we featured two days ago in a post, is that one gets impressive views of the city skyline from that location.

Right next to Pat's is a large park dominated by a baseball diamond.  Since a fence was in the day, I tried to zoom through the links the best that I could.  The end result was almost artistic, a look at a city that has had as many historic ties to dominating financial structures and Federalism as it has to religious liberty and progressive democracy.  Here we look from the working class neighborhood around Pat's, through a fence, higher up into intermediate businesses, all past floodlights meant to illuminate a baseball diamond, and finally resting in a city above all that, one of corporate finance and upper management.  Meanwhile, next to the fence, all members from all layers were chowing down on the same steak sandwiches. 

Lots of potential social commentary in one convenience-oriented photo... 

Anyway, you decide what it means.  I was thoughtful at the time, but still largely conquered by lunch.  This is south of the city center looking north; colonial Philadelphia, including the original banks and exchanges which steered the city in this landscape direction, would be to the right of those tall buildings. 

Philadelphia: City Of Brotherly Sandwich

Part of the fun experience of traveling is to find lodging and food that is local flavor.  Its nice to see the mundane as an evolution from ages of cultural development, and how particular regions and even cities and towns have produced both high and low culture with their own touches as a result.  Sometimes it can be hard to find something that is not overly "tourist", but sometimes you have to sit back, laugh at the kitsch, and dive right in.

Philadelphia, like any destination city, is full of things drawing tourists into the bright, sparkling lights.  It manages to do this in a way that very much blends in with the normal reality of the city, however, and even though some places feel like a museum packed into a modern mess of skyscrapers and freeways, she does so out of concern for the past while moving on with the future.  "Out with the old, in with the new" does not apply here.  That's a tangent for a different time, but the lesson holds strong in the living example of finding a place to eat the local flavor.  When I was last there in 2014, I had a choice between going to some re-invented gastro pub that was a recreation of some colonial era tavern, or... Pat's King of Steaks.

This was not a hard decision to make.  What might have been hard was choosing to go there, or to Geno's, right across the street.

But, being a traditionalist, as Pat's claims they started the whole thing, and far more attracted to the particular smells coming out of Pat's (not to mention the faster moving line), I went for it.

Despite what some reviews might say, Pat's gives you a pretty impressive sandwich.  That, some fries, and a coke (9-10 bucks total) was more than enough to sate me for some time, and it was a pretty active day walking around much of the historic core of the city.  The steak was definitely better than what is offered for the sandwich in most other places, the cheese was pretty delightful (but honestly, as much as it sounds gross, traditionally I would have been better off going with cheese-whiz than with American, at least according to my traveling companion, as it melts and fills the thing so much better), and the bread was pretty good.  The most refreshing feature, however, was seeing the options in a nice grill from which one could self serve.  There were peppers, more onions, etc. piled together with condiments.  You can see one of the wee green peppers behind my sandwich.  Normally I'm not much of a pepper guy, but... amazing little things.  Grilled to perfection.

All in all, a pretty enjoyable experience, with a caveat: Know what you want (use the website for instruction) when you order, or else they kick you to the back of the line.  They serve people fast, and don't like to mess it up.  Seating is somewhat limited, but the tables were moving pretty fast, like the service.  In terms of accessibility, the steak shops are off the beaten path, decently south of the historic core.  Some people have said that the neighborhoods are scary, which I suppose is true if you have lived in a cave outside of some no name town in North Dakota your whole life.  As a reward for braving the non-tourist actual city, you get to see a small slice of how the normal folk live.  My take?  Pretty clean, pretty open and airy, fairly laid-back compared to New York or Washington. 

Passyunk ave and Wharton st., looking south, right across from Pat's.

Really, the neighborhood is one of families and working people, ethnically diverse and with typical urban east coast atmosphere.  We went at lunch time and the place had quite a few suits milling about.  Multiple bus lines are in the area, and if you drive, you just need to sneak a few blocks away and find a parallel parking spot.  Tip: try it off of the main eating hours for easier access.  Otherwise, be prepared to find a space in this:

South along 10th street, beside Capitolo Park/Playground, a block walk from Pat's.

Now, as for the sandwich itself, I would say that the Philly is a pretty average street food for something from an east coast city.  You get the sandwich, something European if not downright traditionally English, then you get the American spin on it turning it into something huge and more than just a snack, and then you get really good meat, lots of it, and on a superior bun, representing the Italian blessing on most east coast street and deli cuisine.  It's a democratic sandwich that has evolved in a city born of liberty, that has survived total transformation by government and high finance, and ended up as a place where you can get relatively greasy, cooked with gusto, here-enjoy-this eating.  You had suits next to tourists next to construction workers, and no one gave off any attitude or got in anyone's way. 

Next: Greek food... in the desert?!

Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.

The Historical Importance Of An Invisible Creek

The brief summer of 2014 which followed the brutal winter of 2013-14 gave your author every reason in the world to be out enjoying the bounty of nature and not wanting to stare at a screen or gather hordes of photos together in an attempt to make sense out of the North American experience.  Well, winter is upon us once again and he finds himself indoors a lot more, even while he takes in the chilly air with confidence that he lives in Michigan and not northern Manitoba.  I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as well as a lot of listening.  The United States is currently in the midst of some of the most bitterly divided political warfare that it has seen in some time, Mexico is busy trying to deal with the fact that perhaps helping PRI regain entrenchment has done little to support growth in the country, to say nothing of stem the tide of violence from the drug cartels, and Canada sleeps above all this in some false sense of superiority.  Some jump into the fray completely ignorant of history and reason and foretell of the apocalypse; others claim they are on intimate terms with both the past and the cause of righteousness and yet present to the public rather obvious revisionist viewpoints of who said what in some document, religious or otherwise, made by a court hundreds of years ago, perhaps not even from our shores. 

Life goes on.  Freedom is maintained enough that most in North America, and yes, including Mexico, individuals can choose to tear away the veil of ignorance and find out the facts behind the truths in our larger story.  That's what this blog is about, my own journey to discovery about our story here in North America, and not just about great people or events or even transitory concepts.  Instead, I take a look at even the small things.  My latest read seems to be taking me for a ride down that particular path; Sarah Vowell has been entertaining and informing me about how taking a look at the small things can help one understand how the bigger picture fits together.  Better put by a really good friend, she takes a look a reality through the perspective of one within the fishbowl.  After all, this is why those who study history and geography even bother to look at details even when the facts are largely laid out in plain sight for them; happenings like revolutions are a bit more complex than the slogans which ignite the passions which drive them.  Sometimes we need to tear down the sacred statues and become iconoclasts in order to prevent such revolutions from turning away from said passions and into the realm of pure legalistic precedent.  Alright, so maybe I have also been reading some of that iconoclast Gore Vidal.  The thing is, I'm back to share some more of what I have found.

And what better little thing to then bring to attention than this charming little discovery:

Does not look like much, does it?  I am sure that most people would never recognize it as anything other than a slight depression in the ground which for some reason was bridged rather than filled and paved like the rest of the surrounding city.  In reality, this is what remains of Dock creek, a small tidal creek that perhaps served as the mark for where William Penn decided to center his capital city of Philadelphia.  The "dry water feature" rests buried in a lovely park behind Carpenters Hall, meeting place of the first Continental Congress ,and, as such, another relic of the city's past that gets largely ignored by the visiting public in favor of bigger, grander things like Independence Hall.  Today, aside from the depression in the ground, the only thing that lets the walker know that anything different was ever here is a plaque set up by the National Park Service.  The plaque lets people know that this center of the famous seat of American political birth was full of not only the gassy overtures of politicians, but also plain, simple swamp gas.  Much like inheritor Washington and predecessor London, this first capital of the United States was a rather wet and marshy affair that has otherwise transformed and been paved over.

Of course, the modern face of Philadelphia tends to look a lot more like this:

Chestnut street at 4th, looking west.

And, as expected, this:

Passyunk and 10th, turning south onto 10th.

She started out as the last grasp of the Atlantic's dominance against the fall line.  This is what makes this little creek so interesting, really.  Philadelphia, you see, is unlike many other cities in that it falls not soundly with the "North", is definitely not part of the "South" either, and while hardly on the ocean and farther away from salt water than even Washington, is definitely more coastal than inland.  Many houses here have gardens that feature a magnolia alongside a spruce, fitting for a city that can be buried by snow in the odd winter and yet experience a summer every bit as unpalatable as any given city further south.  In essence, we have a city that had a noticeably longer growing season than what could be offered by New England and the Hudson valley, thus suitable for plantations, yet not idealistically part of a colony founded otherwise for the sake of individual liberty (in contrast to Jamestown) in which the good land could be used for families of farmer-workers.  We thus have a city founded not in consideration to proximity to the coast and thus the broader market, and yet not so far removed from it as to be deaf to the siren song of international commerce. 

Here we have a city founded on the principles of religious tolerance and a degree of personal liberty that also had an increasing number of African slaves imported into it in the mid-eighteenth century.  Proudest son of the city, Benjamin Franklin, otherwise later noted to be something of an abolitionist, did not actually free his slaves until after the Revolution.  As the creek was covered over, so too was slavery, and the city and her history were simultaneously whitewashed; the colonial federal style look was abandoned for a lot of marble even as Pennsylvania passed the first abolition act in the United States in 1780.  The creek gives us two lessons: not everything is as simple as it seems, and nothing on this earth is immutable.  So, let's take a stroll further up the creek...

Rhododendrons: Flame Azalea (Rhododendron Calendulaceum)

This is the third in a series of posts in which we will take a look at some of our native North American Rhododendrons.  Rhododendrons (and their happy sub-genus, Azaleas) occur throughout the continent except on the Great Plains, the eastern interior plains (southern Michigan, western Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.), and all of Mexico other than the mountains of northern Baja California.


"The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life."  -Katsumoto, from the Last Samurai.

Azaleas are a subgroup of the Rhododendron genus; they tend to be a bit smaller than their more robust looking cousins, and while they can put on quite the show in flowers, even in nice big bunches of flowers just like their bigger friends, they do not have flower clusters like the full Rhododendrons do.  They also tend to have a different general leaf shape than the familiar long and cold-curling Rhodies.  In North America, the Azaleas can be found everywhere from the usual mountain haunts to well into warmer, lower reaches near the coasts.  Unlike the Rhodies, most of which here tend to be evergreen, Azaleas in North America tend to be on the deciduous side.  We have 16 native species in North America, many of which can be found in the Appalachians.

One such species is the marvelous Flame Azalea (Rhododendron Calendulaceum), which has beautiful flowers that pull off some sort of heavenly combination of orange, red, and yellow.  Orange seems to be the most prevalent color in the wild population, but cultivators have managed to squeeze out brilliant selections from the neighboring colors of the rainbow to the degree that the Flames probably have as many garden children out there as most other Azaleas or Rhodies, even giving the Catawba descendants a run for their plant money.  While searching for wild type Flames at various nurseries, I have seen far more for sale than any other North American Rhododendrons or Azaleas.  And why not?  They are an incredibly beautiful flower that brings a real show of fiery color the garden.

All of these pictures of are of the same plant at milepost 361.2 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Glassmine Falls overlook.

Naturally, I just had to find one growing wild.  To be honest, I really had no idea they even existed until I was researching the genus two years ago, and ever since then I have been consumed with trying to find some wild Flames.  I knew I could easily find Catawbas and Rosebays, as their locations and bloom peaks are well documented, but for some reason the same has not been my experience of trying to find Flames.  So it was that when I took my recent botanical pilgrimage to the center of Rhodo heaven, well, even the majesty of Roan could not give pause to the hunt.  It turns out I was largely barking up the wrong tree.

The Flames are sort of in between the needs of the Catawbas and the Rosebays when it comes to elevation and exposure.  Like the Rosebays, they seem to thrive best under some amount of shade, yet they are also more than happy with a few hours of direct sunlight.  As such, they can be found on balds, especially the ultimate place to find them, Gregory Bald (which I did not find out about until I was leaving the Smokies), but they can also be found along slightly open areas in the forest understory.  I found a decent number along the Blue Ridge Parkway growing like this, mainly between Mt. Mitchell and Asheville, but like the Catawbas at Craggy Gardens, they were pretty much mostly done blooming by the third week of June at such altitudes higher than 4,000 feet but less than 5,500 feet.  In some places, they formed a decent patch of orange, but impatient motorists made stopping a pretty nasty prospect.  If you manage to hit the right flowering time for certain altitudes (they apparently can handle much lower elevations) it is likely that you will see a bunch more orange.  I was fortunate enough to find one growing half in the sun and half in the shade at the Glassmine Falls overlook.

For this reason I don't have many pictures of them, but the one I did find was a pretty nice specimen.

It was all alone, surrounded by a bunch of American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana), a pair of species that looked really nice and lush together.  As you can see, it (and the others I could not stop for) tends to be a bit more fragile looking than the Rhododendrons.  Flames are pretty delicate looking, but they still have nice globes of flowers (even if they only produce one flower per stem) and decent, somewhat glossy leaves.  I would still go so far as to call Flames such as this one a small tree rather than a shrub, because it was pushing twenty feet.  Among the Ash trees, it looked to be as much a part as the canopy as they did.  Elsewhere, especially among the maples and beech, they tended to function more like a second canopy just as the Rosebays do.  I hope to some day make it to Gregory or a similar bald to see them in their open habitat.

Just as Catawbas are a good sign, even an indicator, if you will, that one is close to if not decidedly in the Southern Appalachians, Flames for the southbound mountaineer are a mark that one has progressed at least as far south as the Central Appalachians.  They can be found infrequently in Ohio, and have been reported up in New York, although Pennsylvania claims they have been extirpated.  Like another showy plant that pops up in Ohio, the Crossvine (Bignonia Capreolata), the Flames look like they belong at the edge of the subtropical world.  I suspect that like the Rosebay, they might have once been a bit more common in the northern reaches, and probably got too much attention as a thing of beauty and thus been forcibly transformed into a hopeful garden dream, but their particular forest associations and preferences of habit leave me thinking they are not as northern in nature as their big leaf cousins. 

Rhododendrons: Rosebay Rhododendron (Rhododendron Maximum)

This is the second in a series of posts in which we will take a look at some of our native North American Rhododendrons.  Rhododendrons (and their happy sub-genus, Azaleas) occur throughout the continent except on the Great Plains, the eastern interior plains (southern Michigan, western Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.), and all of Mexico other than the mountains of northern Baja California.

While I maintain that Catawba Rhododendrons are amazingly beautiful and something that every true plant lover should make a pilgrimage to see at least once, the Rosebays have a special place in my heart.  They grow all the way up to Quebec and Nova Scotia and might have once covered more territory in Ontario.  For a broadleaved evergreen, they laugh at the face of winter cold, more so than even the mountain-top hugging Catawbas, but they also have limitations.  Like the domestic cultivars of the genus popular in gardens, the Rosebay is not really fond of the hot sun of the afternoon.  They also don't tend to get a lot of attention from gardeners outside of their home region of the Appalachians, which is a shame because they can be every bit as impressive in flower and scale as their Catawba cultivar cousins.  Like the Catawba, they are properly considered a tree, having every bit the stature of one.

Great Smokey Mountains National Park, alongside the Newfound Gap Road along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina.

That said, it tends to take on a bit more delicate of a branching structure than the mighty Catawbas.

The slender trunks of the Rosebay stand out in individual specimens.  This one was found at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park in Kentucky, along the Pinnacle Overlook road.

Like the Catawbas, it can and often does form pretty impressive forests in its own right.

Along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina.

The difference here, however, is that they don't like the same degree of exposure that the bald species do.  This probably owes to the fact that they are a more intermediate elevation rhododendron, which in the southern portion means that summer brings much warmer temperatures, and anywhere in its range means comparatively less available moisture for the plants.  As a result, one will find Rosebays among the forests, where they can even form a secondary canopy in places that they tend to dominate.  In the southern Appalachians, especially in the Smokies and along the Blue Ridge, they really do dominate, perhaps even to the exclusion of other plant life on the forest floor, an invasive native if you will.  

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, somewhere between Spruce Pine, NC and Mt. Mitchell.

Same as above.

Still, they do form a lovely understory, and fit in in a variety of surroundings, be they drier forests of oak and pine, where they are less common, and moister, northern forests of beech, maples, and hemlocks, where they can found at home both in the central and northern Appalachians and the Cove Forests of the southern Appalachians which duplicate these conditions in an otherwise much warmer setting.

A cove forest, but I don't recall where exactly.

They seem to perform the best, or at least occur almost without fail, along streams, especially in forests of Hemlock and associated trees.  Here they help to make for an incredible lushness in a darker green setting and reach proportions of size that put the Catawbas to shame.

Along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina, in Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

Same place as above.  That Rosebay in the left background up there was half the size of some pretty decent trees, well over 30 feet tall.

And speaking of size, they are not called Rhododendron Maximum as a joke.  Their leaves are the biggest of any Rhododendron in the world.  They can usually be identified by these long, relatively narrow leaves even when not in flower.  Herein also lies their main attraction for this particular gardener: huge evergreen leaves that can take northern winters.

Same location as above.

And yes, they flower as well as a Catawba does, in the same big globe clusters, albeit sometimes not always at once, and not necessarily as prolifically.  They also take their time flowering, flowering as early in the southern ranges as March and continuing up into August pretty much everywhere.

These first two were taken off the same plant, again along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina in that amazing National Park.

This one was found at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park in Kentucky, again along the Pinnacle Overlook road.

All in all, a nice, if not as dramatically special Rhododendron that the Catawba is.  They certainly are more common, and in some places it was hard to miss them.  I have yet to find some of their natural populations further north, where they do thin out a bit more in comparison to the thickets of the south, but they are pretty common as escapes from cultivation, and they can even get weedy in character as they like to take advantage of disturbed areas, something odd for a plant that likes being cool, moist, and shaded.  

A chance meeting near a highway widening project, where land looks to have been opened for some time, along Gap Creek Road near Elizabethton, Tennessee. 

This was the canopy above those Rosebays, which this far south means drier conditions than they would normally frequent.  Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus) are a true northern species, but down here they seem to also make a lower-middle elevation home among the dry and hot conditions favored by oaks.  I would figure sand would have something to do with it.

One can find tons and tons of them along I-80 in Pennsylvania, especially on the stretch between I-81 and I-476:

Many more where this came from.  Sorry for the blur.  This was in the thirties in February, and they did not really look overly concerned about the cold.

To return to the White Pine picture for some closing comments, I have to wonder about just how widespread these things used to be.  Current botanical thinking is that they are opportunists that have taken advantage of artificial changes brought by humans in modern forest settings, akin to how the Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus Virginiana) is more prevalent than it once was.  While I don't argue with the evidence that backs up this line of thinking, because they really do tend to be opportunistic for a Rhododendron, the evidence also focuses on disturbed conditions, and in some decent growth forests they still do form an integral part of the scenery.

My thinking is, owing especially to their tolerances and favored conditions (I mean come on, they can handle cold just fine and they can pop out of rock hillside soil like its made of Miracle Gro), they were perhaps once a feature of forests in Ontario and decently into the Canadian Shield.  They do grow in upstate New York and Quebec, including parts of the Adirondacks and even Erie County, where urban development in Buffalo has probably removed a bunch of the wild population (I would looooove to find some if anyone knows of any wild ones there).  I could imagine that perhaps once, along with maybe Prickly Pear Cacti, grew happily in the sands of eastern Ontario below towering White Pines.  Sure, they might colonize disturbed areas bearing such conditions, but they are no stranger to somewhat dry pine lands, as this particular part of Connecticut demonstrates:

The Most Unusual Natural Area of Connecticut

Oh, and they are also movie stars, as far as plants go.  You can see a few flowering ones in the woods during the opening running scene in Last of the Mohicans!

Tomorrow we shall come across something a little different, an azalea!