Where the Sand Meets the Forest

Sand is at once both an exotic and a mundane thing.  In the natural context, it evokes images of deserts, beaches, and river features, but it can be found in just about every environment on earth from the most hot and dry to the damp and cool.  Among of the most famous instances of sand in eastern interior North America are the dunes surrounding the Great Lakes, and usually pictures of the dunes involve grand sweeping vistas of sand towering over the beautiful azure expanses of Lake Michigan, particularly at Sleeping Bear.  Despite the presence of trees in such images, it can be easy to forget that this is not some exotic meeting of sea and desert, but a shifting landscape that is constantly at war with vegetation that threatens to stabilize the dunes.  The contrast between verdant forest and seemingly barren sand is striking.

The contrast is even more interesting when viewed from within the trees.  The early European explorers of the region tended to follow water courses in their travels into the interior, and so would not have approached the dunes from "behind", but it would have been interesting to see how they would react to a bright, nearly glowing wall of sand emerging from the canopy.

As one gets closer to the interface of sand and woods, the embrace of the two parts appears more to be a mutual action, in which neither side is willing to give in.

Of course, such a meeting of turfs is somewhat commonplace near sandy shores.  The barrier islands of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of North America have excellent examples of this on a reduced scale, and even where dunes are not a factor, as in places where the receding glaciers left a lot of sand in their outwash plains along the upper Mississippi and Ottawa rivers, as well as much of northern Michigan, Minnesota, Ontario, Quebec, and along the extensions of lake beds of the ancient Great Lake shorelines, sand tends to take no prisoners in vegetation.  Pines, oaks, cacti, and grasses are often the only species that will dominate sandy soils, and a savanna in the eastern continent is a sure sign of sand below the green carpets.  As you can see from the pictures above, however, other trees are adaptable, and the result is a paradise of opposing worlds.