Residents Of The Piney South: The Longleaf Pine

The South did not always look as it does today.  The Loblolly Pine (Pinus Taeda), while common in pre-settlement times, was not nearly the apparent monoculture of endless coniferous wallpaper that it is today.  Once there were pines that were as tall and as graceful as the Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus), the best example one might give for their northern counterpart.  Both grand trees managed to make their way to the crown of forest existence only through a baptism of fire, and the northern majesty and southern elegance alike needed the flames to wipe out the competition and let the sun do its work.  The two could not otherwise be more different, however.

The White Pine, you see, needed competition gone to reach into heights above what would later fill back in as a main canopy beneath their super canopy.  This southern pine I speak of, however, was a creature of the savanna more so than the forest.  This pine is the Longleaf (Pinus Palustris).  Like the Loblolly, there are very few pictures of it that I can say to have taken, but not for the same reasons at all.  The Longleaf, you see, is a tree that has fallen on hard times for the last 150 years.  Aside from isolated trees (which can be found rather frequently), only a quarter or less of the ecosystem they supported in great numbers still exists.  In truth, I have never experienced a Longleaf savanna with my own senses.  Only recently in Congaree National Park did I even see a stand of more than several of them together:

Congaree is probably one of the most amazing national parks in the world, just in terms of sheer treeness.

And what a sight they were.  I was already pining away (did I just do that?) to see a gathering of them after having an inspiring read of Janisse Ray, but what I saw when I found them in an approximation of their past glory, I was surprised by just how impressive they truly are.  Up close they look somewhat similar to any globe-clustered pine, in some ways even more like an old growth Red Pine (Pinus Resinosa) than a Loblolly is, but from even a slight distance, the scale and elegant sweep of their branches puts them in a beauty class more approximate to that of the White Pine.  The forest you see above is not the best approximation one could give of what a healthy forest of these things looks like, namely because they were very much a creature of the forested grassland, soaring over happy little seedlings, blueberries, palmettos, Wiregrass (Aristida Stricta), and enough forbs to make even the Midwestern tallgrass prairie swoon in lust.  Apparently one could stand in a Longleaf "forest" and look in all directions and see miles and miles of trunks soaring over the park-like expanses as if they were columns in a natural cathedral of Cordoba.  Imagine it, a place where the game was plentiful, the breeze blew freely under a semi-open sky, and yet the grand trees still provided a lovely shade as if one were in thicker woods.  I suppose I have a weakness for our native grasslands of any stripe, yet you have to admit that this sounds pretty damn wonderful. 

The First Born certainly did.  In addition to the fires that the many storms of the region would provide and the grazing that the many ungulates, including Buffalo, would do, the First Born would keep the place as it was supposed to be by now and then starting a fire of their own, just as they would in the rest of the eastern grassland ecosystems.  This was simply their style of land management, to continue the work that nature was already doing and use it within their agricultural and hunting practices.  Then along came us, the Second Born, who were used to fencing off plots of land and requiring the soil to be productive not only for sustenance, but the generation of capital.  The first two and a half centuries of Southerners loved this ecosystem too for its fertility, but also because the trees were just incredible to use for lumber.  At the same time, there was a different pace of life in the South that let the land become conquered much more slowly.  Similar to how a semi-solitary existence and frontier mentality was the norm in the backcountry stretching from Vermont to the Smokies, the lowland people of the South did not try to farm over every square inch of what they saw and actually sort of blended into the back woods.  Yes, I did classify the land that the Longleaf once grew in as the low country, but Southern culture is a unique thing that blurs divisions like that.  More on this as the blog endures.

But then great changes came about as industrialization and productivity started taking over the nation after the Civil War.  The frontier moved west, and along with it went the go-to-hell rugged individualism of the Eastern backcountry.  That said, as the beautiful but inhuman plantation existence came to an end, many Southerners went back to fending for themselves and went into small-scale cotton farming in that wonderful ground that the Longleaf savannas once blessed.  In tandem, however, the market became more spread out and roads of rail and dirt alike starting developing the land faster and faster, and with it went what was left of those marvelous parklands of pine.  The pace has only increased ever since, along with the rate at which the last remnants of the old, colonial even, Southern culture have disappeared.  Again, this is not necessarily the classic movie-type slave-holding plantation culture, but something as older than cotton or Loblolly stands.  Like the Longleaf itself, such a culture is a lost memory consigned to the same dusty bin of history where the First Born sit, buried even behind the plantations and the sharecroppers and the other stuff that is now buried behind whatever it is we have developing today.  Almost makes me sound like an old man telling the kids to get off my lawn...

Anyway, as I neglected to provide a map last time for the Loblolly, and since the comparison of how deep into the South we are getting with our pines seems appropriate to now give, here's the Lobolly range:

Thanks USGS!

And the Longleaf range:

As you can see, the ranges are comparable, but the Longleaf likes just a little bit more of a lower and hotter climate and does not venture too far onto the Piedmont.  Ready to get even toastier and really sub-tropical?  Feast yer eyes on the range of the Slash Pine (Pinus Eliottii), which will be our next and final guest of pines before we get into some really fun Southern stuff:

Yep, this is where we really start getting into the DEEP South.  Heck, you can't even see Canada on that map.