Residents Of The Piney South: The Slash Pine

The final leg of our pine tour takes us to where the South leaves frost and snow behind, except during the coldest advances of frigid Canadian fury.  In this place the land becomes half sea, and the air is often tinged with a bit of salt or at least the smell of some rather fishy water, a land where at least an estuary or inlet is never far away.  Things are quite low here, but they are also often sandy or elevated enough to be decently drained.  Hence we have more pines, in this case another fine pine that has very long needles, often the better part of a foot.  Say hello to the Slash Pine (Pinus Elliottii).

All but one of the pictures seen here were taken at what has to be one of the most amazing places on the continent, Hunting Island State Park, just a hop, skip, and jump from Beaufort, South Carolina.  This was taken about a few hundred yards from the mighty Atlantic.

The Slash Pine has a regal form that tends to be rather thick near the top of the crown and somewhat sparser underneath, a silhouette not entirely different from an Italian Stone Pine (Pinus Pinea) and bearing the look of other typical globular pines, would that were on massive amounts of fertilizer.  This pine is nothing if not as robust looking as the rest of the flora in its home turf.  Like the rest of its companion vegetation, especially the Southeastern palms, the Slash Pine can grow in low, mucky land and is no stranger to the world where the swamp and the dry lands blend.  Granted, it can only take so much water, and so does not handle the same sort of situation where a Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum) reigns supreme, such as in the Everglades.  That said, the Sea Islands are positively FULL of them, and they grow right up to the edge of the Atlantic. 

That's right, what we see here are the first trees one landing on much of the Atlantic shoreline south of Charleston would see.  I have used this picture before, but it illustrated the concept so nicely that it had to be used again.

Like the Longleaf (Pinus Palustris), they form savannas or at least something like them.  Unlike the Longleaf savannas, however, the Slash openings feel just a little sparser and sun-baked, which is odd when one considers how dense an upper crown the pine can produce. 

Looking into the edge of the forest from the Atlantic, or rather the side of Hunting Island near the pier.  Things seem dense, but...

This is what it looks like inside of that vantage point.  Again, these pines have a dense crown seemingly only at the very top.

 

At some points the older trees do form some nice shaded patches, but the ratio of sky and foliage is almost half and half even there.

 Heading southward into the heart of Florida, these savannas get positively full of Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens), adding to the feeling that this might be less of a savanna and more of a shrubland sheltered by a super canopy over a nearly missing main canopy, a sort of forest without a forest.  One still feels like they are in a woodland, but in general things remain somewhat open rather than like a jungle.  That sort of ambiguous classification seems to fit in nicely with the bridging role the Slash Pine performs; the other Southern pines lose steam in Central Florida as the climate and conditions transition into true tropical.  A tree that seems at home in something neither called a prairie, nor a forest, nor a swamp, but maybe a little bit of all three seems perfectly suited to a place where the seasons seem to have lost their watch and the land can't decide whether it is a part of Cuba or Georgia (no political pun intended). 

They grow insanely fast, especially compared to the Longleaf, which they are slowly replacing across the land, even farther north than where they are wild.  Many timber interests consider them just as valuable as the Longleaf, and in some cases of mistaken identity or just ease of use, landscape restorers have taken to promoting re-forestation with this species instead of the ancestral Longleaf.  Their fire ecologies are similar, and in fact they look downright terrible in pure tight stands compared to most other pines.

Even when they get thick, though, they still look a bit open!  There is no way that those Cabbage Palms (Sabal Palmetto) could grow in a stand of many other pines.  The thing is, forest diversity permitted or not, they need space to fill out to look less than sickly.

 Both are trees that flourish in a savanna setting, and the most southerly forms of the species even have a similar grass-like seedling stage.  In many ways, this is symbolic of the South trying to focus so much energy on a semi-resort climate and shove the pines and other less than trendy natives away to make room for palm tree after palm tree, exotic flowering trees, and even mild-winter cacti!  A pine, after all, is all sticky, sappy, too big, and "common".  But oh what a lovely backdrop the Slash does make, even in a town setting:

This is the one photo not taken on Hunting Island, but in Beaufort itself.  Many professional gardeners think that tall trees, even ones with a narrow profile, are too big for appreciation in one's garden, to which I have to say that such a philosophy is greedy and self-serving, contrary to the beauty of the neighborhood as a whole.  So what if you can only see the trunk...

And for that matter, one wonders why more cultivars have not been made to show off its already incredibly beautiful wild-type bark:

One would think that the bark is the reason for the name, but apparently a "slash" refers to the sort of jumbled shrubby half-swamp these giants arise from, just like a Loblolly refers to a mire of sorts, or even the scientific name of a Longleaf, Palustris, refers to the swamp (never mind that none of them like their feet entirely soaked).  I digress!  While the Longleaf ecosystem is definitely something that should not be replaced for mere economic convenience, at least the world of the Slash Pine is not too far off, and they really are quite amazing trees.  The thing is, they are a creature of the other edge of the South, the Deep South, more so than a main feature of the broader part of it.  Let's face it, when you find them even at the northern edge of their range in a place like Hunting Island, you can tell that you have arrived in a place that puts the tropical in subtropical. 

Looks a little more Florida than South Carolina in some ways...

Someone tell that Loblolly to get out of the way, people might get confused!  Can you find it?