A Work In Progress

One would figure that I would have more than enough time on my hands these days to keep American Voyages up and running, what with the wintery winter we have been experiencing in these parts lately.  My usual natural distractions are buried beneath the snow, at least right outdoors anyway (the local fens look amazing, especially where the Red-twig Dogwood, Cornus Sericea, just pops out of the scenery during these lean months).  The truth is that due to such an opportunity, I have retreated deep into the world of research, much of it historical.  Often times this is spurred on by political disruption which makes me all the more eager to brandish the sword of knowledge against hecklers fighting for political parties, or worse, sides caused by those parties so that politicians can profit off of partisan sentiment.  These days, though, I find myself absolutely blessed by the affordable bounty of used-bookstores in the area, particularly within the giant den of learning known as Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Yes, it can be a den of other things as well, but at least where there are parades there sometimes tend to be books and thinkers of all stripes too. 

So I figured we can go in two directions now, that of shorter posts which the blog experts claim are important for holding attention, supposedly being as effective as shorter pod-casts.  A few of my short posts have caught decent attention, but by and large my most followed, and thus I assume most interesting, posts have been longer affairs.  While hardly exhaustive posts on even the most diminutive topics, I figured they should be halfway well-informed.  As such, these posts deserve research, and maybe such research can come across in more book reviews.  Don't expect footnotes anytime soon, though, as that would mean I would have to really start focusing research (I dip from a huge buffet) and spend a lot more time than the already extensive duration I spend editing the blog.  Anyway, keep checking around this thing.  I think every month or so I will update where we we have been and where we are going, just to keep things rolling:

Currently my post direction seems to be focused on:

-The American South
-Black history
-Things Palm, Magnolia, and Rhododendron
-Charleston, Charleston, and more Charleston

My current research is absorbed in:

-Colonial settlement and expansion
-Religious development in North America inclusive of Mexico
-The National Road
-19th century environmentalism
-Whatever I can get my grubby fat fingers on
-Native plants in Britain and Ireland 

Oh, you want a picture of something anyway?  Fine.  Have a weird piece of my childhood curiosity:

I think this was in Chillicothe, Ohio, important First Born town since ancient times and now mostly home to large prisons and a fascinating national park site. 

American traffic lights always looked both cheap and cool to me.  In Ontario we have expensive steel poles with boring looking red on top-green on bottom lights.  Going down to Florida I always got a tickle out of the lights strung on wires with a lot of lights involved to tell you when to turn right, left, backwards, up, or whatever.  Michigan has a dearth of these lights, which always convinced me that it was halfway between Canada and the United States but part of neither.  Clearly one had to go to Ohio or New York to see real American lights, and thus somehow the real United States.  You know, for an imaginative ten year old.

The First Underground Railroad

I know I have been on a kick about the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida lately, but the truth is that this region was an incredibly diverse and storied region until it fought for the wrong side of history during the Civil War.  Yes, here there was the hearth of the house of Southern elite slaveholders and their belles, but there were also the non-slave holding Second Born Georgians, First Born, Spanish, French (of both Hugenot and Royal varieties), long forgotten Austrians, and of course Black people which would soon, through economic reasons, come to outnumber all of these groups.  Needless to say, I also have long loved the majestic world of palm and pine which thrives here in an otherwise humid, bug-infested wild country.  When I recently began to read more about both the birth of slavery and its opposition among abolitionists and freedom-seekers here, I just had to share what a powerful crossroads in history this truly difficult land had become.

No one can argue against the fact that the Spanish colonizers were brutal and racist in their treatment of the First Born, and that they enjoyed watching their conquered subjects tend the fields for them.  That said, it was the English colonizers who were real pros at commercial exploitation of the new land and exotic peoples from just about anywhere on the planet.  The Spanish, you see, were plunderers less than merchants (they kicked out a good portion of their merchant class when they told every Jew in Spain to head out of town in 1492), and they were also enthralled by the concept of converting the planet to Roman Catholicism.  In contrast, the English also plundered, but on a smaller scale (except maybe in India), so as to better gradually set up favorable economic conditions for their cult of free-enterprise.  Oh sure, they had religion too, many Protestant varieties of it in fact, but their concept of spreading the faith was pretty much centered on trying to get freedom for themselves to contemplate and pray as they so wished, which they had to cross an ocean for in the face of Anglican and then Calvinistic and then lip-service Anglican successions of power.  They rejoiced when the First Born converted, but otherwise just regarded them as pagans who could either be helpful to setting up commercial security or harmful in trying to dismantle colonial progress.  The French were another story altogether, and that one takes a while to explain...

Anyway, the Spanish would not hesitate to bring over Africans for use as slaves, but seeing as how plantations of cash crops were but one of many different agendas behind the otherwise important gold-plundering and conversion game, race slavery never developed to the same degree that it did in the English colonies.  Again, this is not to say that it did not happen; many Black communities can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and a few traces of where African slavery did make inroads into Mexico can be found in Veracruz and Guerrero, the two important states of colonial landing of the Mexican coast.  The ban on a Spanish-run slave trade made importation of Africans difficult, if nothing else.  When they wanted slaves, the Spanish could run to the English or Dutch for their needs, which further compounded the general aloofness from the enslavement of Africans.  What's more, racial hatred did not develop in nearly the same way throughout New Spain than it did it the English colonies.  As I state in my post about the most important event in North American history, while the Spanish came as conquerors and extractors, they also often fell in love with the land and the people of the New World.  Mexicans to this day are largely Mestizos of heritage reaching back to both sides of the Atlantic.   Yes, you can find hatred towards the First Born in the Spanish-descended elite of El Salvador or Argentina, but by and large the rest of modern Latin America is a culture resulting from pure exchange rather than separation. 

So it was that when a few runaway slaves heading south from the Carolinas made their way into Florida, they were not immediately chained up and re-enslaved in their new home of Florida.  Rather, they were not only welcomed, but encouraged to keep coming.  Those who chose a more colonial existence in St. Augustine would be required to convert to Catholicism, but often times the Black refugees found a happy existence with the First Born of the area.  Further north, they often helped the refugees through to their freedom, which as usual was a very difficult and terror-filled trip to safety, but down here in the still-largely natural hot and humid subtropical lushness, they had the advantage of not being readily followed by the prone-to-malaria and easily sweat-able northern Europeans.  The Spanish authorities figured that they would be so grateful to make their way into waiting freedom and safety that they would rise up in arms with them, Black beside colonist, against English advances from Georgia.  They were not wrong. 

Some stayed in town, some even enlisted in the Spanish forces.  Others left to form new societies of their own in the wilds, and sometimes they came across the First Born and formed a new culture of this encounter.

Public domain.

You can read more and see some pictures here.  Actually, that website can tell you quite a lot about some of the Black experience I never knew existed.

What Martin Luther King Jr. Day Means

My apologies for the not a lot of activity around here lately.  I did come across something that made me want to jump into a few posts, though.  First:

Q: You really don't talk about the Black experience a lot.  Why not?

A: I generally consider myself well-informed as to the details of said experience, but I am intimidated by my overall lack of specialized knowledge therein.  I like to do topics of posting some amount of justice, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to putting off posting.  That said, my recent love affair with gobbling up every last detail of everything Southern has started to lead me into a lot of reading on the Black experience.  It's not a world entirely foreign to me either; I have a fair degree of involvement in religious ministry in Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI where I can definitely say I got immersed in various facets of the Black experience.  One of the most amazing features I came across was the prevalence of town hall style democratic participation, something that one would figure is entirely absent from any large developed areas and relegated mostly to the land of small farming towns in Indiana or Iowa. 

The two mentalities are not so different that they have never existed in unison; most Black people living in the United States and Canada, at least before the Second World War, were agriculturally focused and lived in smaller communities.  The first Black people seeking a better life in Canada settled not in Kingston or Montreal but in Amherstburg (just south of Windsor, Ontario) or in Oro-Medonte, a largely rural community about an hour and change north of Toronto.  In the United States, before employers like Ford attracted many Black people through equal pay and hiring opportunity, racial demographics were spread pretty even between rural and urban areas; cities were often full of struggling immigrants who were often responsible for creating discriminatory conditions no better than in the more timid parts of the South.  This might have been due to a distaste for even more competition in addition to any racism passed on the other groups already living here by such times.

This was nothing compared to what Black people were dealing with in the South, however.  Read the following article to get a taste of just what that meant, and just what yesterday's public holiday means:

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/29/1011562/-Most-of-you-have-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did

It's sobering, to say the least.  It puts things into perspective, like the question "Why don't I talk about the Black experience a lot?"  I decided to wait a day until posting this so the hysteria of everyone wanting to post about it died down and we could look at things from a vantage of reality over popularity. 

Niagara Falls In The Winter

Can Niagara Falls freeze over as recent news reports have indicated?  If it gets cold enough, possibly, but this would have to be colder than cold, really.  One of the things that makes Niagara Falls so impressive is just how much water flows over her rim.  Think about it, the entire drainage of the Great Lakes is forced through this one outlet (The Chicago and Welland Canals are not permanently open) in a dramatic scene that is one of the last visual reminders we have of what life was like when the Laurentide Ice Sheet was in final stages this far south.  This is a lot of water to slow down enough to turn into a solid.  That said, there will be lots of ice in a decent winter for the very same reason.  Lake Erie has to put all that frozen water somewhere.  In periods of prolonged cold, like the winter of 1911, the river can be so jammed and frozen across that the flow gets severely restricted.  Piles of ice at the bottom of the falls and smaller flows over the rim will indeed form the illusion that the place is frozen over. 

So what does it look like otherwise, in a more typical winter?  Beautiful. 

That there bridge would be the Rainbow, with the buildings in the background being in Niagara Falls, NY.

Large chunks sometimes survive the fall and gather with other masses of ice which get trapped in the gorge to form icebergs.

Still quite a bit of flow on the American Falls, with the gorge walls being coated nicely in ice enough to look like the falls are frozen.  This is water frozen into place on the rock face, rather than the falls themselves.

The Niagara Gorge itself is pretty impressive this time of year, let alone at any other time.

Looking back into Ontario (from Ontario actually) we see a less than frozen Horseshoe Falls.  Considering the amount of water that flows over this thing, it would be next to doomsday if it were truly frozen.  That huge volume of mist sure does freeze on the way through the air though, coating everything nearby with a decent amount of rime. 

 Winter is actually a pretty decent time to come explore the falls and surrounding area if you want to beat the crowds.  For bird lovers, the almost guaranteed open waters and fishy smells (a lot of fish get sucked into this discharge) wafting into the air by the powerful mists attracts the world's largest known gathering of nearly 20 Gull species every winter.  The water and smells are just as powerful on human gatherers too, with the senses being delighted by the magic of liquid water in an otherwise frozen time of the year.  The place almost always smells like fish, but not in a bad way, more like in a refreshing next-to-the-ocean sort of way, which is great because this is not even saltwater. 

These pictures were all taken in February of 2013.

The Garden Spaces of Charleston

In general, most gardens I saw in Charleston (or anywhere else in the lowcountry South) seem to have small elements of formal design which are allowed to burst beyond the boundaries and completely fill any available space with lush, vibrant life.  This leads to some incredible spaces which truly are retreats from the hustle and bustle of the urban environment, despite most such refuges being just a little off of the beaten path.  As is the case with any older North American city, Charleston is a place where space is at a premium.  Such restrictions, combined with the penchant for intense growth, give the city gardens which mystically combine the courtyard with the subtropical forests she is surrounded by.  I think that I will leave the rest of the post in the hands of the pictures, and provide us with a gallery of cultivated Charleston, captions provided for highlights.  To see how things got this way, read up on the previous posts in the last week.

Even simple alleyways here are bedded and then seemingly left to their own devices.

Washington Park in downtown features Live Oaks (Quercus Virginiana) planted in an orderly fashion, yet encouraged to sprawl in their own individual habits of growth, almost like a natural oak savanna.

Here the Live Oak is allowed to grow to its own pleasure, nearly covering the entire street and turning it, with help from small strip plantings in the side yards, into a garden of sorts in its own right.

Some home owners take full advantage of the really long growing season, mild winters, and powerful levels of moisture and go nuts with the subtropical plants.  Here it is very possible to have a pretend jungle in your backyard and just let things go without it looking entirely out of place.

Many gardeners do apparently try to occupy space in this fashion, with some choosing to maintain a basic level of formality with a tasteful balancing of free growth.

And for sure, some of those Old World formal influences do remain here, complete with Boxwood (Buxus Sempervirens) hedges, symmetrical paths, Italianate fountains, etc.  Nevertheless, things remain relatively well covered and the best word to describe this space is not "formal" so much as "abundant".

And on other places were are reminded that this is indeed a colonial city with pleasant Georgian architectural features like the arched courtyard entryways lit by those period scones.  That said, I doubt very much that a gentleman of 1770 would have let his entryway become so dominated by greenery.  No, I think like the case is with the picture above, we have a fashion of development that built on the old culture and merged with the growing power of the land and the unrestrained decorum of the passing generations.

Wednesday Filler: A Western Intruder

Rising above some hidden courtyard, along with some disturbingly modern architecture, is a Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia Robusta).  In the foreground grows the native and rugged Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto). 

In Southern California and parts of Arizona and southern Texas, Mexican Fan Palms get planted so much that one would think them native to such parts of the world (they are actually from Sonora and both states on the Baja peninsula).  They feature prominently in street plantings, and often form an urban backdrop in Los Angeles and San Diego, even more so to the extent than how the Cabbage Palm is used in Charleston.  With two native palm choices that nearly grow like weeds already in Charleston, I was amazed to find one at all, but snickered a little bit when I saw how hidden away it was.  Next post, the promised look at the green spaces of Charleston.

Is It Racist To Like Southern Gardens (Or Anything)?

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. 

The Palms of Charleston

In the last post we pondered the question as to how well palms were received for ornamental purposes in past eras, at least in the United States.  As noted, very few depictions of gardens, cityscapes, landscapes, or even individual botanical subjects include palms as a regular feature, even while we also know that the settlers of the Carolinas and Georgia were certainly familiar with their abundance in the wilds around their settlements.  The islands from the Charleston area southward do indeed have the mighty Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto) growing in abundance among the pines, magnolias, myrtles, and all other sorts of wonderful Southern plants.  The Dwarf Cabbage (Sabal Minor) also grows here and north halfway up the coastal areas of North Carolina (in the west well inland to extreme southeastern Oklahoma).  Crepe Myrtles and various broadleaved evergreens are easily grown here, and considering what I had thus far seen of the new subtropical crazed South, I was expecting to see a few streets nicely lined with Cabbages, such as in the scene below:

Yes, it was humid, hence the blur.  Yes, like much of the eastern United States and Canada, everyone here seemed to be glued to a cell-phone, at least in the trendier shopping areas and business-dominated streets.

 But while there was some formality to the plantings as in the standard lined street above,the older sections of town seemed to focus slightly less on formal layouts than in fitting in vegetation wherever possible. 

That's a story for another post, but the theme of the finding is important in understanding how palms are simply everywhere here, almost like weeds.  Understand, Charleston is very groomed and formal.  Yes, some of the brickwork and paint could use some work, but the overall effect is more one of proudly displaying an aged antique.  Most of the people here have public dress which belies a concern for respectability and a sense of decorum.  Manners are refined even between people in rush hour traffic.  Once you get away from the hustle and bustle of the urban core, the cell-phones even disappear.  The backstreets have a quiet, reflective pace.  Again, this is owed another post, so back to the palms, but you get the idea.

They are allowed to grow to their own designs.  It seems wherever there is a little bit of room for soil and roots they are planted, and not necessarily to the exclusion of other trees and shrubs.  They do range naturally here, and probably spring up just as often wild as cultivated.

If this were so many other cities, the little one at the lower left would be groomed right out of existence!

But let's face it, the tourists like them, the locals have long since made them their floral emblem, and they are low demand trees.  I still question how long they have been this popular, but in some places where the overall formal lines do return, it is obvious that the Cabbage Palm has long since been a favorite of Charleston, the planned city with crooked edges. 

And really, they do look like they belong here, far more so than the imported cherries of Washington or the nearly-imported Mexican Fan Palms (Washingtonia Robusta) of Los Angeles and environs.  Though there are so many other reasons beyond imagination as to why one should pay a visit to Charleston, coming to see the palms is not exactly a bad thing in and of itself. 

Charleston, after all, is a special place where garden and building seemed to have been created for one another.  It's almost like a place that sprang into existence so that both concepts could be celebrated in unison.  Much like the modern lake shore of Chicago, Charleston looks as if it and the trees were trying to grow into one another.  Very few North American cities seem to make this much room for vegetation, at least not to the degree where the cityscape as a whole would be at a bit of a visual loss without it.

After all, the city owes its salvation to this wonderful tree, and the tree is etched into the human era of artifice because of that role:

Want to see more of Charleston's organic setting?  That's where I'm headed next.

Palms In The Carolina Landscape: An Historical Overview

When I recall traveling down to Fort Lauderdale back in the late 80's and early 90's for our annual winter romp from frigid Canada to tropical Southern Florida, I recall that I found narry a palm tree until one hit the Georgia-Florida border on I-95.  As if announcing that this was a truly unique land of eternal summers and palm trees even so far north near the rest of the country, palms suddenly exploded from the median.  Oh sure, Georgia nearby had a decent ground-cover of Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) that emerged from the dense pinery around about Brunswick or so, but they had nothing on the veritable carpet of them that showed once one found high and dry ground past the St. Marys River.  One notable exception stood out, that being the Jelly Palm (Butia Capitata) which grew by two as a lovely frame to the entrance of a Fieldcrest towel outlet in Smithfield, North Carolina.  This was very, very much to the north of Florida, especially to the eyes of a child who liked to exaggerate distances.

This might, in fact, have been the occasion in which I started reading about trees, way back in either the second or third grade.  I was fortunate to have a mother who was wise to the concept of providing her offspring with as much book book book as possible, and no sooner did I turn to the palm pages in lovingly acquired Florida's Fabulous Trees than I found our friend the Jelly Palm, an import from exotic subtropical southern South America.  The block of text accompanying the delightful picture of the frosty-green fronds stated that the noble plant could be found as far north as Washington, D.C.  If this were so, and people liked palm trees so much, I wondered why I only ever saw the pair outside of towel land, and none more until far into the deepest reaches of Georgia.  Believe me, I looked!

Then this last year, when I made my way to a steamy South Carolina, I found palm after palm pop up starting with some lovely Jelly Palms planted beside a pool at a Days Inn off of I-26 exit 154 near Orangeburg, South Carolina.  Why yes, I do take botanical observation locations seriously!  Anyway, anywhere downstream from that location was awash in palms as part of the landscaping.  It seems that the last two decades have seen a flurry of palm planting as people are discovering the hardier species can take a few cold nights on an otherwise humid subtropical landscape.  Humorously enough, to the equal delight and chagrin of my traveling partner, I was worried that I had to stab very far south to see palms, either wild or cultivated, as common enough features in the landscape.  The truth was that they are EVERYWHERE in lowland South Carolina.  Again, I really do not recall this being the case back in my younger days, and believe me, I was every bit as botanically precise and insane back then as I am today.  This led me to question a few things, namely just how prevalent the mighty Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto) was in older times.  Well, to start off with, the flag of South Carolina prominently features the lovely tree:

Thanks, Open Clipart!

This flag does not date back to Colonial times, but it does feature elements of one that does.  The blue field and crescent moon date from William Moultrie's original South Carolina military flag of 1775, a flag which flew over his fort to save Charleston from capture by the British.  Despite being in command of a tactically inferior force, Moultrie successfully defended the city from initial British assault.  He found that Cabbage Palm trunks are perhaps the most amusing and surprising military grade wood material known to exist on the planet.  Cannon fire from the British ships apparently bounced right off of the palm walls of his fortress, which is fairly believable considering as how the King's navy was unable to simply plow over the weaker Carolinian forces.  In 1861, when South Carolinians were getting ready to oust what they saw as Union invaders, the modern flag seen here was raised.  The Cabbage Palm, mighty defender of Charleston, was seen as a natural symbol of defiance against out-of-state invasion, and the newly-minted Confederate defenders of Fort Sumter declared themselves the heirs of the Colonial Carolinian defenders.

Like many state flags of the South, South Carolina held on to hers once Grant reminded them that their viewpoint was inappropriate, and in some cases, these flags are a sad reminder of the racism that belies a supposed continuing crusade for subsidiarity.  Don't get me wrong, I get the point of state's rights and all, I am a Canadian and therefore hold as sacred the intense power placed into the hands of individual provinces at the expense of anything not Ontari... er... you know what I mean.  Anyway, that is a post, indeed a blog and a lifetime of political and social upheaval unto itself.  Back to the point, this is one of those Southern Flags that can stand for something above and beyond what the flag makers intended, namely because it is cool enough to have an actual tree for a central figure.  Likewise, the intent of heroic defense symbolized in said tree has its greatest meaning invested in an older and far more morally-righteous rebellion.  In the north, they crowned an American Elm (Ulmus Americana) as Liberty Trees. and the economic symbol of American independence, used even on one of the first flags of the continental army, was the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).  Down here, in warm, lush South Carolina was the Cabbage Palm.  That's right, this country had trees for symbol before it had flag-dressed women or men, eagles, chopped-up snakes, or any other sort of symbol.

So if I don't remember seeing so many of them before the cold-hardy palm craze caught on, just how widely planted were they as a landscape feature for our Second-Born ancestors?  Did they tend to leave the small space trees alone when clearing their fields of otherwise broad pines and oaks?  Did they line their streets with them?  Art from the period does not really seem to show the city as being particularly gardened, at least not nearly to the extent that it is now.  Considering the relative sophistication and connections with Britain that the city did maintain in the Georgian era, one wonders why this would be the case.  Botany was extremely popular among the planters and merchants alike, and both got rich off of a thriving plant trade.  Perhaps palms did not get much press as most gardeners did not see them as being particularly hardy or useful in the place where most of the commerce was directed, rainy and cool England (unlike today where they have gained a bit of popularity).  The palms that did start catching on in Europe in Georgian times were mostly Old World palms, notably the dates and in particular the Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix Canariensis), which saw container planting use at Versailles.  I can't say I blame them, the thing is pretty freaking cool looking, and can even be trimmed into, well, a pineapple.  Down in our yard in Florida I wanted one really bad, at least as a kid who knew nothing about the difference between plants native and exotic.  I can see the appeal for people in an age when the world was still largely being discovered by everyone and the backyard took a backseat. 

Very few Georgian era depictions of Southern life bring palms into view, however.  Magnolias appear now and then, as do moss-draped oaks, but by and large paintings of the era, in fact those up until the 1860's, seem to be Colonial versions of the romantic natural visions of John Constable.  American landscape art in general seems to emulate the dreamy, sweeping romanticism he championed.  On the one hand, the concept of broad, vast frontier wilderness is celebrated, but on the other hand, art and gardens alike seemed to want to give homage as well back to manicured England, which in turn wanted to be more flowing and open like North America, and yes, I seem to really be opening a slew of topics at this point.  I end the post with a question as much as a summary of the concept of historical overview: how were palms envisioned and used by early Americans, and where have they come today?

The View From (Part Of) The Boardwalk At Congaree

As I have said many times, Congaree and the rest of the lowcountry South is a harsh environment for comfort minded humans.  Whether you call it a floodplain or a cypress swamp, the fact of the matter is that the place is spongy and mucky even in drier times.  The grand pines and the gigantic Beech tree (Fagus Grandifolia) are blessed and able to grow to such dizzying proportions due to the abundance of water in this humid subtropical land, but even they don't like what lies just below the first significant set of steps one comes across on the boardwalk.  This is not to say that things resemble a true swamp right away, but water is certainly never far away, and small puddles let the high and dry walker know that they have entered the domain of the river.

And this is where things start to get truly magical, majesty of the pines and beech aside. 

The main players here are the amazing Water Tupelo (Nyssa Aquatica) and Balcypress (Taxodium Distichum) and they are both very annoyingly similar to the forest frolicker.  Because they like getting their feet soaked, they need support in the riparian muck, and this support includes swollen trunk bases.  As a result, it can be frustrating trying to pick out one from the other in a mixed forest of both:

In general, the tupelos seem to have the smoother trunk, and the cypresses look a bit more like fluted columns.  Up close, they are a bit easier to differentiate.  The tupelo are broadleaved, whereas the cypresses (not actually true cypresses) are needled.  If they were fully exposed and allowed to grow open, the tupelo would look something like an ice-cream cone in crown shape, almost as if pruned by a giant gardener.  Remember the backdrops in the Disney version of Pocahontas?  Those slender, vase topped trees growing along the James River look as if the artists involved were actually trying to capture pre-settlement Tidewater Virginia.  For some reason, however, popular imagination of southern river scenes does not otherwise include much focus on the tupelo, probably because of just how unique the cypress looks;  they are far more sprawling and fluid, reminding a northern or backcountry onlooker of a mature Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis).  They also have a very cool ground feature which most other trees can't lay claim to: knees.

No one knows what they are really for, but the predominant theories ponder that the knees either help hold the giants up in the soggy ground or help with respiration for the roots.  I tended not to think about it too much when I got to see the knees for the first time in nearly two decades.  Instead, even as I dripped in the humidity and wished the mosquitoes would find a dragonfly to run away from, I just let the place speak to me on it's own terms, removed from science, from history, from names, from preconceptions.  I did not even make it that far into the place before the realities of the hot and humid South and a long drive back to Michigan loomed before me.  I definitely want to go back and see the water's edge, see the palmetto which I never imagined grew so far inland, and just see whatever nature wants to present to me.  I find that is what is best about places like Congaree, little remnants of Eden which act as natural icons to silence the busy mind and heart and allow for a gaze into something bigger than ourselves.  Visit the place, you won't be disappointed.  In the meantime, take a look at these pictures, which I figured could speak for themselves:

 

More information on Congaree can be found here:

http://www.nps.gov/cong/index.htm

They also have those fancy, new-fangled Facebook and Twitter pages. 

Wednesday Filler: Redwoods Of The East

While next post we take a look at the broader canvas offered by the boardwalk at Congaree, here today we can catch a glimpse at one of the defining features of the lowland experience.  Seen below is the trunk of a Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), in fact an extremely large and old one, at chest height, from about ten feet away.

Why yes, the camera has a rough time in 90% humidity.  The trees seem to enjoy it, though. 

There are other trees of vast scale in the east.  Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana) and Bur Oak (Quercus Macrocarpa) are massive sprawlers of immense volume that can dominate nearly every setting they can find enough crown room to stretch out in.  Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) and Florida Royal Palm (Roystonea Regia) can both grow incredibly tall and dwarf a mature forest of some of the tallest eastern and northern Caribbean trees in their respective northern and Floridian/Cuban habitats.  For a lovely combination of both features, however, the Baldcypress certainly holds its own.  These things are massive in the western redwood family sense of the concept, and just as few of them remain, despite having a much broader range of acceptable native habitat. 

It's a shame we don't have more of recorded testimonies from the early European explorers about what they thought of such sights, and why people were so astonished by the western forests when the East put on quite the show for the centuries leading up to their Californian discovery in the mid-nineteenth century.  If Americans are more so impressed by frontier than the familiar, then what a wonder a frontier in the eastern backyard must have been.  Perhaps words failed so many times, and the redwood family got more attention because people started understanding how so many failing words had started to cause their frontier to disappear before the approach of the civilized world.  John Muir came to his botanical passions when growing up in Wisconsin, and fermented them on a long walk through forests such as these to the shores of the Gulf before he set off for California, and by ship rather than experiencing the heart of the continent the long way.  His loss!

And yes, I just said something bad and silly about John Muir.  Makes you want to pay attention to your backyard more, doesn't it?