The Eastern Forests and Plant Succession

This was going to be another Q and A, but I ran into this question that deserved an extended response:

Q: It really is hard to imagine prairies existing so far east.  Are you sure that some of them are not just abandoned fields?  I mean I know you explained that we once got a lot of fires and such here, but we also have a lot of rain and water in general, and most land that I have seen go to seed again turns into a forest in a bit of time.  I think you just get excited when you find wildflowers.

A: More of a comment than a question.  Maybe both?  Cuomment?  Prairies and more so savannas existed well into areas that we imagine are only forests.  Central Mississippi and Alabama, both notable for being quite humid and rainy places, once had an extensive band of tallgrass prairie known as the Black Belt.  The pine flats stretching from Long Island to Miami were a mosaic of thicker forests merged with savannas, which southward also include wonderful shrubs in the underbrush like the Dwarf Palmetto (Sabal Minor):

Google Earth Streetview at above coordinates, or just south of Vero Beach, Florida, on I-95, east side, northbound.  

All of these areas were much more prone to regular rainfall than the interior plains, but what they shared in common, indeed, what makes grasslands possible is a combination of moisture, fire, soil, and sun exposure.   In earlier posts about how savannas and eastern grasslands work, I noted that the forest and grass were locked into a never-ending natural battle against one another that depended greatly on the specific combinations of the above ingredients.  In places a bit further off of the front lines, the ingredients would favor one over the other.  The suppression of natural fire regimes from the nineteenth century onward have skewed such patterns, but in other ways have showed us accelerated models of what a transition from a seemingly barren prairie into a lush forest can look like, often in a period of a few decades or even less.  While the above picture is somewhat natural and "ordinary", it is also somewhat indicative of what happens when the ingredients have been altered.  The shrubs are starting to take over far more than they otherwise would, and the forest is, well, turning into a forest rather than a savanna or "pine barrens".

Was the above stretch of land ever a thick forest?  It might have been, and it might be again, which is part of the wonderful process known as plant succession that defines the shifting mosaic of landscapes that is natural eastern North America.  Fortunately, there are ways to advance beyond conjecture to figure out what used to be "open" and what used to be "closed", ways which also do a lovely job illustrating what succession is all about.

First of all, we can check records from those who came before us.  When Europeans landed on these shores, they were often amazed at the world that stretched before them, leaving us journals and other accounts of what they found as they pressed into the interior.  While these days we get excited over things like skyscrapers and deluxe shopping malls, people then noticed things like big trees, rocks, and even landscapes that surprised them, like the "park like lands of pleasant Michigan".  We tend to think of our ancestors as hacking their way through a primeval forest that was untouched by the native folk, when the truth of the matter is that they often had a fascinating voyage of discovery and enjoyed the variation in the landscape.

Secondly, we can take a look at what is actually in patches of land like the above shot.  If this was once a "solid forest", there would be a lot of stumps in the palmettos, either from the passing of lumber men or a raging inferno, the latter of which would have taken out much more of the canopy and left us with a different forest from what we see, namely one with either fewer or no trees, or one far more arboreal, as in here:

Streetview, the special friend takes us to I-95 northbound again, this time just south of Jacksonville, Florida.

Where we do have more of a forest, we can also take notice of isolated elements in the canopy.  Where we do have either a really broad tree or one that stands out from the rest of a dominate stand of just a few species, this can indicate that at one point this area did have ground that was exposed.  Why is this?  Well, a canopy, while not exactly perfectly uniform, does more or less expand up and out at a rate that favors quicker growing species which tend to dominate everything else, such as maples.  Very rarely does an opening stay exposed long enough for a massive oak or pine to out-compete a bunch of sun-struck maples.  A really broad oak, for example, might be a sign that the area was once an oak savanna.

Taken in Island Lake State Recreation Area, Michigan.

A lone trooper like this Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus Virginiana) almost certainly means that instead of growing so well in the shade of the canopy, the tree is a survivor of something far more exposed.

Taken at Brighton State Recreation Area, Michigan.  Yes, I know it looks like an Eastern Hemlock.

In fact, it would not be too out of place to suggest that the above scene may have once looked like this:

At an edge of Island Lake State Recreation Area, Michigan.  

Now I don't know the history of the site pictured well enough to claim it is an actual grassland, either emerging or remnant, but the soil is rather sandy (the hills around there, in fact, are stabilized dunes).  In any case, Eastern Red Cedar is an opportunist that can really only get started and prosper under sunny conditions, and often pioneers tree cover on abandoned fields.  Here it is a passing feature of changing landscape.  In more greatly open areas, such as parts of Oklahoma, it is native but actually considered a noxious weed!  I have seen some on oak savannas, which have always been a bit of a misnomer to me anyway.  Yes, oaks are resistant to fire and can handle the drier conditions offered by exposure, but so can these things, junipers, and pines.  


Regardless of what tree deserves the crown of the landscape, our isolated friends are but another way of showing us that nature is not as compartmentalized as we suspect her to be, but always in motion.  This is how we can get from this: 

Taken at Island Lake State Recreation Area, Michigan.  Prairie Remnant converging into Oak Savanna.

To this: 

Taken at Brighton State Recreation Area, Michigan.  Prairie Remnant with edges dominated by savanna converging into mature Oak-Hickory forest.

To this: 

Taken at Brighton State Recreation Area, Michigan.  A little bit of everything, but mostly becoming a mature Maple-Beech forest, a half mile from the above photo.

Basically, nature provides new conditions that the flora of the area then move in to take advantage of.  At first, sun-loving plants that can tolerate not only a bake but also some rather dry soil dominate the situation.  They can be maintained by fires even if they only occur once every few years to a decade, as competing shrubs and trees will be burned out.  Sometimes, however, the fires will not come around, animals such as deer will not graze on certain patches of ground during years of abundance, and the soil quality might have been good enough to allow some species to make a rebound quicker than others.  Given the chance, many areas of eastern North America will indeed progress from grassland to savanna to a dry forest to a more moist forest.  Again, it all depends on the ingredients available, how they are used, and how much they are used.  


Nature is not static.  Yes, we have prairies so far east of the drier rain shadow of the Rockies not because we share general climate conditions with the plains states, but because nature has provided opportunities for these ecosystems to flourish, but they are hardly always passing elements of the landscape.  This also means that not everything was a forest before we came by and plowed it all into farms and cities.  The forest, as much as the grassland, was dependent on conditions to make it possible in the first place.  Was there a lot of forest?  Yes.  Was there also enough open and park-like land to be noticeable?  Yes.  Very often we do have areas that have been forest for a very long time, often hundreds of years.  Sometimes we even get lucky enough to see a rather lovely marriage of the different worlds.

Taken at Brighton State Recreation Area, Michigan.  In the middle of a mature Oak-Hickory forest we have a shaft of sunlight penetrating to the forest floor and letting a Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbekia Hurta) grow amidst its much taller friends.

North America's Artificial Tropical Land: Southern Florida

With the exception of historical photos, data maps, and otherwise very impressive photographs and videos, I have wanted to display only pictures that I have taken.  This is not so that I may show off my amateur photographic skills, which a professional photographer friend have said are lacking, but so that I may present things from experience and a personal perspective.  Pictures are wonderful things, but as I have stressed so many times before, they don't complete the story.  That said, I have not been to certain parts of the continent in a while, meaning I don't have a lot of pictures around.  At the same time, even a picture backing up descriptions of sensible experiences is still just a description.  Let's face it, the time has come to move around a bit a more here, and so from here on out, I will be making use of images gathered from around the internet (so long as I have some sort of a sensible connection to them).  When they are not my own photographs, I will include their source in every caption.  This will also be a great way to explore "off the beaten path" from more than just the blog.

So, that in mind, let's head to the Florida that exists beyond the tourist hot spots and postcard perfect beaches.  Why?  Because when I was browsing some nature books last night, time and again, I came across a refusal to document anything from southern Florida (and Mexico) because it feels too much like a copy of the Caribbean islands.  If you ask me, I think they were just afraid of the production costs of adding in a bunch of more pages to make their guides exhaustive, but here we are.  Southern Florida is a very unique place on this globe, deserving of far more recognition than to be dismissed as "part of something else".  True, it does have some botanical and animal species that are also found in Cuba, the Bahamas, and southwards, and it also has some species that extend their range slightly into the tropical realm from as far north as Quebec, like the Red Maple (Acer Rubrum).  Raccoons (Procyon Lotor) live alongside American Flamingos (Phoenicopterus Ruber).  More unique and becoming increasingly rare is this scene below:

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/palms/msg0319222516174.html?28

Here we have a wild Florida Royal Palm (Roystonea Regia) growing in a hammock among the Bald Cypress trees, which are noticeably bald during the winter, even though it is commonly in the mid seventies or warmer even in the depth of January.  Deciduous trees do still lose their leaves here, though sometimes the change of brilliant color to bare branches back to spring flowers and leaves only takes a matter of weeks, if even that long.  For the most part, the casual visitor to southern Florida will not even notice this subtle transformation of a pretend winter, as the wild areas that do remain are full of enough broad-leaved evergreens and pines that the northern species do not make much of an impression.  There are native mahogany trees here, as well as the Gumbo-Limbo (Bursera Simaruba), three kinds of mangroves, and 13 native species of palms!

The parts that are not wild, well, they are packed so full of exotics and invasives from the tropics around the world that one would be hard pressed to find something genuinely southern Florida.  This happens to be the case because it is the one place in the United States where tropicals can safely be grown, and in the fine American tradition of planting one's property with perceived beauty over native species, there are manicured lawns everywhere along the suburban streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale that boast just about every kind of flowering tree and palm you can imagine.   I would know, because when I was growing up, it was the first place and time where I realized that many of the trees around me were not there when things were wild and untamed.  I was six years old and had just taken an interest in both reading in English and noticing that the trees in our Fort Lauderdale backyard were very different from the trees in our Milton, Ontario backyard.  Of course, at that time, even while I wondered what "forest Florida" looked like as opposed to city Florida, I also delighted in the sheer beauty of all the tropical flowers, trees, and even lizards around me, native or not.  I did not care that everything was here artificially and introduced, and especially did not mind that we were even in the actual tropics.


That's right!  Southern Florida does indeed have a tropical climate, but even Key West lies 40 miles north of the Tropic of Cancer.  This is because the land is surrounded by water, and very warm water at that.  This is the birthplace of the Gulf Stream, which also (usually) makes Europe's winters much warmer despite being as far north as much of Canada.  Artificial climates and plants aside though, nothing can really take away from how exotic this land is, both its manicured Miami environs and its primordial but vanishing Everglades wilderness.  The contrast is very noticeable:

Much of the densely, yet comfortably, packed urban areas are built on the only true solid ground in the land, a ridge of limestone which rises only 10 feet or so above the surrounding ocean and everglades, with 24 feet marking the highest point in Coconut Grove, a Miami neighborhood which has retained much of its hammock character of dense mahogany and Gumbo Limbo groves towered over by pines, palms, and the odd high-ground Bald Cypress.  Still, Coconut Grove is but a remnant, and a very incomplete remnant, of what the Miami rocklands once looked like, which was mostly dominated by southern pines.  Development aside, the absence of regular fires in the landscape has altered what remains of the vanished pine rocklands even more. Below is a sample video of some of what remains of this ecosystem and the role of fire in maintaining it, presented by Everglades National Park, which gives you a pretty good idea of what Miami looked like before it was Miami:




This is also a good video for illustrating the role of fires even in a wet and humid place like this.


Outside of the developed areas are vast open prairie-like stretches of sawgrass interspersed with other hammocks; in essence, a very wide, very slow river that drains much of what is green on the map there.  Much more can be said about this unique extra-tropical tropical land, but hopefully this post has served as a nice introduction to one of the extremities of the continent, which we will be revisiting a lot in the future.

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part Three.

Part One.

Part Two.

In the years following the Spanish conquests and explorations of the sixteenth century, entire populations of Native Americans started dropping dead.  The Spanish had brought (inadvertently) a host of diseases with them which the isolated populations of the Americas had thus far managed to avoid.  While Europeans, Asians, and Africans had managed to build up immunity to certain diseases, maladies like smallpox now had the chance to affect a vulnerable population in the New World.  Along with their diseases, the newcomers also brought plants and animals that would find an open market to thrive and threaten to overtake their native counterparts, a tragedy which continues to this day.

So? Who cares?  Nature can't take care of itself?  Well it can, and sometimes nature can respond rather rapidly to sudden introductions between environments, but in many cases, we are a force of change that outpaces natural evolutionary process.  Sure, nature can be catastrophically destructive on its own, too, so we should not get upset when a hurricane or tornado wipes out homes and such, right?  You see the point...

So how bad are invasive plants?  Unlike the exotics that will rarely reproduce or do so at the same pace and type of spread of other plants, invasives are species that can do any or all of the following, in the absence of their native biological controls:

1. They grow much faster in their new home to the point at which they simply outgrow other things.

2. They can thus also crowd out other vegetation, meaning that if other things would start to grow along with them, they would be denied sunlight and nutrients, or even just sheer space, by the invader.

3. In doing this, and even when native plants do hold their own in competition, the invaders take away from the available food sources for animals.

4. They release either salts or chemicals into the soil to actually prevent anything from becoming competition again.

And then also, dependent on us yet again,

5. We still find such invaders beautiful and tasty and actually remove natural vegetation in favor of the invaders.

Now, this does far more than just outrage native purists like myself who like to see the landscape as it was designed by the Creator (yes, yes, I know, a loaded statement on all sides of the debate of Darwin vs. everyone else).  While I would like to illustrate the heinous nature of Kudzu (Pueraria Montana, and don't ask me how an Asian plant got a Latin name like that), it appears that I missed out on some photo ops of the deadly vine.  You can read more about it, and find some amazing pictures, here:

http://www.jjanthony.com/kudzu/houses.html

Instead, we can take a look at the forests and wooded places of Michigan yet again and stare sylvan death in the face.  I speak, of course, of Garlic Mustard (Alliaria Petiolata).  Garlic Mustard bears all five of the above marks of destruction.  Here we have two pictures of our "friend", the first for an example of how densely packed it can grow, the second for an example of what it can do to a forest.

Now, if the second image did not look at all that terrifying, keep in mind that that spread of the stuff goes well back into the underbrush.  It crowds out everything else, even itself, and when it dies it releases over a thousand seeds that explode into a decent cover of the area around each plant.  As if this were not enough, it releases allelopathic chemicals into the soil which its roots grow in.  If for some reason the plant would not reseed and germinate successfully, it would prevent anything else from doing that either.  It spreads like crazy, enough so that eradicators such as myself have been completely demoralized by seeing it everywhere. (And yes, this is what I do with my days, tromp through the forest, swamps, and prairies looking for stuff like this and removing it).

What happens when hopeless cases like me don't get out there and tell it to die and never come back?  You see that lovely forest up there?  That would become a memory.  Sure, it will not kill the trees outright, but eventually, they will fall or die by some other means and not produce future generations...  This thing literally not only harms biodiversity, it outright eradicates it.  In its native lands of Eastern Europe there are things that eat it and plants that have some degree of defense to its chemical warfare.  Here, even a starving deer will not even touch it, and our normally robust native plants get all wimpy around it.    Perhaps in time plants would adapt to this pest, but by then our natural lands would look very, very different and be quite dead... So how did it get here?  People thought it was tasty.  It tastes like garlic, well... bland garlic.  A bag full of the stuff smells like someone torched an Olive Garden, meaning it can make even a garlic lover like myself want to turn my nose.  Some people even think it is pretty and consider it a wildflower, which they either try to replant or let wreak havoc on the margins of their gardens and properties.  In this case, the choice to not garden with natives actually destroys the local ecosystem rather than simply result in an "also ran" landscape. 

Perhaps this would not be so bad if it were only Garlic Mustard engaging in ecological war crimes, but the truth of the matter is that we have a lot of invaders out there.

http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxComposite

Now don't get me wrong, this happens elsewhere in the world too.  We send stuff to Europe that has already had fun in destroying what little virgin landscape they have left there.  Invaders are just bad news everywhere.   Before you plant or before you decide not to weed, look up what you are introducing/neglecting.  Likewise, when traveling, be aware that not everything you see might belong there, which can sometimes kill the mood when you are impressed by the local flora, but can also help one appreciate what does belong there even more.  We are blessed in that for the most part, our continent still has a fair portion of its natural appearance intact where the lands remain undeveloped or have reverted to the wild.

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part Two.

Part one can be found here.

In the last post of this series, we explored the wonderful world of native elements in a garden and yard.  Now we move on to things that we have introduced to this continent, which are otherwise known as exotic plants.  For today, we can stick to the relatively good stuff, and just leave it at exotic and not invasive, which we can take a look at Monday.

Exotic Plants.


The word can be deceptive.  While exotic can indeed refer to something really beautiful and stunning, it mostly just refers to things which are foreign to the native habitat in which they are now cultivated.  In many parts of North America, especially in urban and suburban areas, exotic plants account for at least a third of what you see, including invasives.  Many of the more functional plants, namely trees used for shelter, shade, and windbreaks, lawn grasses, and some crops have been imported from Europe.  What can we say?  We like bread made from wheat and beer made from hops and barley.  We like our wine to be made from various strains of Vitis Vinifera rather than the more robust tasting North American natives.  We absolutely adore orderly rows of Lombardy Poplars (Populus Nigra) when lining our city streets and making windbreaks on farm fields.  We are not entirely Euro-centric, however.  Your average flower bed and garden will have Asiatic hollyhocks and hydrangeas growing well, and in the warmer parts of the continent African and Australian plants are all the rage.

For that matter, exotics do not even need to be from another continent.  We have an overabundance of Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens) in the eastern United States and Canada.

These are exotic, having been introduced from the other side of the Great Plains.  Likewise, Floridians are fond of the towering Mexican Fan-Palms (Washingtonia Robusta), and California and northwestern Mexico accept Southern Magnolias (Magnolia Grandiflora) in return, which are also planted northwards as far as the climate can support them when cultivated with care.  The point is that, like much of the rest of the world, North America has a ton of foreign elements in our botanical ensemble.

Now, are these bad?  No, at least as long as we maintain some wilderness and wild spaces, parklands, and make sure that our native ecosystems are not threatened by new species.  Why are they good?  Well, you try eating a baguette made out of corn.  A corn tortilla is amazing.  A corn baguette is a mistake.  Our gardens have been greatly enhanced by combining elements of flora from around the world, and I personally cannot live without a bed of snapdragons planted every year.  I am exceedingly fond of my Bald Cypress growing 300 miles north of its natural range, so much so that I record minute details of its growth every day.  (What?  We all have quirks.)  Don't get me wrong, native plants are lovely and impressive, but variety can be the spice of life, and zone and climate denial is a very fun aspect of gardening.  Not only is variety fun, it is also a wonderful reminder of how we have coped with our environment from the time we first learned to stick something in the ground and make it grow a certain way.  We have developed so many cultivars of flowers, fruits, vegetables, grains, and even trees in a relatively short length of evolutionary timescales.  Exotic plants are essentially an extension of our interaction with the natural world into that same world, a real miracle in and of itself.  While we can decry pollution and resource mis-management, we can applaud leaps in efficiency regarding agriculture and sustainable forestry.  In North America, we have managed to do this really well:



At the same time, on this same continent, we can also see how much we have changed in the past few hundred years.  People who don't think much about the abundance of Blue Spruces probably figure them to have always been there (some even think they grow in straight rows naturally).  People might figure that Los Angeles might not have always had skyscrapers and freeways, but they also might assume there were always a variety of palm trees growing in pre-colonial California (they were not).  Southern Florida has been changed beyond recognition, even in parts of protected areas.  Sometimes the ignorance has extended into professional forestry, with exotic trees being planted instead of the natives that belong and can flourish better there.  While invasives can thrive because of ignorance, non-invasive exotics can sometimes grow nicely but fail to reproduce.  Worse yet, the plants themselves, while remaining benign and non-intrusive, can still host certain insects and pestilences that can devastate our natural flora.  The disappearance of the stately and formerly widespread American Elm (Ulmus Americana) is but one very sad example of what happens when disease travels with garden imports.  We can end up losing our natural heritage at worst, and diminish an appreciation of our natural ecosystems at best.  The most helpful thing to do is to remind ourselves that an exotic is exotic.  It was put there by us, sometimes only survives because of us, and can compete with or make us forget about what was there before us, which happens to be remarkably good at surviving without us (which is a very helpful thing economically, no?).

Exotics are not evil, and by no means do we need to get on an aggressive campaign to eradicate them.  Invasive exotics, on the other hand...

Q and A Session Five

Q: You seem to jump around not only the geography quite a bit, but also from nature to civilization and history, etc.  I thought all this was supposed to be seeing North America for what it really is?

A: What North America "really is" is a continent that has been dramatically transformed in only a few centuries, much of it far more rapidly than that.  American Voyages is all about showing people what they have in their backyard, because it is amazing how many people really do not know what is just around the corner from them, what has happened there, etc., to say nothing of what lies further afield, especially in one of the neighboring countries.  Part of sharing what places are like involves:

What was this like in its natural state?
What has happened here because of nature?
What has happened here because of people?
What is this place like now?


I like to focus on the first and the last question, but you really can't get from one to the other without the middle two being asked as well.  Question one holds a particularly strong interest for me, because in so many places we just have no idea what we have changed, and might never get the chance.  Understanding this, especially through the lens of history, is very important in getting to know ourselves better.  For that matter, it helps to ground the sciences, such as botany, in something not distanced from humans.  Simply put, we are a component of the environment, and a danger lies in ignoring this by either insisting on our dominance of creation or seeing us only as an invasive element within it.  Anyway, whenever studying anything, it is important never to do so entirely from within or without a fishbowl.  This, of course, leads to another question:

What is my perspective on these things?


I made this blog because I wanted to share my perspective with others so that I may be in turn enlightened by theirs and open our worlds a bit more.  I suppose I could say the idea for American Voyages came when I was in high school and shocked that some of my peers did not know much about the world beyond their county.  I became aware of the idea when I went to Mexico to learn Spanish and was exposed to a much broader viewpoint of the place than I expected.  Finally, as noted before, in my very second post in fact, I became enraptured by the sheer grandeur of the Grand Canyon and knew that I wanted to share not just impressions of my travels and research, but my wonder.  Many people could care less about the facts and would prefer to skip ahead to "what is it like?"  To answer your question, in considering all of the components of a place, meaning its ecosystem, history, and forces of change, I like to expose both the facts and "what it is like".

Q: Why so much attention on a few places?  Why all the focus on Michigan?

A: I live here, and I have taken a lot of pictures of places like here and southern California.  I like to present posts that include photographs whenever possible, and I like to make sure they were pictures I or someone I was with have taken just to keep the images pertinent and meaningful in sharing my perspective.  Anyway, what's the big deal with Michigan?  It tends to not get a lot of good press from the rest of the country, to say nothing about getting much press at all.  On that note, just wait until I get some Mexico pictures together, because then you will probably be sick of those too!  Don't worry, I have plenty of requests and plans for more variety.

Q: What is corn?

A: A grain often eaten as a vegetable that is native to Mexico and has been cultivated throughout the Americas throughout human existence here.  In English it can also refer to grains for making bread in general.

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part One.

One of the great ways to experience some of what one's own backyard has to offer is to brighten up said backyard with some local flora.  This is known in landscaping and gardening circles as working with natives, that is to say flowers, herbaceous plants, shrubs, trees, cacti, and even grasses which are indigenous to the local area.  Ever since I made American Voyages, I wanted to post about the joys and benefits of native gardening, but as I survey my own domain, I find that I happen to like not-so-local things in the yard as much as the next person.  Instead of trying to create an oak-savanna or a beech-maple forest (both are found in remnants within the same few square miles around here), the latter of which might be frowned upon in our suburban fantasy world of golf-course trim lawns, I have some roses, azaleas, morning-glories, and heck, even a Bald Cypress growing.  Last night I even found a hardy cultivar of the lovely evergreen Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) for sale, adapted for outdoor planting in lower Michigan.  At this point, staring at the native elements in the lawn, a slight grimace came over my face as they reminded me how they were surrounded by exotics, and I realized my eco-hypocrisy.  

My horticultural sins put to light then, what types of things can we plant, what do they qualify as, and what are their benefits and/or drawbacks?

Native Plants.

Native plants, as noted, are things that are indigenous to the local ecosystem.  The term indigenous can be difficult to define, especially when we consider time parameters as one criterion.  Something that seems to belong to a place these days might have only found their way there within a few thousand years or so, true.  The global climate does change without human assistance over gradual periods of time, barring a natural disaster of planetary scale (such as a big old space rock hitting us).  Technically speaking, under a vast scale, things like moose and humans are not indigenous to North America because they migrated here over the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age.  That said, we can pretty much claim that both Bullwinkle and our native peoples are, well, native, as both person and moose naturally found their way here, the moose no doubt being chased by a band of hunters across the dry Bering, neither knowing what they were getting into.  Examples of native plants would be Live Oaks (Quercus Virginiana) in Florida or Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) in Ontario.  Having a native plant in your landscape and garden is almost always a good thing, though this depends on the condition in which the plant is expected to grow.  While a fern might be native to one's area, planting it in full sun requires it to get watered really frequently, which is an inefficient use of water.  This said, here we have two sub-categories of native plants:

Native Plants in and out of Habitat.  

The fern example stands out well, but flowers work even better.  In the yard I have a single Purple Coneflower (Echinacea Purpurea, which has to be one of the most poetic scientific names out there), which is indeed native to Michigan and can be found in savannas and prairies in the state.  Right beside it I have a Wild Columbine (Aquilegia Canadensis), which is native to Michigan and grows on the margins of forests and along similar clearings like river banks (and is also the flower on the blog header).  In the foreground is a sprouting Rough Blazing-Star (Liatris Aspera), native to Michigan, and another prairie and savanna species.  They are all planted beneath a charming Northern Pin Oak (trunk pictured, Quercus Ellipsoidalis), which just so happens to have an isolated native population here in Livingston and neighboring counties.  

Yes, I plant flowers directly into the lawn.

Now the coneflower is not extremely out of place here (though it does not have a record of being native to this exact county, but does right next door, which I dispute, which means I need to hunt some down).  The field across from the subdivision actually is reverting to type into a savanna, and remnants can be found across the main roads adjacent to this field.  The columbine is sort of out place, but as the savanna is surrounded by forests, not terribly so either.  The blazing star is about at home as the coneflower, perhaps more so because they definitely occur in the area, and less so because they like a little bit moister of a setting than the local prairie/savanna.  The oak, though planted by developers solely as a pretty landscape thing, is right at home.  All of these being together naturally, however, is improbable.  Sure, the yard could have once been one of the edges of the savanna grading into the forest and a columbine could be next to a coneflower as such, but... well in any event I suppose this is being overly technical.  The point is, some of these are slightly out of habitat, and some might be in habitat, minus being grown in a lawn of non-native grass.  

How is this good?   Well, I have planted things that belong here, more or less.  Insects get a chance to pollinate something that would otherwise not exist in a developed area, and a semblance of the native ecosystem is restored, albeit by introduction, native but introduced.  The butterflies in the yard are plentiful and the whole scene is thus rather idyllic.  How is this bad?  Well, it happens to be a bit fake, but nature will not complain even if a botanical purist might.  On that note, it would be a bit improper if this were not a lawn  but a prairie remnant trying to be rejuvenated.  In any case, this is the best I can do at making a nice little reminder of what was here without getting a citation for growing a prairie instead of a lawn, which in my opinion is sad, but people like their lawns.  

Anyway, in the same vein, another good example of an introduced native, the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis).  I apologize for the poor lighting quality of the image, but I only recently learned about the magic of light control on cameras.  

Taken at St. John's golf course in Plymouth, MI.

Redbuds are indeed native to southern Michigan and are often a very striking part of our moister forests.  They are so lovely that they tend to get planted a whole heck of a lot.  They serve as an excellent example of "good plants" we see in our landscapes that would not have been here without human intervention, at least not in quantity, but are not entirely foreign elements of the local area, just the particular ecosystem in which they have been introduced.  This means they might not have popped up here by themselves, but they also blend rather well with the local environment.  Many plants reproduce by seed, and often the seed is carried to new places by animals, animals which sometimes also create new ideal conditions for the plant to flourish (browsing, den and nest creation, etc.).  You know what?  A guy finding a nice iris in a nearby marsh then planting it in his garden is sort of doing the same thing, albeit for aesthetics rather than as a matter of survival.  

So why all the fuss about what belongs and what does not?  Find out in two days and four days for parts two and three of this rant, as well as tomorrow when I do a little Q and A.

Wilderness Among Cities in North America

Upon exiting Penn Station in Manhattan, one enters a very urban environment of concrete, tall buildings, and hordes of people coming and going.  One can see one of the great capitals of the world of finance, culture, and transport, in many ways the sum total of what we have made for ourselves.  Easily impressed by the hustle and bustle around them, most people will not notice what the horizon terminates on down west 31st or 33rd street. The street vistas end at the Hudson River, but rising above the river is the low rise of the beginning of the Hudson Palisades, a remarkably undeveloped set of cliffs that run parallel to the river and give an often ignored scenic backdrop to New York's skyline, if viewed from down below in the streets.

Likewise, out near another packed metropolis, Los Angeles, are towering mountains somehow still largely covered by forests and chaparral, the Santa Monicas and the San Gabriels, despite every other nearby inch of available land being developed as thickly as possible.  Surrounding and even within Chicago, amazingly, are patches of tallgrass prairie that once dominated much of central and northern Illinois.  And perhaps most amazing of all, near the very spot where the United States traces the start of its modern lineage to, stands a forest of pines, cypress, and tupelos, the very same mysterious forests that greeted the first Virginians coming ashore.

Today these wild lands stand close to one of the larger complex of cities in Virginia that surround the mouth of the James River and Chesapeake Bay, seemingly unfazed by the intense development that has transformed the east coast of the United States in the centuries since the founding of Jamestowne.  Perhaps these sorts of places get unnoticed by most people.  I remember taking a course on Greek history back in college, where on the first day of class the professor asked us all "how many of you have ever even been to a farm?"  Aside from the professor and myself, no one else raised their hand.   I would imagine the same response would be true if he had asked which of them had ever taken a walk into a forest, to say nothing of into a forest off of a path.  Then again, perhaps these places do get noticed by most people, and they exist even if we can't quite figure out why.   The same people would gladly raise their hands if asked if they would support preserving the forest or even help save the farmlands from being turned into mini-malls.

This seems to be an weird sort of dualism in the North American consciousness, that we feel the necessity of wilderness, or at least something rural, even while we enjoy the rush and comforts of the city.  Canadians are proud of their vast northern expanses of nothing but tree after tree, Americans are absolutely enamored of their National Parks, and Mexicans love their native forests and deserts, a love which in recent years has transformed into a broad cultural movement of gardening with natives.  At the same time, we love our convenient highways, our manicured lawns, our benefits of civilization.  We started down in Mexico by draining Lake Texcoco to start farming its muddy remains.  We hacked our way into those swampy tidewater forests we see above to farm tobacco and re-create something of the England we left behind.  We divided up the land into thin strips that marked ownership of the forests that flanked the St. Lawrence River.

We made our way up the rivers and along the bases of mountains further into the wild-lands in order to settle and transform them, and yet the burning desire that propelled this expansion was not so much a steady steamrolling of development, but a thrusting into an exotic frontier that always made us want to see what was behind the next ridge or further upstream the river.  If this were not true, we would not have moved so quickly into lands as distant as California or Alaska.  Eventually, we would recognize this fascination with the world we were transforming and make parks, preserves, and help restore what we had changed back into something more... ancient?  Pure?  Mysterious?  No single reason can explain why we have such a subconscious fascination with our beginnings, but the truth of the matter is that we do have a fondness for our heritage, cultural, natural, and both in relationship with one another.  Heck, I was crazy enough to make a blog about this sort of thing, right?

Oak Savannas of Southeastern Michigan: A Reminder of Our Natural Heritage

Taking a much needed break from the Civil War content, and heading back to something a bit more natural, we take a glance at some of the remnants of the savanna landscape which once covered sizable areas of Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario.  Of course, this being the Nearwest, rather than the Midwest, things are far more moist and both the infrequent natural fire regimes and the soils are much more capable of producing full-blown forests.  These were all taken at Island Lake State Recreation Area in Michigan, near Brighton.  Island Lake is a wonderful haven of some of the last remaining "as it was" bit of wildlands in the metro Detroit area.

As you can see, right beside the savanna is a typical mixed deciduous forest full of oaks, hickories, and even a few ashes and maples.  

 Even over the oak savannas, the canopy is exceptionally high and relatively dense.

More into the "thick" of the savanna, we see a semi-open horizon and a rather appealing park-like setting.  We also see a lone Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), which is at the southern edge of its naturally occurring range, at least in present times.  The White Pines, which normally infrequently poke their way up in  sunny gaps in hardwood forests, have much less competition here, and grow quite well in the well-drained soils and sands.

Such a landscape is a rare find these days.  Even when things revert to nature after being abandoned, plants that humans have brought to the lands here often transform the ecosystem.  Setting aside any arguments over the benefits or curses of the trans-formative hand of humanity on the world, these few natural places we do have left, especially in the central eastern part of the continent, usually tend to stand out when they get stumbled across.  Most people would assume a place like Michigan or New York would be a relatively mundane affair of endless, uniform forest.  Instead, our natural landscape shows a much more intelligent design at work, one of astonishing complexity.  The warm season is upon us, readers!  Go outside and try to find some of the primal beauty of North America.  Get to know your state or province or even county or district and what is so great about it, like the post we have today about mine.

A Quick Look at Kenilworth

A quick photo trip today.  I intend to keep posting at least every other day, but currently your author feels a bit under the weather.  Digging back through some pictures from the Mid-Atlantic trip of last July, I found a few pictures to tide us over in the meantime.  They were taken at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, one of the least visited and definitely most under-appreciated NPS sites in the Washington, D.C. area.  Not much time was spent there, mainly because it was 109 degrees that day, with humidity to boot.  Still, I figured it would be a shame not to at least take a passing glance at the park, as I was in the area.  While it is well worth a visit, it can be difficult to find, and is in a rather rough area that might scare the more timid away (parking is secure, so don't let that stop you).

The park and gardens is dedicated to the propagation and study of aquatic plants and ecosystems.  Plants from around the world can be found here, but the park is interested in keeping up a stock of native North American vegetation.  The gardens were built on the floodplain of the Anacostia river, a tributary of the Potomac, which had historically been heavily polluted and becoming something of a cesspool.  The landward portions of the park became the gardens, which would help in filtering the river water to some degree and serve as a plant bank and research garden.  The floodplains and marshes closer to the river, which I did not brave the heat to see, are the last remaining vestiges of tidal marsh in the D.C. region.  Apparently, the best way to see the entire park is to arrive by canoe with the oncoming tide, fool around, and leave with the departing tide later in the day.  

The gardens are certainly lovely, and I can only imagine what the marsh would be like.  

The flowers were not even at their peak, but were certainly exquisite.

Aside from the obvious benefit this place brings to all sorts of birds, the place also teems with insect life, the majority of which is more than happy to assist in controlling mosquitoes.

All in all, a lovely place to visit, and a nice way to see a major city from its natural roots.  Like much of the eastern side of the capital, this park does not really receive much attention, mainly because it is so far off the beaten path.  

Detroit Before Detroit

Many of the larger cities of the world share one trait in common, that they look nothing like the original landscape on which they are built.  While London and Manhattan stand out as prime examples of the results of urban development, even smaller cities, such as Detroit, are so heavily altered that one is hard pressed to find a surviving place that looks anything like its natural landscape once did.  What is natural Detroit now?

Detroit is heavily developed, to the same degree that Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, etc. are, meaning you are just as likely to find concrete as you are soil in a given space.

Detroit has an abundance of small neighborhood parks, but lacks a large body of central urban parks like Buffalo's Delaware Park or Manhattan's Central Park.  There are two parks on the periphery of the city, Belle Isle and Hines Drive, both created over river land difficult to build on.  Park design has been largely based on a recreational initiative, rather than a preservation initiative.

Detroit is extremely flat, with no noticeable hills or valleys (most creeks that would have had such are now underground or simply gone).  The highest point in Detroit, all 675 feet of it, lies near the corner of Wyoming avenue and Outer Drive.  The Detroit river remains the lowest point, with the average water level resting at around 571 feet.  The level elevation gradient is a result of much of the area being the former lake bed of Lake Maumee, which was also partially responsible for forming its soil.

Detroit has soils consisting largely of sand, clay, and some remaining muck soil rich in humus.  While not overly rocky, the soil contains a good assortment of rocks and minerals left by past glaciation.  A good dig through a backyard might even produce some of the same stones you can find on beaches throughout the Great Lakes.

Detroit landscaping often makes use of non-native vegetation.  Even native trees and flowers are usually planted outside of their normal conditions; the lovely maples and oaks might not have been there before.  Lots that remain untended to after human alteration are often taken over by the invasive and destructive tree of heaven.

The east side of Detroit is still somewhat flood prone, not only because of an aging sewer system, but also because some of the area lies in a broad flood plain.

Now, what is true about what pre-settlement Detroit used to be like, and where can remnants be seen?

Much of south east Michigan used to be swampy bottomlands, including the lower areas of Detroit.  In fact, the east side neighborhood known as "Black Bottom" was so called because of its original landscape.  There would have been creeks that pooled a bit in places, but were otherwise extremely wide and maybe only an inch deep where they had standing surface water, sort of like the Everglades. Very little of this remains, and most of it is on Belle Isle in the forested section.

The grasses you see in the background are actually invasive.  Now, to be fair, there would not always be standing water like this, but the soil would have been very spongy otherwise.   The area, after all, was not a true swamp.  The ground I was standing on was fairly solid, and there were slight rises of half a foot here and there which were dry.  Here, and probably in much of the lower portions of Detroit, Black ash was the dominant tree.  There would also be many cottonwoods, and in a few places, you can find old survivors.

In cases like these, the trees were most likely just thought to be lovely and built around.  Now, when the land would rise as little as a foot or so, drainage improved.  Creeks could also form and help clear out water faster, and oaks, hickories, and White ash would start appearing.  On some locations, particularly with sandy soils, White oak would grow in small pockets of prairie, maintained both by the relative aridity of the location, along with fires that could spread easier than in the wet low lying areas.  Dramatic examples of this type of landscape can no longer be found in Detroit proper, although the Oak Openings Preserve of Toledo and Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve in Windsor are remnants that can be found nearby.

Woodward avenue and much of the immediate surrounding area downtown are about 40 feet higher than the lower east side and the areas southward leading up to the Rouge river mouth.  Records of the original French settlements on both banks of the river indicate that the area that Cadillac founded the city on in 1703 featured a somewhat prominent sandy bluff that tended to be a bit more hospitable than nearby areas (and provided the most strategic viewpoint).  Despite the waterlogged appearance of the lower areas of the city, conditions must not have been too bad; people settled here, drained what they could, and made use of the muckland for agriculture.  Some of the landscape today even retains land use patterns which began under the Seigneurial system of French settlement.  The most prominent examples remain south of Windsor, though the city grid of the east side of Detroit retains the pattern as well.  As you can see, the straight lines that form blocks of land parcels stand in contrast to the relatively ordered farm squares further inland which were plotted much later.

Also of note in the river front portion of the east side are the numerous canals and harbor indentations which creep in from the river and Lake St. Clair.  Many of these were formerly creeks, including Connor creek.  As noted, nearly all of the water courses in Detroit proper have long since been buried.  Plans are currently underway by both government and private interest groups (such as The Greenway Collaborative) to unearth these streams and recreate them as greenbelts and strip parks.

The land gradually slopes, at a rate of 10 feet per mile or less in places, as it heads toward the north west corner of the city.  In the area of Old Redford, one would most likely see a few more oaks and hickories, and perhaps even the occasional Eastern White pine or Eastern hemlock sticking up through the canopy, provided the soil was drained enough.  The land would look somewhat similar until one would notice that the slope of the terrain was getting a bit more definable, where it would meet the glacial lobe that ran from Adrian, MI up to about Port Huron.  Here, the ashes and their accent oaks and hickories would meet the beech and maple forests of the rest of upland lower Michigan.  Detroit itself, however, would remain the dominion of a relatively lush wet forest.  Think about that the next time you complain about having to water the back lawn.

Remnants of Natural California: Canyons of the Foothills (part 2)

If one starts in the middle of the city of Fontana, California, and drives straight up Sierra avenue (more or less main street) and continue to the exit at I-15, you get probably the most accurate remaining viewpoint of what basin topography and plants would be like.  Downtown, of course, is built up and paved over, and any grasses you might see are manicured lawn specialties.  As you head closer to the mountains, the development eases off a little, and one is surrounded by open fields with the occasional shrub sticking out.  Slowly, about every mile or so, the land gains about fifty to seventy feet in elevation, and by the time you near I-15, you get shrubs starting to make the area look a lot more bountiful.  Ahead, you see the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains meeting head on, with a moderately high pass in the middle called Cajon Pass, which leads up and out into the Mojave desert beyond.

Staying on Sierra avenue, which is now called Lytle Creek road, the land becomes a bit rocky, gains about 400 feet to a mile until it hits the town of Lytle Creek.  The road passes over Lytle Creek itself, which this far up is still a stream even in dry months, as it has yet to sink into the dry basin lands.  Here, the ground is denied full sun by the closing canyon walls, and groundwater is closer to the surface as it flows downhill.  In some places, the water pools and cascades in pretty decent displays even in the dead of summer.  On the day I took this, many people were swimming in the creek further downstream.

That soft, pine looking shrub in the front center is the dreaded Tamarisk, a tree which wreaks havoc throughout the western United States.  They reproduce easily, crowd out existing vegetation, suck up the local water table, and even dredge up salt from deep in the ground which they then drop in the decaying leaves on nearby soil to prevent other plants from growing.  Fortunately, this one seemed to be a bit of a loner, and was surrounded by normal, patriotic trees like Fremont Cottonwoods and various willows.

As noted, this lets streams be streams, but it also allows for taller species of trees to grow.  Only a mile and a half into the canyon, the slopes have Bigcone Douglas-fir growing on them.

These are trees of opportunity, to say the least.  They grow mainly on the east and north facing slopes to avoid the desiccation of the full afternoon sun.  Their little niches are rocky, moist, and spots of safety among the otherwise fire prone canyons.  In such conditions, they reach down as far as possible into the basin lands, stopping at around 1,000 feet in their lowest occurrence.  In some areas, they are true survivors, several centuries old and beacons of vitality in a scorched landscape.

In others, the sheer intensity of wildfires overcome them, usually high-intensity blazes that are deliberately set by arsonists or careless smokers (this has been proven and confessed by such people).  Still, they are tough things, and I have yet to see an entire hillside devoid of them. There are always at least a few survivors that were shielded by their neighbors.

The outer trees actually slow the fires, which burn outwards then back to the more flammable vegetation.  Of course, the flammable stuff also has mechanisms that help cope with the extreme fire conditions here.  In the immediate foreground are Chamise, which dominate much of the lower foothill landscape.  These and other shrubs, mainly manzanitas, ceanothus, and yuccas, burn to the ground quickly in the intense fires of the region, aided by the oils in their leaves and branches.  Some of these can even spring right back up again from the roots, which were safely away from the quickly passing fire underground.  Many of the plants have seeds which can remain dormant until activated.  In some cases, several months later, the area can look undistrubed.

Many of the shrubs are deciduous evergreens and could provide for a lovely garden year round in their native climate, but are often passed over for the many plants from around the world that grow can grow in the area.  More often than not, residents living along the foothill ranges see only their distant appearance, which in the summer through early winter look dull and brown.  Closer up though, even in late August when the basins and deserts across the range look brown and choked, these hills can be a very refreshing green.

The large stalk in the middle belongs to a Yucca whipplei, which Franciscan missionaries also named "Our Lord's Candle".  (The plant is hidden in the bushes, but you can make out a non-flowering one on the left of the picture-the spiky pale blue-green plant).  I have seen stems as tall as twenty five feet shoot up from the small plants, which die after they flower in this way, sacrificed for providing nutrients to such a feat of growth that bears hundreds of seeds.  Nature, as some of the more romantic naturalists have noted, is often more of a temple to honor God than most cathedrals.  I would add that it can work just as well as a theology book, given proper understanding.

So why do I find canyons and ravines like Lytel Creek to be so amazing?  Well, maybe because if you cross the Mojave desert for hours and wonder if you will ever see a tree again, you finally descend into this lush world and it stands in amazing contrast to the sandy expanses above and the dry, urban sprawl below.  Here, see for yourself:

Out in the desert, not too far away:

Here in the canyon:

Down towards Fontana, San Bernardino, etc.:

Noticeable contrast, to say the least.  The foothills and their canyons are surrounded by dry lands, and are themselves witness to maybe 20 inches of rain a year, roughly half of what the Eastern United States and Canada receive annually.  They are subject to intense natural (and unnatural) phenomena, and yet are full of life that has not only managed to survive, but thrive.  From a distance, even relatively close up, the slopes do not look like much.

For those who take a moment and venture a closer look, however, there is some lovely life growing here.

Mind you, in some places, the beauty can be arresting even to those always in a hurry.  

OK, so I cheated on that last one, that was taken about seven miles away, off of California 18.  Granted, the landscape and ecosystem are fairly the same.

Lytel Creek canyon is easy to get to, right off of I-15 on the Sierra avenue exit, which is the last exit before heading up into Cajon pass.  There is a wonderful joint ranger station for both the San Bernardino and Angeles National Forests, which aside from having weird hours and a closed bathroom, does have a lovely botanical garden that highlights the native flora.  The canyon is a wonderful remnant of natural California, and the wonderful oasis that once offered rest to the peoples who lived here for ages and welcomed those who arrived in these lands after a long trek across the continent looking for the golden land near the Pacific.