Treasures Of The North And Winter: American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana)

Most conversations I have had with people about my northern (i.e. pine tree and really cold winter country) heritage usually include discussions on what exactly grows up in the land of frigid winters and gentle summers.  Many people assume that the farther north one travels, the more one runs into coniferous needle-leaved trees, and that the horizon is nothing but spruce after spruce.  Just as residents of the lower north (southern Great Lakes, Midwest, Northeast) assume that Florida is one giant palm plantation, or that the desert west is nothing but sand dunes devoid of life, residents from said lower north down to the the rest of the continent picture the Boreal north as a land of excellent Christmas trees and the odd moose or bear bursting through the needles.  In truth, spruce are the most northerly occurring trees, right on into the tundra in fact (albeit as a very small form that takes centuries to hit an inch tall).  They are very quickly joined by willows, birch, aspen, and best of all, by something that looks like it should not grow in this land of the anti-leaf, the American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana).

Clingmans Dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  North Carolina, with some Tennessee in the background.

 On the upper slopes of Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina.

 As you can see, our friend the grand Mountain Ash looks, like the northern growing sumacs, to be a palm tree that got lost along the way.  Despite growing in an otherwise rugged setting, the tree (others insist it is a tree-like shrub) has delicate looking foliage and a branching structure that looks like it would get absolutely broken apart in heavy snow and ice.  Believe what you want, however, because this fine specimen of a plant really only grows where things get somewhat brutal:

Thanks, USDA!

Most of my pictures of them come from North Carolina, despite the fact that this is indeed a tree I have grown up with for a long time.  The good olf Sorbus is indeed a tree of eastern Boreal Canada, growing right on up to James Bay.  Not until I was specifically plant hunting and noticed it stood out among the Spruce-Fir forests of the higher Appalachians did I really think it was anything unique!  Yes, it has the same good characteristics in both Ontario and North Carolina, and it stands out from the forests in the Laurentians:

Somewhere in the forest north of Brent, Ontario and south of Deux-Rivieres, Ontario.

As well as it does in the Blue Ridge and Smokies:

Off of the summit of Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina.  They really do look weird with the conifers.

Along the main road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, eastbound side, not exactly sure, but high enough to see the transition between coniferous and deciduous forests.  On the top right there is also a heath bald full of rhododendrons and kalmia!

Yet I always seemed to think of it as part of the scenery, taken for granted.  This is probably because it is not a "northern" looking thing; just as the kid who got excited over pine trees did, so do people who get excited over spruces and rhododendrons which happen to grow best where the Sorbuses do: 

They really do offer a nice foliage effect together.  I am sure by now that any gardeners reading the blog are getting some ideas!  This was taken on the road leading up to the summit of Mt. Mitchell.

Let's face it, you all looked at the flowering Catawba Rhododendron (Rhododendron Catawbiense), and why not?  The Sorbus looks like any old sumac (or worse, a Tree of Heaven [Ailanthus Altissima]) growing in an abandoned city lot might. This holds true until the winter comes, however, and the true glory of Sorbus Americana enters the landscape, it's berries:

Another fine tree from the Ontario Laurentians, probably about 6 or 7 miles from the other one pictured in this post.  Both were set in some fairly dark and lovely spruce-fir forests.

Somewhere in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, most likely on the path to Munising Falls near Munising, Michigan.

The berries, of course, are preceded by flowers, which truly makes this an all season interest tree:

Flower buds!  This was at Mt. Mitchell and taken mid June.

Clingmans Dome.  I arrived too early at the high elevations, and too late at the lower elevations, to get a full bloom.

I don't have any photos of the plant in full bloom or naked in the dead of winter with those bright red berries really standing out against the landscape, but it does not take too much imagination to realize that this is a tree which proves that noticeable seasonal changes are not a bad thing.  Indeed, this tree might have even given a bit of a boost to early colonists who had to deal with an actual winter or were heading into the dark and mysterious mountain or northern interior.  It was a welcome splash of color in the winter landscape, and would have reminded them of their own Sorbus back across the sea, the Rowan Tree (Sorbus Aucuparia), which people had considered to be good for everything from making jelly to fighting off witches.  That said, it seems that Aucuparia still gets more notice and stock in the nursery trade; in keeping with the current few posts and their theme on the blog, it is important to note that this is probably because the European version can be grown in warmer spots than the North American version.  Again, however, this is not say that our version is weak and tender, as it can grow out of some really difficult soil:

Somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway near north of Mt. Mitchell.

Somewhere on Mt. Mitchell.  As you can see, the soil is pretty shallow before bedrock is reached.  This particular Sorbus is joined by a nice blanket of blue alpine flowers, Mountain Bluets (Hedyotis Michauxii).

And of course, our version can also handle the colder end of the spectrum better than even some of the hardiest northern broadleaved trees.  This tree just happens to be hardy in the other direction, the one that no one claims to like!

By the way, if any Illinois people are reading this, I would love to hear/see anything on the wild population in your state, which is far more prairie than Boreal. 

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. 

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?

Residents Of The Piney South: The Loblolly Pine

Sometimes a tree is just considered a weed with a trunk.  In much of the South, pines are considered to be simply background material, stuff that grows in the way of development and agriculture.  A friend I met back in college, a Carolinian in fact, told me that pines were sometimes even considered to be more than just a weed but a real nuisance.  "They don't take too well to storms and hurricanes, and leave a tangled, sap-filled mess to clean up".  Pines are nothing if not sap-filled, but I hardly considered that to be problematic.  After all, they are just as ubiquitous in Ontario as they are in the Carolinas and we go out of our way, occasional tornado or violent microburst aside, to pay vast sums of money to get mature ones in our landscape if they are not already present.  In mostly deciduous SE Michigan and NW Ohio, nearly every public works landscaping project includes at least shelter-belts of pine, usually Scotch (Pinus Sylvestris) or Austrian/Black (Pinus Nigra) but often the native reds and whites.  Mile after mile of I-75 is lined in such a way up in these parts.

I-75 in Georgia or I-95 anywhere south of central Virginia look like such a landscaping project put into years of growth, and a nearly solid wall of Loblolly Pines (Pinus Taeda) screen off the northern tourists and other thru-travelers from the local world.  Janisse Ray even insisted that this was their purpose in her masterpiece Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.  Janisse, you see, loves all the spires of her native forests down in Georgia, but just as I have a particular weakness and reverence for the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), so does Janisse look upon the noble Longleaf Pine (Pinus Palustris) with grand esteem.  To her, is the Loblolly a seemingly unworthy also-ran that has filled a niche that the Longleaf once dominated?  Without a doubt, she considers it an important and lovely tree, but it is just in so many ways ordinary and second-fiddle to the monarch that was once the Longleaf.  This is not to say that Loblolly Pines are bad trees, just that they are an unfortunate sign of the times wherein entire ecosystems have been disrupted and trees such as this one find a place in an ever-changing world made by humans that lets such highly adaptable species thrive.  The Loblolly is one such tree.

The Lobolly, you see, does not mind getting its feet wet, unlike most other pines.  It can tolerate being at the margin of a swamp better than most of its genus, even while it can handle the harsh, alkaline conditions of an abandoned clay-soil farm field baking in the sun.  Surprisingly, it does not take well to the pure prairie environments found scattered in the South, notably the eastern extensions of the central prairies into the Louisiana coastal plains and the Black Belt, an arching area of prairie (that can now be seen on physical maps as a dense concentration of farmland) stretching across central Mississippi and Alabama.  Like most established prairies, the incredible roots of the grasses and forbs have contributed to the formation of a rich, dark mineral soil.  Likewise, rich soils can be found in the Mississippi valley, an area which forms a significant gap between the eastern and western portions of the Southern forests.  While the Loblolly does tolerate getting its feet wet, it does not like them soaked.  Such land is instead reserved for incredible stands of tupelo, cypress, cottonwoods, and willows (along with the lovely Red Maple <Acer Rubrum>).  In short, we can see that it dislikes certain ecological extremities and even in its very broad choice of tolerable situation is still... average.  Simply put, the Loblolly is a common tree that you will find across much of the South, from Texas clear to southern New Jersey. 

That's the direction I became inspired by when writing this post.  You see, I have so very few specimen pictures of the Loblolly because of how "common" they really are.  Most of my shots incorporate the sentiments of how they get viewed by Southerners, as background scenery behind modern development.

There they are, filling up the backdrop in Santee, SC, just off of Loblolly-framed I-95.  I witnessed very few trees, except maybe old survivors that were big enough to not be considered "weeds", used in a landscape around homes or businesses.  That honor instead went to cold hardy palms (like that lovely Pindo Palm, Butia Capitata) and magnolias fighting with crepe myrtles for places of honor on the front yard.

 In fact, aside from the photo of your typical "it was too big to just yank out" Loblolly back a few posts ago, this is the only canopy or crown shot I have of them!  I regret this, as a stand of Loblollies (and do they ever make fine stands, just like the Red Pines do up north) is a wonderful wall of green, a wall which I remember fondly as a child welcoming me to a South that otherwise felt so very distant from my far north.  I always tried to squint deeper into those dense growths along I-95 and wonder what the forest was like inside them.  Even at that age I figured that this was not a natural situation, that there had to be more in the forest besides a single giant plantation of one tree.  For the life of me though, even as common as they were, they were a tree that seemed to outweigh all the other elements of the landscape.  Only after a half day of Loblolly wonder would I notice the subtle changes that happened in Georgia as Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) started carpeting the understory and Slash Pines (Pinus Elliottii) started to take over, especially into Florida.  The bigger needle globes of the Slash Pines were part of the very different world of the Deep South and Florida, not a Red Pine look alike that the Loblollies were.  The Loblolly fit perfectly into a Canadian child's image of what the South looks like: the same as the north, but with even more pines, palm trees, and a night time that was as hot as a Northern day time, complete with some buzzing outdoor light illuminating this mysterious pine that grew even in such a hot land. 

I was too young to imagine that things had not always been this way.  This is not to say that I had no imagination or that I knew not what a wilderness was (I grew up in one), but that I was simply ignorant of the fact that the Loblolly would have been truly an "also ran" back in the days when the Longleaf was king of the forest and savanna.  The settlers who followed the First Born would have seen that very different world of an incredible arboreal diversity, with towering pines stretching forth above grasses and flowers stretching as far as the eye could see, kept open by the same agent of nature that made lower Michigan, Ohio, and Southern Ontario into a natural park of oak openings, fire.  I imagine, as Janisse Ray does of a South long past, settlers living among these giants, every bit as transfixed upon them as... a child doing the same thing when confronted by the inheritor pine, the Loblolly.  Maybe it is not, after all, such a common tree as it is a survivor and a triumph of nature trying to cope with human development.  I consider the Loblolly to be an arboreal emblem of the modern natural South, in which nature still manages to rebound like, well, a weed!  Even in farm country down there you can't help but run across a tree every few hundred feet, and often enough it will be a Loblolly.  In truth, I have never seen the ancestral forest with my own eyes, and I can only imagine the grandeur of the Longleaf Savanna.  The Loblolly, though, has managed to welcome me home every time I have come back to this land of the South, which holds such an irresistible lure to a botanist who is still a child at heart. 

A part of me wonders what life was like where this tree held its own once against the broad rule of the Longleaf.  Perhaps places like Jamestown, places where the continent started to forever change into the modern land it has become, are places where one can still find a forest of curiosities otherwise stepped quickly past by human advancement.  Here maybe can be seen not some oak or pine parkland that provided an irresistible lure to colonial settlement, but a needle carpeted half-forest, half-opening maze of strange trees that grew beyond the landings of mushy cypress forest infested with mosquitoes.  Would the first Virginians have tried to press on toward higher ground capable of more agricultural wonders and either ignored or found inconvenient the odd forest that was too open to give good shade, yet to thick to plop a house on?  What would they have made of this place come winter when even the leafy shrubs beneath the pines would refuse to surrender their greenery, like the Red Bay (Persea Borbonia) or the Loblolly Bay (Gordonia Lasianthus)? 

Both of these delightful messes were captured at Historic Jamestowne, in the drier center of the swampy hook of land that John Smith and company tried to give Virginia a decent go at.

Were such forests taken in by the colonists like the Red Pine forests of wonderful blueberry (Vaccinium Augustifolium) and Wintergreen (Gaultheria Procumbens) understory of an otherwise grand White Pine dominated North, which together with the more open Jack Pine (Pinus Banksiana) openings on sand and granite (depending on what side of Lake Huron you would find them on), and considered second fiddle and scrubish by their northern settling counterparts (compared to the valuable timberlands of the White Pine supercanopy forest)?  We may never know.  After all, we don't even notice the trees around us these days...

But what about that Longleaf?

Piney South

We North Americans in the lands commonly referred to as either Midwest (grumble) or Great Lakes tend to think of pines as something of a northern tree, at least those of us in the middle latitudes between the lands of cold and warm.  Indeed, west of the Appalachians and east of the Rockies, native pines are largely missing from the landscape south of the Great Lakes, throughout most of the prairies, and until one gets into at least the edge of the South.  The same is not true for the coasts of the continent, where pines can be found from the Arctic treeline down well into the tropics.  Many botanists, in fact, will point out that the greatest living diversity of pines and probable place of origin for many ice-age surviving species is in Mexico, hardly northern by most standards.  Some pines, in fact, only like areas that are warm most of the year if not outright hot and dry.  Only one species of pine, the noble and scraggly Jack Pine (Pinus Banksiana), even makes it to the northern limit of trees.

Still, where once central North America used to have a relative dearth of things pine, one is likely to run across some thanks to a modern landscaping fetish for durable, mass-produced coniferous evergreens.  Sometimes this results in lovely drifting plantings of the majestic and sacred Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) which seems to be popular well into Nebraska and southwards wherever the climate will be merciful.  More often than not, however, the Austrian, or Black Pine (Pinus Nigra) gets slammed into tight groupings to serve as an exotic windbreak far from its happy mountain home in the northern Mediterranean higher elevations.  This is a shame, because we have so many wonderful pines available for use here that can take hot summers rather well.  Anyway, I digress.  How about those hot summers?

Just off of Exit 35 on I-26 near Roebuck, South Carolina.  That there (and those behind) is a Loblolly Pine (Pinus Taeda), and if you spend any time at all in the South you will come across more of them than you can imagine.

You see, the South gets a lot of rain, but in the dry times, even while it is more humid than should be permissible for decent living, that Sun of ours tends to bake the landscape so that something Carolina feels more like something Texas.  There are oaks for that, to be sure, but pines can handle the rough stuff even better.  Drive anywhere south of the Potomac or the Ohio and pines will never be far away.  Drive further along into, say, Tennessee or North Carolina, and they might be all you see for miles upon miles in seemingly pure stands (albeit with fun, acid loving surprises thriving in the partial shade and sheltered soils like azaleas, magnolias, grasses, and blueberries... and <swoon> palmettos).  I-95, from Richmond nearly all the way to Miami, is pretty much miles and miles of pine scenery, and let me tell you, it smells amazing.  Come along the next few posts to take a wonderful look at some of our southern pine friends.  

Are We Headed To A New Civil War?

North Americans, yes, even us comparatively politically and socially sedate Canadians and Mexicans, are an opinionated lot.  Sure, there are active ideological fronts being fought over in the rest of the world, but here we seem to have built up a culture that thrives on, or perhaps even requires, ideological diversity.  Even in some of Europe's more open societies which rely on total democratic participation to exist as they do, North Americans trump them in terms of respecting the notion of personal determination to the point of it being made into a sort of religion of liberty.  Canada and the United States largely inherited this passion for mother Britain, which in the eighteenth century was every bit as crazy over liberty than the colonies were.  The frontier mentality of rugged individualism, in fact, can largely be traced to the freedom-oriented folkways of the people of the northern borderlands between England and Scotland.  That said, such passions were later transformed by an influx of a wide diversity of immigrants, both free and enslaved, from across Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.  Down in Mexico, a reaction against a distant or otherwise oppressive Spain grew in intensity inspired by what was happening further north.

The history lesson from there on is an important one.  Whereas Britain buckled down in defending a particular concept of freedom, particularly the national identity brand, against intrusions by France and eventually Germany, North America exploded into hundreds of different camps.  In Mexico and Canada, this has always been strongly evidenced by strong provincial/regional traits; the near revolutions in Chiapas and Quebec that have never really faded away are proof enough of this without even looking at the rest of how the countries are at odds with the capitals.  In the United States, however, while the federal government remains strong and appears to be an emblem of power and unity to the rest of the world, well...

Let's just remind ourselves that the thirteen colonies almost did not rebel together, much less stick together once the final shots had been fired at Yorktown.  The backcountry was at odds with the lowcountry, both of which were at odds with the valley inhabitants of the Delaware, Hudson, and so many other watersheds, who were further at odds with the struggling remnants of Puritan power in New England, who were at odds with... you get the picture.  Or maybe not.  You see, especially in the frontier regions, regionalism was the furthest thing from the minds of towns and even just families, clans really, that preferred a lack of contact if not outright war with the neighbors.  The only thing that kept a Virginian mountaineer unarmed in the same room with a Virginian planter, to say nothing of a Bostonian merchant, would be a common threat.  The firstborn, with their ferocity in combat and every bit as strong desire to preserve home security, were the first cause of unity.  Then came their allies the French, either from across the ocean or closer to home among Les Habitants.  Both were largely dealt with in 1763.  In the decades to follow, that new threat would be mother Britain, and finally in 1812, that same mother and her new child and sister to the colonies, Canada, would be the source of final movement into a cohesive national sentiment.  Note though, the term there, for sentiment is not to be confused with identity. 

There were still identities a plenty even within the individual states.  This is how Virginia, a behemoth stretching from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the Ohio valley, eventually became broken into smaller entities, starting most vividly with the memory of the creation of Kentucky in 1797, itself an improbable geographic collage of mountains, savannas, forests, and even cypress swamps.  Yes, such a buffet of both mentality and environment combined into the rugged individualism that continues to define divides with American society.  Most people know that the West is not the Plains is not the South is not the Rustbelt is not the East Coast, but they don't know how fragmented national identity is beyond such simple distinctions.  People with the regions certainly do; no Charlestonian would ever be confused with someone from Memphis.  No "Yooper" would ever be confused with someone from metro Detroit, at least by someone in Michigan.  Buffalo feels like it is at the other end of the world from New York City, if New Yorkers even take the time to recognize that there is also a state called New York (I joke only slightly).

This is now.  How about back, say, during the Civil War?

Artillery at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.  This gun is in Kentucky, pointed toward both Virginia and Tennessee.  The Gap never saw significant military action, but changed hands many times.  I put this photo here as a reminder that that war was very pervasive, with reminders of armed conflict surrounding nearly all of even the backcountry population.

The sides of the war are usually broken simply into North and South, with the North being pictured as a heavily urbanized industrial bastion of truth fighting against slavery and the South being painted as an agrarian civilization vainly struggling to hold on to slavery.  Military historians often focus on the main events in the Tennessee and Mississippi valleys and the front centered around Virginia.  The truth is, decently-sized battles were fought as far west as New Mexico and as far north as Indiana, and in an age when much of the population, especially in rural fronts, had access to a firearm, little skirmishes across towns were a lot more common than historical memory permits recollection for.  Recent works of fiction like Gangs of New York have managed to revive interest in the back door of the war, but common imagination likes to view the early 1860's as a brief interruption in an otherwise strong national expansion and development.  The truth is, we were all at each others throats half the time, over issues like race, class, the economy, religion, the environment, immigration, language, etc.  Sound familiar?

It should.  We never really stopped fighting, because we are all so damn passionate about these issues.  We had a series of crises, from the two world wars and a rather brutal depression, to bolster the strength of federal versus local identity, but the security, prosperity, and romanticizing of historical memory that came afterwards helped us forget about some things.  Indeed, again, we never really stopped fighting even during the outbreak of peace.

Even people who claim to hate politics and loathe taking sides feel strongly about such issues here, and given the chance to get irritated over at least one of them, will try to weigh in on how they really feel, even if they don't exactly pick up a gun and fire into the air over it.  One such issue is language, which after a delay of nearly two years in running this blog, I think I will finally just bite into and discuss next post.

But in the meantime, how about that title question up there?

Things are getting ugly, and the last lingering stabilization provided for by the Second World War might finally be fading from national consciousness.  Some serious questions are once again being asked, people are either arming themselves with guns or democratic participation in increasing numbers, and, surprisingly and ironically, camps are being formed to make the claim about who is the most American of them all!

Yes, gay and confederate.  Talk about a diversity of camps.  This was taken in a town which I will not call by name, for potential fear of some bizarre form of reprisal, in North Carolina. 

This answer is, we probably are heading to something major that is going to bring about large scale changes to our society, and in a country with a history defined so much by war, armed conflict is certainly not out of the question.  In the coming weeks, let's explore why and what this means together, and as always, through the lens of history and geography.

Rhododendrons And The Potency Of Native America

I often spend a lot of time on this blog touting the benefits and perhaps even superiority of native plants.  This is not to say that I think imports and exotics don't have their place; where would we be without wheat, rice, etc?  My house garden is actually quite full of foreign and distantly native things like western lupines and sagebrush, southern trees, that and I really have a thing going for portulacas and rare hostas, and... of course I just adore Rhododendrons.  Truth be told, they are a "distant native" here too.  Michigan has only one species of a native Rhododendron, Rhododendron Groenlandicum, which is found mostly in the northern reaches of the state where bogs are a regular feature of the landscape.  The species that I have elaborated on last week are all Appalachian beauties that come close only as near as Ohio.

Maybe at one point they were more widespread, however, and perhaps crusaded against in a mad dash by the people of our continent to cultivate and develop every last inch of land they could find.  This sort of thing has happened to many of our regional botanical gems, including mangroves in Florida, Longleaf Pines (Pinus Palustris) throughout the southeastern United States, so many prairie plants in the interior of the continent, cactus and sagebrush species in the west, and everywhere, the towering trees that had caused reluctant second born North Americans to stay in their experimental colonies.

Believe it or not, until the industrial way of the world got well underway in the later part of the nineteenth century, complete with great lumps of immigrants to power the factories and mills, the main commercial attraction of these shores would be the vegetation.  Rough winters and ideological uncertainties were harsh selling points for Europeans thinking about having a go at a venture in Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Quebec.  Mexico and Cuba long had a stronger advantage over such places in terms of climactic desirability, even after the allure of potential easy gold had dimmed to mere cantina discussions over the old days of legends and legendary explorers.  But in all of these places, a rather incredible, and tough, world that was nearly unspoiled lay before astonished Europeans.  For the English and Dutch, and far more so the French, the economic attraction of these unspoiled lands was great.  One of the stars of the show were the pines, conifers that seemed to be an inexhaustible resource of legendary, yet living, proportions.

The trees made the colonies possible.  They allowed for ships to be built for large Spanish fleets to defend the interests of a nation where the domestic supply of forest was growing very thin.  They allowed the Puritans of New England to sustain a colony founded on ideological grounds by selling their lumber into the great circle of trade between them, England (who sought out ships of her own), Africa, and the Caribbean.  They made for wonderful habitat for the fur bearers pursued by the French who traveled as far as the western mountains on canoes made by their unsurpassed timber.  More so than any of this, though, the trees and plants were unlike anything they had seen back in a depleted mother land.  Once the initial economic foundations had been laid and the New World took on a separate life of its own, the colonies stopped being viewed as a savage frontier.  The vegetation of the continent started becoming every bit as desirable and aesthetically pleasing as it was already quite valuable for utility.  The gardens of Europe were getting more formal, more refined, and needed new sources of excitement to be dressed up into the realm of the exotic.

Enter then both the old aristocracy and the new upstarts with names such as Washington and Monticello.  Like most good aristocrats, they loved beauty but preferred to pass on the work to subordinates.  Their carefully cultivated plant museums were stocked and maintained by botanists both domestic and imported.  Men such as John Fraser, Francois Andre Mirchaux, and many others before and after them glided into the western frontiers of the dark forests and found and returned with amazing plants for the rich gardens.  North American flora became a very hot commodity, but this it remained, a mere commodity.  The founding fathers and founding scientists took pride in the powerful, seemingly indestructible vegetation that was as much responsible for creating a mysterious and seemingly dangerous frontier as any of the native peoples helped to produce.  For the most part, though, they were absorbed in the economic value of these home grown things.

The common people of the era were much more concerned with clearing out and selling the pine forests and rhododendron thickets they came across.  To them, the most valuable plants were not ones that could provide for grand specimens in huge gardens, but rather apple trees which could produce safely drinkable cider and fruit or cash crops such as cotton and tobacco.  The great pines were amazing, but considered commonplace and inexhaustible.  The rhododendrons and other such non-lumber plants were just a mess to get out of the way of room meant for fields.  The small gardens which took up residence near domestic quarters were filled with familiar garden plants often imported from Europe, planted in an attempt to push off the frontier and create some sense of "civilized" tranquility.  The frontier moved on, eventually, but the wilderness which created it in the first place would slowly grow back; any glace at a map to this day will still show grand areas of green surrounded by cultivated miles upon miles, and this of course would be Appalachia. 

Well over a century would have to pass before people started thinking of the local plants as symbolic of what a truly different world North America had remained to exist as.  As economic opportunities shifted from into diverse fields of opportunity beyond natural resource extraction, and especially as the emotionally detached Enlightenment thinkers and encyclopedic intellectuals faded into memory during the Romantic ascension of the nineteenth century, North Americans started valuing their landscape on a different level.  North American art became dominated at certain stages by naturalist painters who thrilled in dramatic landscapes.  People trying to find a renewal of the spirit by departing noisy, polluted city life sought to try and conserve the land, its vegetation, and animals first in societies, then in zoos, and finally in reserves and parks. 

The damage had long since been done, however, and things such as rhododendrons, cacti, grasses, and even pines were reduced in territory to land that was considered less desirable for cultivation and development.  In short, there might have been a time where rhododendrons would have spread throughout Ontario and Michigan, cacti would have been common as far east as dunes lapped at by Lake Champlain, and an Eastern White Pine putting up a brave, if stunted, front on the tallgrass prairie of Nebraska would not have been entirely unthinkable.  The damage is still being done!  One is hard pressed to find people in the south planting, let alone remembering, their amazing Longleaf Pines.  The last sanctuary of the rhododendrons is being shaved away as mountain tops are entirely removed to get at a wimpy little layer of coal within.  Ranchers and home owners in Texas and Oklahoma still drag chains on their land to rip out anything resembling a cactus.  Nature, especially here in the demanding New World, however, has ways of showing just how tough and devil-may-care our plants, like our people, can be:

Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina.

Same as above

Great Smokey Mountains National Park, North Carolina side.

That's right.  Barely any soil to speak of except that made by otherwise beautiful and delicate Rhododendrons.  This is a New World which does not give up without a fight!

Thanks to all my viewers for taking a stop here on the blog and making this the most viewed month ever.  I'm glad to see that the spirit of exploration and a desire for learning can still be found in an age of reality television.

Not Really Rhododendrons: Mountain Laurel (Kalmia Latifolia)

Well, we took a look at the three biggies of the Appalachian Rhododendrons this week.  The funny thing is, however, there is another plant that, while not a Rhododendron in any way, shape, or form (other than also being a member of the heath family), they compete with them rather well on their home turf in terms of sheer loveliness. 

Somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  This specimen was so lovely that I actually did a Blue Ridge "no-no" and stopped traffic to take a picture of it and sigh over its gracefulness for a few seconds.  People honked, but then they each did the same thing behind me.  The sun filtered through the canopy so perfectly on this one glorious tree that I figured it just had to be arranged as such by Divine Providence.

Mountain Laurels grow in association with the Rhododendrons, where they expect similar conditions of fickleness in terms of soil acidity, just the right shares of sunlight and shade, and handle practically growing right out of a pile of rocks with the same ease as any of member of the heath family.  The funny thing is, they are a heath plant, but are closer related to blueberries than Rhododendrons.  They are evergreen, and they could definitely qualify as a small tree; their branches are curled, twisting, and numerous, forming an under-canopy cage of sorts just like the Catawbas.  Their leaves tend to look more like, well, a blueberry's, but much larger in scale.

Blue Ridge Parkway, near some sort of overlook.  This one had seen better days, but was still growing strong from some of its branches.

They are fairly common throughout much of all but the far northern Appalachians, and even grow as far south as the Mississippi gulf coast.  This means they can handle lower, steamy southern elevations, even while they seem at home up to the 5,000 foot mark.  They seemed to be most common between 4,000 and 5,000 feet.  I did not see as many Mountain Laurels as I saw Rosebays or even Catawbas, but when I did come across them, they were hard to miss.  I have never seen a single one in cultivation, although apparently many people grow them.  It seems that the Master Gardener keeps them mostly for himself, which is probably for the best, because nearly every one I have come across is a masterpiece when left in its own setting.

Words fail to describe more of this lovely thing, so I will let the rest of the non-Rhododendrons do the talking.  I never did manage to get a close up of the leaves or the flowers, in most cases because they were actually a bit inaccessible, being off some dangerous looking outcropping too far up or down to get safely close.

This was also off the Blue Ridge Parkway, hiding behind what a Table Mountain Pine (Pinus Pungens).

These last three are of the same glorious plant growing off of Newfound Gap Road in Great Smokey Mountains National Park on the Tennessee side.  This plant illustrates how thoroughly the blooms overtake the body of the tree.

Rhododendrons: Flame Azalea (Rhododendron Calendulaceum)

This is the third in a series of posts in which we will take a look at some of our native North American Rhododendrons.  Rhododendrons (and their happy sub-genus, Azaleas) occur throughout the continent except on the Great Plains, the eastern interior plains (southern Michigan, western Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.), and all of Mexico other than the mountains of northern Baja California.


"The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life."  -Katsumoto, from the Last Samurai.

Azaleas are a subgroup of the Rhododendron genus; they tend to be a bit smaller than their more robust looking cousins, and while they can put on quite the show in flowers, even in nice big bunches of flowers just like their bigger friends, they do not have flower clusters like the full Rhododendrons do.  They also tend to have a different general leaf shape than the familiar long and cold-curling Rhodies.  In North America, the Azaleas can be found everywhere from the usual mountain haunts to well into warmer, lower reaches near the coasts.  Unlike the Rhodies, most of which here tend to be evergreen, Azaleas in North America tend to be on the deciduous side.  We have 16 native species in North America, many of which can be found in the Appalachians.

One such species is the marvelous Flame Azalea (Rhododendron Calendulaceum), which has beautiful flowers that pull off some sort of heavenly combination of orange, red, and yellow.  Orange seems to be the most prevalent color in the wild population, but cultivators have managed to squeeze out brilliant selections from the neighboring colors of the rainbow to the degree that the Flames probably have as many garden children out there as most other Azaleas or Rhodies, even giving the Catawba descendants a run for their plant money.  While searching for wild type Flames at various nurseries, I have seen far more for sale than any other North American Rhododendrons or Azaleas.  And why not?  They are an incredibly beautiful flower that brings a real show of fiery color the garden.

All of these pictures of are of the same plant at milepost 361.2 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Glassmine Falls overlook.

Naturally, I just had to find one growing wild.  To be honest, I really had no idea they even existed until I was researching the genus two years ago, and ever since then I have been consumed with trying to find some wild Flames.  I knew I could easily find Catawbas and Rosebays, as their locations and bloom peaks are well documented, but for some reason the same has not been my experience of trying to find Flames.  So it was that when I took my recent botanical pilgrimage to the center of Rhodo heaven, well, even the majesty of Roan could not give pause to the hunt.  It turns out I was largely barking up the wrong tree.

The Flames are sort of in between the needs of the Catawbas and the Rosebays when it comes to elevation and exposure.  Like the Rosebays, they seem to thrive best under some amount of shade, yet they are also more than happy with a few hours of direct sunlight.  As such, they can be found on balds, especially the ultimate place to find them, Gregory Bald (which I did not find out about until I was leaving the Smokies), but they can also be found along slightly open areas in the forest understory.  I found a decent number along the Blue Ridge Parkway growing like this, mainly between Mt. Mitchell and Asheville, but like the Catawbas at Craggy Gardens, they were pretty much mostly done blooming by the third week of June at such altitudes higher than 4,000 feet but less than 5,500 feet.  In some places, they formed a decent patch of orange, but impatient motorists made stopping a pretty nasty prospect.  If you manage to hit the right flowering time for certain altitudes (they apparently can handle much lower elevations) it is likely that you will see a bunch more orange.  I was fortunate enough to find one growing half in the sun and half in the shade at the Glassmine Falls overlook.

For this reason I don't have many pictures of them, but the one I did find was a pretty nice specimen.

It was all alone, surrounded by a bunch of American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana), a pair of species that looked really nice and lush together.  As you can see, it (and the others I could not stop for) tends to be a bit more fragile looking than the Rhododendrons.  Flames are pretty delicate looking, but they still have nice globes of flowers (even if they only produce one flower per stem) and decent, somewhat glossy leaves.  I would still go so far as to call Flames such as this one a small tree rather than a shrub, because it was pushing twenty feet.  Among the Ash trees, it looked to be as much a part as the canopy as they did.  Elsewhere, especially among the maples and beech, they tended to function more like a second canopy just as the Rosebays do.  I hope to some day make it to Gregory or a similar bald to see them in their open habitat.

Just as Catawbas are a good sign, even an indicator, if you will, that one is close to if not decidedly in the Southern Appalachians, Flames for the southbound mountaineer are a mark that one has progressed at least as far south as the Central Appalachians.  They can be found infrequently in Ohio, and have been reported up in New York, although Pennsylvania claims they have been extirpated.  Like another showy plant that pops up in Ohio, the Crossvine (Bignonia Capreolata), the Flames look like they belong at the edge of the subtropical world.  I suspect that like the Rosebay, they might have once been a bit more common in the northern reaches, and probably got too much attention as a thing of beauty and thus been forcibly transformed into a hopeful garden dream, but their particular forest associations and preferences of habit leave me thinking they are not as northern in nature as their big leaf cousins. 

Rhododendrons: Rosebay Rhododendron (Rhododendron Maximum)

This is the second in a series of posts in which we will take a look at some of our native North American Rhododendrons.  Rhododendrons (and their happy sub-genus, Azaleas) occur throughout the continent except on the Great Plains, the eastern interior plains (southern Michigan, western Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.), and all of Mexico other than the mountains of northern Baja California.

While I maintain that Catawba Rhododendrons are amazingly beautiful and something that every true plant lover should make a pilgrimage to see at least once, the Rosebays have a special place in my heart.  They grow all the way up to Quebec and Nova Scotia and might have once covered more territory in Ontario.  For a broadleaved evergreen, they laugh at the face of winter cold, more so than even the mountain-top hugging Catawbas, but they also have limitations.  Like the domestic cultivars of the genus popular in gardens, the Rosebay is not really fond of the hot sun of the afternoon.  They also don't tend to get a lot of attention from gardeners outside of their home region of the Appalachians, which is a shame because they can be every bit as impressive in flower and scale as their Catawba cultivar cousins.  Like the Catawba, they are properly considered a tree, having every bit the stature of one.

Great Smokey Mountains National Park, alongside the Newfound Gap Road along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina.

That said, it tends to take on a bit more delicate of a branching structure than the mighty Catawbas.

The slender trunks of the Rosebay stand out in individual specimens.  This one was found at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park in Kentucky, along the Pinnacle Overlook road.

Like the Catawbas, it can and often does form pretty impressive forests in its own right.

Along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina.

The difference here, however, is that they don't like the same degree of exposure that the bald species do.  This probably owes to the fact that they are a more intermediate elevation rhododendron, which in the southern portion means that summer brings much warmer temperatures, and anywhere in its range means comparatively less available moisture for the plants.  As a result, one will find Rosebays among the forests, where they can even form a secondary canopy in places that they tend to dominate.  In the southern Appalachians, especially in the Smokies and along the Blue Ridge, they really do dominate, perhaps even to the exclusion of other plant life on the forest floor, an invasive native if you will.  

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, somewhere between Spruce Pine, NC and Mt. Mitchell.

Same as above.

Still, they do form a lovely understory, and fit in in a variety of surroundings, be they drier forests of oak and pine, where they are less common, and moister, northern forests of beech, maples, and hemlocks, where they can found at home both in the central and northern Appalachians and the Cove Forests of the southern Appalachians which duplicate these conditions in an otherwise much warmer setting.

A cove forest, but I don't recall where exactly.

They seem to perform the best, or at least occur almost without fail, along streams, especially in forests of Hemlock and associated trees.  Here they help to make for an incredible lushness in a darker green setting and reach proportions of size that put the Catawbas to shame.

Along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina, in Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

Same place as above.  That Rosebay in the left background up there was half the size of some pretty decent trees, well over 30 feet tall.

And speaking of size, they are not called Rhododendron Maximum as a joke.  Their leaves are the biggest of any Rhododendron in the world.  They can usually be identified by these long, relatively narrow leaves even when not in flower.  Herein also lies their main attraction for this particular gardener: huge evergreen leaves that can take northern winters.

Same location as above.

And yes, they flower as well as a Catawba does, in the same big globe clusters, albeit sometimes not always at once, and not necessarily as prolifically.  They also take their time flowering, flowering as early in the southern ranges as March and continuing up into August pretty much everywhere.

These first two were taken off the same plant, again along the Oconaluftee River in North Carolina in that amazing National Park.

This one was found at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park in Kentucky, again along the Pinnacle Overlook road.

All in all, a nice, if not as dramatically special Rhododendron that the Catawba is.  They certainly are more common, and in some places it was hard to miss them.  I have yet to find some of their natural populations further north, where they do thin out a bit more in comparison to the thickets of the south, but they are pretty common as escapes from cultivation, and they can even get weedy in character as they like to take advantage of disturbed areas, something odd for a plant that likes being cool, moist, and shaded.  

A chance meeting near a highway widening project, where land looks to have been opened for some time, along Gap Creek Road near Elizabethton, Tennessee. 

This was the canopy above those Rosebays, which this far south means drier conditions than they would normally frequent.  Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus) are a true northern species, but down here they seem to also make a lower-middle elevation home among the dry and hot conditions favored by oaks.  I would figure sand would have something to do with it.

One can find tons and tons of them along I-80 in Pennsylvania, especially on the stretch between I-81 and I-476:

Many more where this came from.  Sorry for the blur.  This was in the thirties in February, and they did not really look overly concerned about the cold.

To return to the White Pine picture for some closing comments, I have to wonder about just how widespread these things used to be.  Current botanical thinking is that they are opportunists that have taken advantage of artificial changes brought by humans in modern forest settings, akin to how the Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus Virginiana) is more prevalent than it once was.  While I don't argue with the evidence that backs up this line of thinking, because they really do tend to be opportunistic for a Rhododendron, the evidence also focuses on disturbed conditions, and in some decent growth forests they still do form an integral part of the scenery.

My thinking is, owing especially to their tolerances and favored conditions (I mean come on, they can handle cold just fine and they can pop out of rock hillside soil like its made of Miracle Gro), they were perhaps once a feature of forests in Ontario and decently into the Canadian Shield.  They do grow in upstate New York and Quebec, including parts of the Adirondacks and even Erie County, where urban development in Buffalo has probably removed a bunch of the wild population (I would looooove to find some if anyone knows of any wild ones there).  I could imagine that perhaps once, along with maybe Prickly Pear Cacti, grew happily in the sands of eastern Ontario below towering White Pines.  Sure, they might colonize disturbed areas bearing such conditions, but they are no stranger to somewhat dry pine lands, as this particular part of Connecticut demonstrates:

The Most Unusual Natural Area of Connecticut

Oh, and they are also movie stars, as far as plants go.  You can see a few flowering ones in the woods during the opening running scene in Last of the Mohicans!

Tomorrow we shall come across something a little different, an azalea!