Q and A: Southern Lush

I came across a particularly lovely picture tonight, one worthy of standing by itself in a post.  I was looking to post on another closely related topic, that of how rivers affect their surroundings in terms of soil and plant life, but that's looking like it will be a huge undertaking in terms of the sheer pictures that need to be uploaded.  Instead, since I have been active on this here blog again, and a few questions have started streaming in, tonight we feast upon a picture and try to answer a question.

Q: Since you have been to so many places and lived in quite a few, where would be an ideal place to plant some roots if you had the option?

A: That is a very unfair, difficult question.  If money were no object, I would love to have multiple small places.  One which is already there, up north in Ontario.  One on the high plains, preferably eastern Wyoming or western Nebraska.  One in highland Mexico, in the trans-volcanic belt.  One in western New York or southern Michigan, where I would probably spend most of my time.  One in the coastal South... yes, especially that one. 

If you rephrase the question as "where would you like to live to be able to garden to your heart's content", it would still be tricky, as I have a fondness for northern species of trees, shrubs, and in the flower department, for the gifts of the prairie, but wow, the South has amazing native stuff like evergreen oaks, more azaleas than you can shake a stick at, pines upon pines, moss dripping off of it all, and... magnolias.  Not the hardy, Asian hybrid kind that flower before they leaf out, but the kind that never lose their leaves and flower in full green.  Needless to say, I do have a picture, and a natural one at that, of most of these elements put together:

Oh yes, that is truly lovely.  Sure, it comes with some price tags, notably brutal summers of heat and humidity, destructive storms for a much longer period than up north (including hurricanes), and much less of a thrill regarding the onset of spring, but... I mean look at that!  The tree on the left with the brown undersides to the leaves is a Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora), perhaps the second or third most beautiful tree on the planet.  The tree on the right with the lighter green, almost maple looking leaves is a Sweetgum (Liquidambar Styraciflua), a tree that can be found from the tropical cloud forests of Central America to the Ohio Valley and New York City, one of the few trees besides the Red Maple (Acer Rubrum of our past maple sugar posts) and Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum) to brilliantly light up the Autumnal southern canopy.  In the center stage below is a Sabal Minor or Dwarf Palmetto, the northernmost naturally occurring species of palm in North America, and in the rear, dripping with that incredible Spanish Moss (Tillandsea Usneoides) is one of those incredible evergreen oaks, the Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana).  Its a veritable natural stand of who's who in the Southern tree world.  When I found this thicket, growing so peacefully off the shores of Albergottie Creek in Beauford, SC, I stared for a good ten minutes, as if it were a holy icon.

Then I had to wonder why these trees, clearly more in love with being nice and dry, were so close to something so decidedly wet like a tidal creek.  Except for the palm, none of these species like to get their feet soaked for a long time.  Then I remembered that even a few inches of elevation change can make all the difference in an otherwise very low landscape such as this.  That's the special thing about river habitats, really, they have a strong influence on their immediate surroundings, but life goes back to something else once you get far and high enough away, as we will see in our upcoming river post.  At the same time, rivers have far more of an effect on us humans; while we love to use them to travel and fence in for aesthetic purposes, we sometimes also learn to give them a wide berth, what with the way flooding and erosion works.  In many places such as this, the "extended river" becomes a vessel of green and wild cutting through an otherwise cultivated and transformed landscape.  So, to be more precise about that question, something in the South near, but not on, a river.  To be honest, the mosquitoes are just a bit much to handle...

Wednesday Filler: Philadelphia's Environmentalist River

The Schuykill River was, like the Juniata spoken of yesterday, a major conduit for colonial expansion deeper into Pennsylvania.  The Lenape people, re-named the Delaware by later Pennsylvanians, formed part of the central portion of their nation around the banks of this and the Delaware River.  Unlike the Haudenosaunee who lived further west in the mountains, the Lenape spoke an Algonquian language, like many other nations along the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Maine.  The Lenape were pretty knowledgeable farmers, and readily understood the ecological importance of fire; the local pine barrens naturally renewed with periodic fires.  The banks of the river itself were, and are, largely lush, owing to the humid and mild climate of this part of Pennsylvania.

Looking north off of the bridge carrying US 30.  As one can tell from the exposed banks, the tide is low (this lower part of the river is influenced by oceanic tides, like the lower Delaware which it flows into).  A weir runs across the length of the river beyond the next bridges.  That classical looking building on the right is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Rocky the steps.

The river has seen not so natural history, of course, being torn apart and polluted by some of the earliest activity of the Industrial Revolution in North America.  The river was of immense fascination for naturalists such as both Bartrams and Audubon, and was later the focus of one of attempts to ensure cleaning drinking water for Philadelphia.  In the last century, it has been largely cleaned up, and much of its banks are incredibly natural, rather than developed right to the water's edge.  Today the river retains its traveler focus, thanks to such environmentalist foundations and concern, and serves as an incredible place to canoe or kayak while taking in scenes of nature in the midst of a cosmopolitan, yet very American, city.

Juniata Sunset

As I was searching for pictures for yesterday's post, I ran across some particularly memorable scenes taken during sunset while driving along US 322 on the banks of the lower Juniata River in central Pennsylvania.  I've been through there several times, and while the area is pretty lovely during the day, it is absolutely stunning at sunset.  In the last post I mentioned that Pennsylvania has its share of farmland and open fields, but the Juniata is Pennsylvania in a more primal form.  Much of the river area is forested, and even though the valleys have featured settlement of both Iroquoian peoples and colonials, it was a staging area and frontier area, respectively. 

Daytime, July of 2011.

Like many rivers in the region, the Juniata allowed for easy connections between the Appalachian interior and the Atlantic coastal lands, and the river is notable for being oriented east-west, like the Potomac, rather than north-south like most of the other waterways.  In addition to long since providing the First Born with connections to the interior, it provided early drive for colonial explorers wanting to press further west into the otherwise difficult terrain of the Appalachians.  Pennsylvania's lower easy Atlantic facing lands penetrated pretty far inland; Chambersburg, for instance, is halfway west into the state.  The Juniata, which is thirty miles north, provided a tempting path to get lost on.  Canals and Railroads would later follow, notable the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, which bridged the Allegheny divide by means of a portage railroad.  Dear portage nps site, I regret not stopping there last summer!  


The canals and railroads ultimately never dominated those in New York or along the National Road route, the former a path the Haudenosaunee were also keen not only on maintaining, but also settling as the heart of their confederacy.  Colonial peoples were also more keen on moving on to the Ohio country; the Juaniata was the scene of frontier settlement in the early 18th century, but the area remained sparsely populated and is still very much verdant and sylvan to this day.  In some ways, its not hard to see why.  Typical of regional rivers, the river cuts through the imposing ridges of the Appalachians, and in some places the slopes come right down to the water's edge.  Dense riparian forests of willows and friends cover the shores, things are rather rapid and rocky in the river itself, and the upland forests have thick underbrush of rhododendrons and other typical Appalachian plants in many places.  Like the canyons of southern California, the Juniata and other regional valleys can provide for some very natural America not far from densely populated America.  The sense of passage and frontier is still very much obvious, especially when the sun disappears over the western horizon. 

And since I did label the post as such...

July 2014.

Hope you enjoyed it!  Sorry for blabbering on so much, but the colonial era frontier has always been very interesting to me.  It easily gets lost behind the later romance of the distant western frontier, and is often ignored by intelligent people otherwise trying to rediscover how the relationships between native and colonial peoples evolved in the middle stages of the modern American story.

The View From (Part Of) The Boardwalk At Congaree

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

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

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

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

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

 

More information on Congaree can be found here:

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

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