Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.

Real Maple Syrup: Part Two

Moving along in our discovery of one of the most amazing native things ever produced from the continent, maple syrup, we must question why some syrups are naturally superior than others, and the answer lies in something similar to what makes wines different from one another: Terroir.

Terroir is a mystical, magical concept.  Like many French words, it has no powerful English equivalent with which to express its full meaning, but basically it comes down to all the things that make a plant do what a plant does best: react to its environment.  This includes weather and climate, soil, etc.  In the case of Vitis Vinifera, a.k.a. the wine grape, things are obviously extremely complex due to human intervention in cultivating numerous forms down through centuries of loving manipulation.  Various species of maple (and by extension, other possible syrup friendly trees), in contrast, at least our North American trees, have not nearly been selectively bred to the same extent that wine grapes have.  That said, we do have a small assortment of species to choose from in the syrup game, and also said, we find that nature is remarkable in that has long produced variations within species without our help.  In part, this is because terroir has affected our leafy friends in such a way that trees are likely to have some small variations in form and resulting taste even when sampled from neighboring areas.  A Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) from central Tennessee would find itself facing a rather brutal winter if it were to find itself suddenly in Quebec, to say nothing of what the same shock would be like for a Red Maple (Acer Rubrum), a far more generally adaptable species, suddenly finding itself no longer in the swamps of Southern Florida but among the shorelines of the Ottawa River.

This sort of stuff gets commercial tree growers in trouble quite a bit, especially where more tender temperate ornamental trees like the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis) are concerned.  One of the most obvious differences in terroir felt by a nursery grown tree from the South and imported into Le Nord would be the new and strange frigid winter that the tree would find itself trying to be hardy to.  Likewise, the tree would find that Le Nord is not nearly as hot in the summer as it was back South, to say nothing of how much less humid and rainy!  Finally, it would also find that the soil was so very, very different from what it grew up in.  I could go on and on about terroir, or Phytogeography, which is pretty much what the core of this blog is about, but...

The maples!

Most maples are creatures of the forest, and thus are very fond of mixed-light conditions and moisture, moisture, and more moisture.  With the exception of the aloof, adaptable, and mysterious Box Elder (Acer Negundo), none of our temperate eastern maples are courageous enough to venture far into the drier prairie lands, and the Red Maple will not even make it very far into the eastern prairies of Illinois or Indiana, being completely afraid to face the possibility of drought combined with fire, which is another reason why I probably found even the thought of central Illinois syrup to be funny (to be fair, Sugar Maples and Black Maples are apparently made of tougher stuff and can indeed be found in forested patches there).  Sure, the maples can be planted further afield from their comfortable natural ranges, but they might not produce enough starch in their roots to make syrup production viable.  Syrup production in most places was not the best in the March of 2013, owing to the colossal hot, drought-heavy summer that was 2012.  The brunt of that disaster was felt in the True Midwest, but trees were sufficiently stressed in all but northern New England.  Rocky, sandy, well-drained northern Ontario and neighboring western Quebec and northern Michigan baked and dried to a crisp.  Massive forest fires made life even more difficult.

That year, Vermont won the award.

Thankfully, most of the time the inland north does better.  Why?  A little thing called maritime, or oceanic influence.

The most powerful maritime climates in the world are usually envisioned as being temperate western Europe, the Pacific Northwest, etc., but a typical cold January day even in chilly Nova Scotia is decidedly more moderate of a chill than one would find farther inland, even New Brunswick and Maine. Champlain and friends discovered this first hand when their colony of Saint Croix was established in a very chilly position, and soon made way to the other side of the Bay of Fundy where they established the roots of future Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia.  Saint Croix was on the "inland" side of the bay, gaining no benefit from the prevailing westerlies which would skim the mostly unfrozen waters, pick up moisture, and moderate the winter chill.  Still, even Saint Croix is much more mild than places further inland, such as the St. Lawrence valley.  The ocean, westerlies or not, is like a giant road block for intense continental chill.  New England, as a result, is a tropical paradise compared to neighboring Quebec and upstate New York.

That said, the same can be noted for upstate New York in comparison to Michigan and southern Ontario, and then Michigan in comparison to Wisconsin.  The Great Lakes, you see, have a small amount of maritime influence of their own.

Public domain, see the original at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041130.html.

The above picture features a north western wind, but the overall effect remains the same: downwind of the lakes one gets moderated temperatures and a ton of moisture.  In the summer, this sometimes has a reverse effect of creating something like a coastal California marine layer, wherein the water and shoreline areas are under heavy cloud while inland the place is delightfully sunny.  In any event, even smaller bodies of water can influence climate, with an unfrozen Lake St. Clair providing small scale changes to the local climate.  The larger lakes, though, are truly things of raw climactic power.  Superior creates its own weather systems!  Well, she does until she manages to largely freeze over.  The lake effect runs to a screeching halt once the bodies get a coat of ice.  A total coat is rare for all but Erie, but enough of the surface area gets frozen in places like Georgian Bay, western Superior, and the Straits of Mackinac, that winter does come and the true maritime influence disappears.  The result for the local terroir in places like northern Michigan, the Adirondacks, and the Opeongo Hills section (Algonquin highlands) of the Laurentian Mountains is the best of both worlds; New England meets Boreal.

Like in the deserts of the western United States and Canada and northern Mexico, elevation rise is the second factor in enhancing this climate soup.  As air rises on the Porcupine, Adirondack, or Laurentian mountains or onto the Mio Plateau, all of which are significant rises above the surrounding lowlands (a change of at least a thousand feet in many places), it cools if even ever so slightly, and dumps out moisture.  In each of these locations, a slight rain-shadow is even created.  The most noticeable of these is in the central Ottawa valley of Ontario, where Jack-Pine savannas and cacti can be found.  Like in the desert sky-islands out west, the Opeongo portion of the Laurentian mountains contrast this scenery with moist spruce-hardwood forests, replete with maritime expectations like Red Spruce (Picea Rubens) and Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis), well west of their happy Appalachian strongholds.  Then of course there are the maples, benefiting both from the same moisture, and the final ingredient of terroir: recycled life and powerful organic soil (and on the Mio plateau and in the Laurentians, glacially deposited sand an loam to assist in drainage).  Powerful for trees, anyway.  Farming never took off in any of these mountain lands, confined instead to nearby clay belts in the surrounding lowlands.  The end result is a logging paradise, and more so, a maple syrup dream, the moisture of the Appalachians with the winters of the interior (sorry Vermont, you are just close enough to oceanic protection to make the slight difference for the pickiest syrup-enthusiast), perfect for feeding a tree and then keeping the food locked away from pesky winter thaws.  When that sap starts to run, it really runs.

In review, the best sort of syrup (and remember, that local soil can make you even pickier) comes from here:

And yes, x does indeed mark the spot of syrup in its Platonic form, but that is just my opinion regarding the finest terroir.  What can I say?  Those Canadian Shield minerals are just amazing.  Next post, we will start looking at individual trees, and we will cap off with individual products.  And before I get any letter-bombs sent to me from the Green Mountain state, Vermont syrup is fine.  Honest. 

Real Maple Syrup: Part One

While I was out today, dearest mother, who is thoroughly Canadian to the core, insisted that she simply could not live without maple syrup.  I agree, to a point.  I personally cannot do without a supply of good maple syrup.  Naturally, I looked at what was available, and naturally, it was from northern New England.  This is not to be unexpected, as maple syrup has been an ongoing concern among the Green Mountain folk for some time, ever since the earliest settlers to New England noticed the first born making it through the winter a bit better because of it.  That said, the first born a bit further north taught some other trans-Atlantic arrivals a thing or two about the miracle sap of the maple tree.  The French arrived on the scene even earlier than the first residents of second born Massachusetts, and believe me, Canada is far more savage in the winter time than anything coastal New England has to offer.  In the words of Samuel de Champlain, "there are six months of winter here". 

Therein lies a key truth about maple sugar production.  The whole journey begins with the sap of the tree being liberated from its arboreal prison, a process which happens only when the holy elixir flows.  For this to happen, the tree must become aware that its dormant period of winter rest is coming to an end, and starch stored in the roots then rises in order to get the tree back up and running.  The next part is the real trick, namely that things need to get cold again at night so the whole process is not rushed by the tree.  A slight increase in temperature over freezing during the day is enough to make the tree run more of that delightful root energy back higher into the crown.  Obviously, to get any sort of sap at all, the maple tapper is best off being in an area where such conditions are likely to happen on a regular basis.  Theoretically, any maple that will produce sap that can make for decent tasting sugar can be used, as long as the tree enters and exits dormancy; maple syrup has been made with some success down into the higher elevations of Georgia.  Funks from central Illinois near Bloomington has been producing "sirup" since the 1840's.  In a moment of sheer snobbery, I regret to say that I declined to make a visit while en route to Springfield.  To be fair, I was shocked to see any sort of a sugar bush in the heart of the eastern tallgrass prairie in hot, humid, flat Illinois.  I have since had the opportunity to try some of their creation, and it is pretty decent, considering the unfair conditions they have to deal with in terms of what may jokingly be called a spring thaw. 

Look at that, see, I'm already ranting. 

Anyway, as with so many other agricultural things, syrup can, and indeed does, vary based on a number of conditions.  While few would argue that differences between syrups are as noticeable and pronounced as those between wines, the truth is that an Illinois sirup made from a Black Maple (Acer Nigrum) will be noticeably different from a New Brunswick syrup made from Red Maple (Acer Rubrum).  Some people, such as your author, can also tell the difference between a Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) syrup produced in Lapeer, Michigan and the same produced in Mason, Michigan, places with relatively similar climates and even soil conditions.  Maybe I'm picky and imagining things, but one imagines that trees with such huge ranges and such varying growing conditions would be not without variations in sap taste, let alone general botanical characteristics.  Mr. and Mrs. Red Maple, after all, can be found everywhere from tropical Southern Florida to windswept and rainy Newfoundland:

Thanks, USGS!

Next post, we shall explore the wonderful world of things maple in terms of climate, weather, and all that stuff that happens up in the sky.  (And yes, Vermont syrup is fine, and yes, I will tell you all about how wonderful if inferior it is, etc.  And no, Everglades syrup is not a real thing).

Wednesday Filler: A Western Intruder

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

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

The Palms of Charleston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palms In The Carolina Landscape: An Historical Overview

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

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

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

Thanks, Open Clipart!

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

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

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

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

Finding The North In Congaree

Today we take the first few steps onto the boardwalk at Congaree National Park.

One of the first things a northern type such as myself notices about the world between the uplands and the floodplain, as small as it may be, is how familiar the surrounding forest is.  Tall deciduous trees grow rather closely together, many species being the same sort of thing we have up north, if not similar in form to more northerly trees.  A Sweet-gum (Liquidambar Styraciflua) can pass for a maple at first glance, and there are even some Tulip Trees (Liriodendron Tulipifera) around to remind us that even this far south we are still passing through what can still be considered the Eastern mixed-forest.  Still, people expecting something more Southern lowcountry are hoping to see those amazing fluted bases of the cypresses or tupelos.  Instead, before we can even make it a decent portion of the way along the boardwalk, we find... a beech?!

Yes, that would indeed be a rather massive American Beech (Fagus Grandifolia), something one would expect to find at a higher elevation in the Appalachians or most certainly among the namesake Beech-Maple forests of the Great Lakes.  Here the thing is positively thriving, with a girth to it that I have never seen on a deciduous tree short of an oak or a Tulip Tree back northwards.  The upper branches themselves looked like they belonged on a mature tree!

That's what a long growing season and plenty of moisture can do down here, one supposes.  American Beech is not entirely a northern tree, as it can barely make it much into the Boreal forest and ranges slightly south into Florida.  Supposedly down that far it still claims title as a king of the canopy, being a tree that makes it all the way into the final stages of forest succession and is a true feature of the mature old growth deciduous canopy.

With love, USGS, with love.

Still, it is northern enough to have been fondly remembered as a regular feature of the forests of the northern Great Lakes.  Trunk after trunk there is marked by bear claw scratches, and most Black Bears (Ursus Americanus) that I have ever come into contact with were high up in a Beech looking down at me.  While the Beech disappear as the north shore of Lake Superior comes into view, they are certainly a regular feature of the edge of the Boreal world.  To see one of such grandeur in Congaree told me almost instantly that here we have a special place not only for the greater South, but perhaps even for the greater East.  Pretty soon, however, a few more steps along the boardwalk took me into that Southern world I was expecting...

Gratitude For Snowy Saturdays

Snow has finally made it to Southeastern Michigan, and it looks as if the ground will have a decent blanket for some time to come (I know that seems shocking to those of you who live in the Ohio Valley or D.C. which has since seen winters to put our historic ones to shame).  This is the first decent snow cover we have seen in Livingston County for well over three years now, a sad situation that has gone hand in hand with extremes of heat and cold, prolonged seasonal lag, and even tornadoes in March, something I thought I would never see.  I write this now because I am thankful that we are seeing something of a real winter this year so far.  I write this because I have seen so many people posting about the snow in Cairo and claiming that such is evidence that global warming is a hoax.  Perhaps it is, but what is not a hoax is that the world's climate is changing dramatically, rapidly, and through our actions.  Snow in Cairo, week long freezes in Florida, an August here in Michigan that felt more like an October, followed by a September that felt more like a July?  These are not normal things, and they are happening more and more.  Hurricanes are turning into half-a-continent wide superstorms.  I, and people like me, don't say these things to scare you into something.  What good does it do me?  What do I get out of it?

On the other hand, there are politicians in the pocketbooks of corporate leaders who want you to feel like this is all some Leftist conspiracy meant to take away even more of your guns, religious freedom, and force you to give money to poor people or else the Planet might explode.  Truth be told, I could care less about your guns as they are your property and not mine, but I do care about how you use them and if you have the right judgment to know when a good time to use them would be.  Truth be told, I don't want religious freedom taken away as I view religion as I view the rest of human everything, an incredibly good thing, again, if used properly and for the sake of looking into our place in eternity.  I myself am a Roman Catholic and believe in my heart and soul that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, which is a very good thing because I have so many, many bad things to be accountable for.   I'm thankful that I can proclaim this without being shot by some control freak despot who thinks I should be something else.  Truth be told, I don't want you to be forced to give money to some poor person, because you might just miss the point of what that deed means.  I want you to understand what life is like for that person and to see them as more than just some required object of charity, as they are much more than that.  Money, like any resource, should be also more than just an object and used a bit more responsibly than we tend to use it, at least in Canada and the United States. 

I could keep going, but this is not a political blog.  Why bring it up at all, you ask?  I bring it up because this is a very political continent.  I tend to view such a reality in a positive light, even while I can sometimes be pessimistic about the path to open war we seem to be set on.  I say this because politics of our sort does have a good side wherein change can come a lot quicker than in more sedate democratic societies.  While I tend to think that extreme partisanship is a dreadful thing that weakens us all, I think that having sides at all means that we care a great deal about some issues.  That partisanship, though, can lead us to believe that we have to follow a certain line and that yucky, ugly things like "climate change" are part of the package of the "other side" and we must therefore think of them as little more than a blinding toxin.  I could probably keep blabbering on here to tell you why climate change should not be just dismissed as a political issue of the opposition, but I think for now I will let this wonderful video do the talking for me:

http://www.upworthy.com/the-future-of-the-earth-s-next-100-years-visualized?c=ufb1

Our continent, and indeed our world, is a precious thing.  It is our home, and we are responsible, as its most dominant species and/or as its caretakers entrusted by God not to keep vomiting on it the way that we have been.  Yes, we do need to rise above political agendas from both sides (looking at you Kyoto accords, you dirty, self-serving German brainchild designed to cripple economies you don't like), but we also need to understand that we are having a really bad effect on our planet. 

In the meantime, there is a solid blanket of snow outside, we are getting a good amount of winter chill needed by the local assortment of ecosystems to thrive, and it does well to remind me that while change is a constant in nature, there is a plan for it and us that are far beyond what our limited visions can even imagine, a plan which our arrogance needs to be reviewed in the face of.  The celestial time table could give a you-know-what about your stocks and futures.  In the meantime, I am happy to have a reminder that I don't actually live in the South that I look at with envy, because down South they don't have these:

I-94 near Port Huron, some of the southernmost Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) around. 

And for the moment, I am glad to be reminded that we do, and that I live at the southernmost whispering edge of the amazing hemisphere-spanning Boreal forest.  Those lovely birch there are still holding their own despite thousands of years of gradual climate change after their prime northern weather retreated with the Laurentian Ice Sheet.  They are a testament to a grand plan in which some things do remain constant despite and/or even in the midst of so much change, a reminder that a greater mystery always remains above our little plans and fields of vision.  As the elegance of the birches reminds us, though, not entirely being in control is hardly as bad as it might seem.  This Saturday night, when someone my age should be out getting bombed somewhere, well, I'm instead just happy because I see that pure white blanket outside. 

Fitting Big Trees Into Small Spaces

This can be done!  Now, yes, one should plant in favor of letting nature do its thing and not confine the wild to something as ignoble as pot, but when you don't have the room and want to dwell among more than just concrete, well, there are trees that can do that.  Even better, there are native trees that can adapt oh so well.  Take this lovely creature, since we are talking about the South and all:

You know, in most places they would try to clip the thing into a fine topiary to keep it off the windows.  Not here.  This was taken on Broad Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

 This is a Balcypress (Taxodium Distichum), a tree that around this part of the world gets very wet feet and often stands at the edge of rivers and lakes in actual open water.  Here it was, however, in the heart of Charleston growing practically out of the sidewalk.  It was not alone!

For those wondering, the palm is a Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto), which can be found in almost every viewpoint in the city.  I think this was taken on Church street, but I am not entirely sure.

Here we have a Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana) forming a rather broad crown with such a tiny base.  Granted, the base was filling out its growing space rather impressively.

That adorable little palm growing next to it is a Dwarf Cabbage (Sabal Minor).

Clearly the people of Charleston, even with such limited space, preferred their skyline to be a mixture of artifice and nature.  Except for the some of the major streets, it seemed as if every plausible inch of the city was planted and then on a grand scale.  I have always noticed this a lot about any urban area in the South older than the past few decades; our winter home in Fort Lauderdale had a backyard featuring two seventy foot tall Royal Palms (Roystonea Regia) and a sixty foot Slash Pine (Pinus Elliottii) graced the neighboring yard.  The climate is just going to ensure that a giant scale is the default setting, and the locals don't seem to be too quick to put a stop to growth.  This is not to say that the North is lacking in such a mentality, but just that places like Charleston seem to promote a more organic approach to the city landscape.  I could probably write loads more on the topic, but I figured I would let the pictures do the talking here. 

Residents Of The Piney South: The Slash Pine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday Filler: Mossy Pines

As one heads further into the Deep South, one finds a rather amazing lushness develop inch by inch.  One such feature of increasing heat and humidity would be the presence of a plant that loves both, namely Spanish Moss (Tillandsia Usenoides).  It is an epiphyte (air-plant) which hangs off of trees and lives off of nutrients that would otherwise wash off the branches.  Contrary to what one imagines, it does not in any way damage the tree it grows on.

Both shots taken in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Normally the moss favors the broad, open branches of the Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana) or Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), but as seen above it will occasionally grow on a pine like that Slash Pine (Pinus Elliottii).  A host is host, even with thick clusters of needles.  Botanists theorize that Spanish Moss is carried from place to place and thus reproduced by birds using it as nesting material.  Fewer birds colonize the pines than the other trees, but perhaps the wind also works where the birds (or the less picky birds) fail to nest.

Residents Of The Piney South: The Longleaf Pine

The South did not always look as it does today.  The Loblolly Pine (Pinus Taeda), while common in pre-settlement times, was not nearly the apparent monoculture of endless coniferous wallpaper that it is today.  Once there were pines that were as tall and as graceful as the Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus), the best example one might give for their northern counterpart.  Both grand trees managed to make their way to the crown of forest existence only through a baptism of fire, and the northern majesty and southern elegance alike needed the flames to wipe out the competition and let the sun do its work.  The two could not otherwise be more different, however.

The White Pine, you see, needed competition gone to reach into heights above what would later fill back in as a main canopy beneath their super canopy.  This southern pine I speak of, however, was a creature of the savanna more so than the forest.  This pine is the Longleaf (Pinus Palustris).  Like the Loblolly, there are very few pictures of it that I can say to have taken, but not for the same reasons at all.  The Longleaf, you see, is a tree that has fallen on hard times for the last 150 years.  Aside from isolated trees (which can be found rather frequently), only a quarter or less of the ecosystem they supported in great numbers still exists.  In truth, I have never experienced a Longleaf savanna with my own senses.  Only recently in Congaree National Park did I even see a stand of more than several of them together:

Congaree is probably one of the most amazing national parks in the world, just in terms of sheer treeness.

And what a sight they were.  I was already pining away (did I just do that?) to see a gathering of them after having an inspiring read of Janisse Ray, but what I saw when I found them in an approximation of their past glory, I was surprised by just how impressive they truly are.  Up close they look somewhat similar to any globe-clustered pine, in some ways even more like an old growth Red Pine (Pinus Resinosa) than a Loblolly is, but from even a slight distance, the scale and elegant sweep of their branches puts them in a beauty class more approximate to that of the White Pine.  The forest you see above is not the best approximation one could give of what a healthy forest of these things looks like, namely because they were very much a creature of the forested grassland, soaring over happy little seedlings, blueberries, palmettos, Wiregrass (Aristida Stricta), and enough forbs to make even the Midwestern tallgrass prairie swoon in lust.  Apparently one could stand in a Longleaf "forest" and look in all directions and see miles and miles of trunks soaring over the park-like expanses as if they were columns in a natural cathedral of Cordoba.  Imagine it, a place where the game was plentiful, the breeze blew freely under a semi-open sky, and yet the grand trees still provided a lovely shade as if one were in thicker woods.  I suppose I have a weakness for our native grasslands of any stripe, yet you have to admit that this sounds pretty damn wonderful. 

The First Born certainly did.  In addition to the fires that the many storms of the region would provide and the grazing that the many ungulates, including Buffalo, would do, the First Born would keep the place as it was supposed to be by now and then starting a fire of their own, just as they would in the rest of the eastern grassland ecosystems.  This was simply their style of land management, to continue the work that nature was already doing and use it within their agricultural and hunting practices.  Then along came us, the Second Born, who were used to fencing off plots of land and requiring the soil to be productive not only for sustenance, but the generation of capital.  The first two and a half centuries of Southerners loved this ecosystem too for its fertility, but also because the trees were just incredible to use for lumber.  At the same time, there was a different pace of life in the South that let the land become conquered much more slowly.  Similar to how a semi-solitary existence and frontier mentality was the norm in the backcountry stretching from Vermont to the Smokies, the lowland people of the South did not try to farm over every square inch of what they saw and actually sort of blended into the back woods.  Yes, I did classify the land that the Longleaf once grew in as the low country, but Southern culture is a unique thing that blurs divisions like that.  More on this as the blog endures.

But then great changes came about as industrialization and productivity started taking over the nation after the Civil War.  The frontier moved west, and along with it went the go-to-hell rugged individualism of the Eastern backcountry.  That said, as the beautiful but inhuman plantation existence came to an end, many Southerners went back to fending for themselves and went into small-scale cotton farming in that wonderful ground that the Longleaf savannas once blessed.  In tandem, however, the market became more spread out and roads of rail and dirt alike starting developing the land faster and faster, and with it went what was left of those marvelous parklands of pine.  The pace has only increased ever since, along with the rate at which the last remnants of the old, colonial even, Southern culture have disappeared.  Again, this is not necessarily the classic movie-type slave-holding plantation culture, but something as older than cotton or Loblolly stands.  Like the Longleaf itself, such a culture is a lost memory consigned to the same dusty bin of history where the First Born sit, buried even behind the plantations and the sharecroppers and the other stuff that is now buried behind whatever it is we have developing today.  Almost makes me sound like an old man telling the kids to get off my lawn...

Anyway, as I neglected to provide a map last time for the Loblolly, and since the comparison of how deep into the South we are getting with our pines seems appropriate to now give, here's the Lobolly range:

Thanks USGS!

And the Longleaf range:

As you can see, the ranges are comparable, but the Longleaf likes just a little bit more of a lower and hotter climate and does not venture too far onto the Piedmont.  Ready to get even toastier and really sub-tropical?  Feast yer eyes on the range of the Slash Pine (Pinus Eliottii), which will be our next and final guest of pines before we get into some really fun Southern stuff:

Yep, this is where we really start getting into the DEEP South.  Heck, you can't even see Canada on that map.

Sunday Afternoon Post: Looking Like A Southern Pine

Just a little picture today to keep the blog going.  When I will reference comparisons between pines in the coming posts, I probably will be bringing up the noble Red quite a lot.  Here she is:

Such a lovely, open crown.  This was taken in Ontario, home of the best Red Pines.  Sorry, Minnesota. 

Red Pines (Pinus Resinosa) are definitely a creature of the north, not making it farther south than Milwaukee in the west and sticking to the mountains only as far south as Scranton in the east (with an isolated anomaly in West Virginia), but they bear a striking resemblance to the Loblolly Pine (Pinus Taeda), which never even come 100 miles near each other at the closest extremities of their range.  While it might be interesting to think of the two trees as subspecies of one another, the Red Pine has needles in clusters of two, while the Loblolly keeps them in threes.  Their cones are also a bit different, with the Red Pine's being brittle and open, and the Loblolly's being spiny, tough, and closed. 

Other than that, they present a similar crown profile in advanced stages of growth, with nice globular masses of needles arranged as if they were ornaments on the trees.  They both like things well-drained and even exposed and windy, the Red Pine being immune to the worst of winter cold and the Lobolly able to handle the worst of southern summer heat.  They also get treated as second fiddle to the two botanically worshiped pines of their same ecosystems, The Eastern White (Pinus Strobus) for the Red and the Longleaf (Pinus Palustris) for the Loblolly.