Land of the Longleaf Pines

We just returned from a long weekend in Thomasville in southwest Georgia. Driving back in the rain that has dominated north Georgia’s weather for the past three months, it came to me that I had never shared with my readers how I came to choose the name for my website. The simple answer is that I spent ten years as the director of Pebble Hill Plantation in the Red Hills region of southwest Georgia, heart of some of the last remaining longleaf pine stands. And it got in my blood.

Longleaf pine once dominated the coastal plain that sprawls from New Jersey to east Texas. It was an inland environment away from the fever-ridden coastal swamps and marshes. Here, tobacco and later cotton gave rise to the plantation system of the deep south.

These towering longleaf giants are not to be confused with the planted trees used in reforesting efforts, the row- cropped, slash pines along I-16 as you find your way south from Macon to Savannah. Nor are they the same as the beautiful and adaptive loblolly pines that grow to enormous size on lower, often damper, ground. The land in southwest Georgia is characterized by sand-covered ridges and red clay subsoil. Trees in mature longleaf stands are at some distance from each other (they are heavy feeders) and for much of the day the woods are dappled with sunlight, revealing ground covered with fragile wire grass in warm weather and in winter by a layer of brown pine needles. Here live the burrowing gopher tortoises.

Wildlife abounds in subtle forms here. Rattlesnakes cannot dig since they have no limbs, no claws themselves, so they share the tunnels of the gopher tortoises. Here, the snakes and tortoises wait out the passing ground fires. Ignited by lightening or human hands, the forest floor is burned with some regularity and left clean and clear for much of the year. The burned under story erupts into a sea of ferns in late February. Red-cockade woodpeckers hammer through the bark of the most ancient of these pines, usually because in old age the trees succumb to a disease called “Red Heart.” The birds nest in the disease-hollowed core, safe from earth-bound predators. By pecking holes and releasing the tree’s sap, they even create an acrid barrier that snakes loath, keeping them away from both the woodpecker’s eggs and hatchlings.

Oaks and hickory, poplar and magnolia have the temerity to intrude into this monoculture along its fringes and in pockets of lower ground, along creeks and beside the big lakes found here. Raging tree-top, full blown forest fires sometimes create ecological opportunities for the hardwoods. These deciduous, broad-leafed trees drop acorns or mast onto damp uninhabited soil. If there is no fire over the next four to six years, they may become established. Younger ones die out when the longleaf stands are subjected to “prescribed” burns. Pines are usually able to survive the ground-level burns.

Fox squirrels, grey, black, or red (and surprisingly often albino), play lazy games here, cutting off the green pine cones or acorns in their clustered shells, then saunter down the trunk to pick out the nutritious soft “meats” or seeds. They can afford to be lazy. Foxes and even now-plentiful coyotes cannot climb. Minks and weasels are less often seen these days. Fox squirrels have grown fat and lazy.

Red-shouldered hawks, plentiful here, are large enough only to threaten the youngest and weakest of the fox squirrels. Hawks are fairly easy to discover. They often use roadside power lines as perches. From there they often hunt, as raptors will, as a family unit, parents and youngster. With a little experience anyone can recognize their vocalized sharing of information. When they approach the nesting places of the crows, the crows raise a ruckus, even attack the hawks in flight. This continues until the hawk gives up or settles on a limb to feed on the nestlings.

The great and fearsome explorer, Hernando de Soto and his chroniclers saw these forests as “deserts,” seemingly endless, dry, open woodlands, easy to march through, but barren of food – at least food familiar to Spanish pallets. For food, the conquistadors relied mainly on the herd of pigs they brought with them, pigs that fed on the plentiful acorns and subsurface tissues of soft-rooted plants.

The swine, as well as the Conquistadors, carried deadly infections against which Native Peoples had little immunity. So this invasion, or “Entrada,” brought terrible diseases to the people they encountered – and in the wake of this expedition, the diseases were transmitted, spread and recurred in waves until the vast majority of Native Americans had perished. The long-leaf “deserts” were an avenue of invasion and destruction.

There are of course rivers, swamps, even large lakes and ponds here. And meadows, golden grass margins in which the Bobwhite quail and wild turkeys feed. Bobwhites prefer the borders between woods and grassy borders, while the turkeys often feed on the acorns of spreading live oaks, roosting over water after dusk in the cypress swamps, sometimes competing with the buzzards for tenants rights. These days it is not unusual to see a Bald Eagle. They have been recovering over the last thirty years or so.

The beauty of this part of the world is elaborated by what humans have brought and done. February brings warmer days when quince and forsythia flowers grace the roads and driveways, and the Japanese Magnolias burst out. In many years the later blooming varieties of Camellias open in unison with azaleas, mostly traditional old Formosa varieties, all showing out at once in pink or snowy cascades . But mostly these are alien things, brought to the forest’s edge by people determined to improve upon nature. Longleaf pines are invasive if tolerated to grow in gardens and many have reached giant status too close to homes and roadways. Nature will have its way. In southwest Georgia, that way is defined by giants.

I found this land beautiful when first I lived on it. Experience and reflection have made it seem ever more beautiful. I am not alone in appreciating it of course. It has attracted and continues to attract to its woods some of the nation’s most creative and successful people, writers and artists. It has been a healing sanctuary for the rich for over a century. Mild winters and an early spring continue to make it a paradise in February and March, while the heat and humidity will drive most residents indoors for the long summer.