Field Guide: Longleaf pines
A lost Southern landscape could be its future—if we learn to rethink the wild
“In ‘pine barrens’ most of the day. Low, level, sandy tracts; the pines wide apart; the sunny spaces between full of beautiful abounding grasses, liatris, long, wand-like solidago, saw palmettos, etc., covering the ground in garden style. Here I sauntered in delightful freedom, meeting none of the cat-clawed vines, or shrubs, of the alluvial bottoms.”
—John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
On a cold February morning in the 1890s, Henry Beadel, the son of a New York City industrialist, was hunting quail on land his father owned along the Florida-Georgia line. Young Beadel was horrified to discover the woods on fire—a conflagration that seemed to have been intentionally lit by the Black sharecroppers who worked the land. “The country looked to us irretrievably ruined, and the quail doomed,” he later remembered.
Once upon a time, longleaf pines covered 90 million acres in the Southeast, an area roughly the size of Montana. Today, sadly, just five million acres remain.
Perhaps that explains why the longleaf’s domain is mostly overlooked by the rest of the country. “When I travel and lecture, I am struck by how many students have heard of Yellowstone, the Great Smoky Mountains, and the Everglades,” the biologist Paul Keddy once wrote in a paper for Southeastern Naturalist, “but when I mention the coastal plain of the southeast and its remarkable diversity, I usually receive puzzled looks.”
Last week, when I began to research this essay, I found myself down a deep longleaf rabbit hole. (Or perhaps I should say tortoise hole: the endangered gopher tortoise burrows throughout longleaf forests, creating habitat that serves other species, too.) There are many plant species that have been granted their own national park: the saguaro, the Joshua tree, the Redwoods. I could not help but wonder, why not the longleaf pine? Certainly, it’s not for lack of beauty. Perhaps the trouble is the way this place does not fit our standard notions of the wild.
Where the longleafs grow, the landscape is more savannah than forest. The trees stand apart, austere and separate, allowing ample sunlight to reach the forest floor. The resulting effect was, as John Muir put it after he trekked through south Georgia in the late nineteenth century, “garden style.” I’ll forgive his slight to my beloved bottomlands: Muir is right that there is something delightful about these woods. All that sunlight feels warm and generous, and, indeed, while longleafs tend to grow in “pure stands,” where they represent the vast majority of trees—80 percent or more—the space between the trees is a riot of life, with up to 40 plant species per square meter.
Pinus palustris, as the tree is known to scientists, means “marsh-loving pine,” which was apparently a mistake by the naming biologist, who had stumbled upon a rare winter flood. These trees need well-drained sandy soils to thrive. You might more accurately say that marshes love this pine; some of the most charismatic species that thrive amid the trees—including species of orchid and carnivorous pitcher plants—prefer the wetland bogs that run through the lowest ground. As if the forest were offering a reminder that they are a special place, just five years ago, biologists found a previously unrecognized salamander in a longleaf bog.
The discovery is particularly amazing given how little longleaf forest is left. The trees were tempting not just as timber—though given its density and strength, longleaf was for a time perhaps the most economically important timber tree in the country—but for resin and turpentine. Once cut down, landowners often replaced their longleafs with faster-growing loblolly and slash pine. The longleaf business peaked in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1920s, most of the forest was gone.
But let’s get back to that NYC industrialist scion and his burning forest. Once he stopped to learn more about the situation, Beadel was wise enough to recognize that the fire was useful. (Later, he turned the family plantation into a research station.) Fire, it turns out, is key to this ecosystem: the flames clear away rival trees, granting space for pine seedlings, and creating all those sunlit patches between the trees.
The trees are carefully adapted to such blazes. During what’s known as the “grass stage,” baby longleafs look like little poof balls of green needles. For more than a decade, the young trees can stay low, focusing on establishing their taproots—until they suddenly burst upwards, as much as four feet in a year. This low height, combined with a deep taproot and thick bark, helps the seedling survive the frequent flares. (The longleaf’s companion species, wiregrass, meanwhile, helped provide fuel that carried the fires quickly across the forest floors.)
The species that replaced longleaf pines across the Southeast aren’t as fire resistant, and so don’t yield the same ecosystem. “If you look at a 20-year-old loblolly plantation, there’s a biological desert underneath,” a U.S. Forest Service silviculturist told my friend Xander Peters, in a piece for the National Forest Foundation. “If you look at a 20-year-old longleaf stand, it provides so much habitat for so many different critters in the world.”
I’ve read several old accounts that suggest the fiery landscape of longleaf pine and wiregrass was aided by frequent lightning strikes, and doomed by modern habits of fire suppression. I think it may go too far, though, to assume that these lovely forests are a local inevitability—that if we just leave things alone, let the lightning strike, then all would be okay. The longleaf pine first flourished in the Southeast around eight thousand years ago, in an era when the region was heavily populated. It seems likely that Indigenous people helped these forests spread through a practice of prescribed burns.
As Beadel’s account shows, even after settlers seized the land, the importance of fire was obvious to the people who knew the ecosystem best—by which I mean not the landowners but the sharecroppers who actually got down in that sandy loam. One of the sharecroppers told Beadel that “every spring as far back as his great-grandpapa could remember” there had been burnings. Locals so took the practice for granted that no one had bothered to warn the visiting quail-hunting landowners.
There is some good news in this story: over several decades, as these trees have become increasingly regarded as a key piece of Southern heritage,1 there’s been substantive work to encourage their return. Two million acres have reappeared over the past half-century; hopefully it will that Jeff Bezos is tossing a big gift of cash toward these forests, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, with the aim of improving carbon retention and supporting biodiversity. Since they’re dependent on fire, longleaf pines are well adapted to climate change: they can survive the coming wildfires. So while longleafs grow more slowly than other pine trees, they may be a good investment for landowners.
Still, when I think of my new dream of a Longleaf Pine National Park, there are several challenges. The South, unlike the West, is a place where the land has been mostly parceled out. About two-thirds of the remaining longleaf stands are in private ownership. Fortunately, there are several huge stands in public forests: DeSoto National Forest in Mississippi; in Florida, Apalachicola and Oceola national forests, along with the Elgin Air Force Base.
Perhaps the bigger challenge is the ideas we hold as a nation about nature. Sure, John Muir thought the longleaf pines were pretty, but he wasn’t enough enamored with the South to stick around. Instead, he schlepped onward, up into the California mountains. His beloved Sierras—a place where it was easier to imagine things being “wild,” untouched by human hands—became the archetype of U.S. nature.
The longleaf pines, in contrast, were garden style because they were a garden, in that they had been carefully maintained for thousands of years. This was a place where humans and trees—and orchids and tortoises, among so many creatures—thrived together. That may not be as wild as everyone wants, but it doesn’t strike me as a bad way to live.
To see it
One of my favorite hikes within a few hours of New Orleans is the out-and-back Tuxachanie Trail, in DeSoto National Forest, which cuts through longleaf forests, and could make for an easy backpacking overnight.
I’m sure there are other trails through the South’s other public longleaf forests. If you know them, let us know in the comments. And if you can’t make to these forests, you can at least enjoy this lovely photographic ode, excerpts from Chuch Hemerd’s book The Pines that were printed a few years ago in Garden & Gun.
Further reading
Janisse Ray was kind enough to send me a copy of her memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, after I posted on Twitter an admission that I’d never read the book. That Twitter thread was an attempt to compile a “canon” of Southern nature writing—a project that I’ll start sharing in this newsletter soon—and Ecology was repeatedly nominated.
Now that I’m reading the book, I can see why: it’s a delightful look at an under-considered part of the country—and, in a nice case of timing, a love letter to the longleaf pine. Grab yourself a copy, and, while you’re at it, sign up for Janisse’s newsletter Trackless Wild.
These forests are prime ground for quail hunting, for example.
Lake Ramsey W.M.A. North of New Orleans has around 800 acres with a few short trails. As does a small tract north of Abita Springs, The Abita Creek Flatwood Preserve. Abundant pitcher plants and sundews as well as Long leaf pines.
The Desoto NF is separated into two main sections. The Tuxachanie is a great trail in the southern section. The northern section of Desoto is outside of Laurel and has the Longleaf Trail that cruises through huge stands of its namesake tree. Also you can run the trail in Mississippi’s oldest ultra trail race, The Mississippi 50 (now Mississippi’s only 100 mile trail race as of this year).