Back from the wilds of southern Alabama and the Panhandle of Florida… The trip was too short – as always. Although the weather was not so great, the beaches are white as snow, the Apalachicola River soothing and the shrimp melt in your mouth. There is something about watching rain from a screened veranda that makes me sing.

BUT this trip, my memory and thought are for the longleaf. Driving through the Apalachicola National Forest you get a small inkling of how these majestic giants must have stood in beautiful splendor before the true rape of the south when approximately 140,000 square miles of virgin forests were slaughtered.

Butch believes that the young growth trees we were driving through are about 50 years old but the longleaf begins to reach its splendor at about 200 – 300 years and can live for 500+ years. There are 191 species of plants associated with the old-growth longleaf and approximately 122 of them are endangered.

Read this great story about Richard Porcher and his love for the trees.

And Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray is just about as good as it gets.

Her love and understanding for the longleaf takes my breath away: “I drink old-growth forest in like water. This is the homeland that built us. Here I walk shoulder to shoulder with history – my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity and stolidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring. Here mortality’s roving hands grapple with air. I can see my place as human in a natural order more grand, whole, and functional than I’ve ever witnessed, and I am humbled, not frightened by it. It is as if a round table springs up in the cathedral of pines and God graciously pulls out a chair for me, and I no longer have to worry about what happens to souls.”

*Photo by Andrew Kornylak for Garden & Gun