Georgia’s biological richness never ceases to amaze me.
Two weeks ago, we were tromping around in a soil-rich, deciduous mountain forest at the bottom of Cloudland Canyon in Georgia’s northwest corner. The early spring wildflowers carpeting the forest floor were breathtaking.
Last weekend, several of us Georgia Botanical Society members were at the opposite end of the state, in the s0-called Red Hills area along the Georgia-Florida border between Thomasville and Tallahassee. There, we strolled through some of the world’s most beautiful, biologically diverse ecosystems — old-growth longleaf pine forests where centuries-old pines more than 90 feet tall stand 20 feet apart amid luxuriant growths of rippling wiregrass, other native grasses and scores of herbaceous species.
The forests looked more like city parks than wilderness.
Two centuries ago, nearly 90 million acres of this longleaf pine-grassland system ran nearly intact, 200 miles wide, on the Southern coastal plain. More than 95 percent of it, however, was felled for timber, turpentine and agriculture, and replaced by plantations of faster-growing loblolly and slash pines.
Only remnants of the great ecosystem remain. Luckily, many of the best-preserved, most outstanding tracts were saved by the owners of dozens of quail-hunting plantations in the Red Hills area. Quail thrive in longleaf/wiregrass systems.
We visited two of those plantations — Pebble Hill and Greenwood. The latter is particularly known for some 1,000 acres of old-growth pine woods — perhaps the South’s finest example of a longleaf pine forest.
If one single thing keeps a longleaf/wiregrass ecosystem healthy and intact, it’s fire. Low-intensity “prescribed” fires sweeping through a longleaf forest every two to three years or so rid it of hardwoods and other competing vegetation. Also, longleaf pines, wiregrass and many other plants native to longleaf forests need exposure to fire in order to sprout and regenerate.
In the sky: The moon will be full Saturday evening — the "Flower Moon," as the Cherokee peoples called April's full moon, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Venus is in the west just after dark and sets about two and a half hours later. Mars sets at dusk in the west. Jupiter is high in the west at dusk and sets after midnight. Saturn rises out of the east around 10 p.m.; it will appear near the moon Tuesday night.
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