Requiem for Hardwoods

By Tom Poland
November 8, 2013 

Displaced by the Ever-Present Pine

Each autumn when the leaves burst with color I retreat to the safe harbor of boyhood. All the trees and their splendid hues lead me down memory lane. Saws, sawdust, and things I saw as a boy return to me in living color as NBC used to proclaim. Trees sing to me come October-November. A chorus of red, gold, orange, and yellow leaves make me long for the countryside, and I must confess a crooning lemony forest makes me resent dreary pines for more than a few days as well.

Here in the city the music of trees takes a backstage presence. We hear horns and sirens a lot. Growing up in eastern Georgia’s rural woods we had detractors as well, detractors in more ways than one. Two sounds greeted me upon awakening each morning. The snarl of broken chainsaws being repaired at my father’s shop rose and fell like prehistoric cicadas. More distant was the drone of a sawmill. Singsongy, it too rose and fell like the clamor of some giant insect species. Neither the saws nor the mill could exist without the other. They had one thing in common: chewing up trees, and their appetite was and is best sated by the ubiquitous pine, a tree that does all it can to ruin fall.

Growing up I practiced an autumn rite come October and November. I’d get away from all of man’s sounds and walk through the woods behind my house. I’d walk deeper and deeper into the forest until the crunch of leaves underfoot and the sound of wind whispering through the canopy was all I could hear. Those sounds soothed me as few things can.

 

Green just doesn’t compare

What brings my young days spent walking through sun-struck, color-soaked woods into focus is an innocent remark a friend made the other day. I was talking about my land back home and how it has beautiful oaks and hickories, but few pines. Why doesn’t it have pines, she asked, going on to say, You know pines are the South’s dominant tree.

Au contraire, not so, I said, explaining how the faster-growing Southern Yellow pine makes a better cash crop than the dense-grained, slow-growing hardwoods. Left alone, a cycle of plant succession ultimately results in hardwoods. We just don’t give the hardwoods a chance now. The Southern yellow pine yields a profit much faster than hardwoods, and that’s why pines rule much of the South (and with them comes all that pollen in March.)

 

Cypress trees could teach pines a thing or two

 

Soft cypress needles, caressed by autumn

Imagine for a moment how this Southland would look if pines were rare. Just think how glorious autumn would be. I don’t know that we could stand all the foliage finery. I believe it would drive us insane, like a man surrounded by bevies of beautiful women. Pines are plain Jane hags. Sexist language aside, look at the photograph with the blazing maple. See those pines behind it? They loom like green storm clouds. What a difference.

The man who gave me my first job as a writer didn’t care for pines a bit. Pines, the green monoculture, he would say his words dripping with contempt. Americus native John Culler, founder of South Carolina Wildlife magazine and a sportsman, disliked pine forests because they offer deer and turkeys little nourishment compared to hardwoods’ acorns, nuts, and fruits. Others liken a huge forest of pines to a green desert. For sure when it comes to fall color, pines are a no show. Why can’t pines be like the cypress pictured here and turn burnt orange at least? If tone-deaf pines could muster up just a particle of color they could participate in one of the South’s showier ensembles.

Alas the show will soon end. As you can see the colors have peaked and soon all the beautiful pigments of fall will leave us. Even so dead, brown leaves will take on new beauty and significance. Glazed by frost, fallen leaves will decompose and return to the soil. Come spring they will nurture freshly minted greenery and continue the seasonal cycle of life and death.

I’m no tree hugger but I do respect trees and I don’t know why but our northern brethren sure like to cut them down. Had a neighbor from up North for a while. One day I heard a chainsaw screaming in her back yard. She had hired men to cut all her trees had I not stopped them and explained it was against the homeowners’ covenant. Anyways, she said, I’d cut them all if it was up to me.

Well, anyways it wasn’t up to her. She’s gone now and the trees in her erstwhile backyard are safe. Late afternoon when the sun is low their backlit leaves glow like 10,000 Japanese lanterns. Trees sustain us our entire lives in many, many ways, one being sheer beauty. Meanwhile, most folks go about their busy lives giving trees no thought. Gripping the ground with their roots, their crowns swaying with the wind, trees quietly convert sunlight, minerals, carbon dioxide, and water into new generations of trees. Some, destined to give their all in the ongoing cycle of death and renewal, have no choice but fall to the insatiable appetite of modern saws and mills.

Come autumn, though, some folks appreciate hardwoods more so than any other time. For autumn is when we should realize just how much color we miss thanks to the million of pines, green as ever, that have displaced maples, oaks, and hickories. Can’t speak for you but I’ll take a disappointing drab bit of rusty fall color over the green monoculture any day.

 

Photos By Tom Poland

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net 
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

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