by Greg Mayer

While Jerry’s traveling, I thought it would be a good time to post the second installment of southern trees. In the first, I showed mostly the epiphytes that grow on trees, and now it will be the trees themselves.

The northeastern US– roughly around the Great Lakes, New England, and the mid-Atlantic– is dominated by broad-leaved, deciduous, hardwood forests (think oaks, maples, hickories), grading to evergreen coniferous forest to the north, tall grass prairie to the west, and southern forest to the south. Interestingly, a big swath of the American south, like the far north, is dominated by coniferous forest: very tall pines, with a short, shrubby understory. As you get far enough south, the understory becomes palms.

The above photo is of a suburban front yard, but as either a remnant of the pre-development forest, or as a planted recreation, it gives a fair impression of a tiny bit of this southern conifer forest. We see about five pines, a thick palmetto (?Sabal sp.) understory, and to the left front and right background, two broad-leaved trees, deciduous on the left, evergreen on the right.

The pines have very long needles, many over a foot long, and longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) is one of the characteristic species. But there are several other pines with long needles, and I’ve never been able to convince myself that I can tell them apart. I think there are two species in this little stand, one with short cones and the other with long cones.

But cones vary both within a tree, related to age and cone-specific effects, and among trees of the same species, so I’m not sure. Here’s some of the range of variation in the long cones:

and among the short cones:

Many of the long cones were damaged, the scales being torn or chewed off. I’m not sure what does this, or why. Gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) are common at this site, but I don’t think pine cone scales are edible or nutritious.

There also seemed to be differences in the bark. The short cone pine has a more blocky texture to the bark:

While the long cone pine had longer, more flattened ridges; but, again, I’m not sure how much individual variation there is within species.

The broad-leaved trees included evergreen magnolias (Magnolia sp.):

with loads of their seed pods nearby. These pods were not under the magnolia, but over a fence and under one of the pines, so must have been moved– by squirrels?

This is the live oak of some sort (Quercus sp.) from my epiphyte post. Astute readers were able to identify the clumps of leaves higher in the tree as mistletoe.

The tree had lost most of its leaves, but still had some, including non-lobed, “live oaky” leaves”:

and slightly-lobed, much more, at least to a northerner, “oaky” leaves:

We’ll finish with the red maple (Acer rubrum) a tree I am very familiar with from the north, that in Florida seems to be semi-deciduous– losing most, but not all of its leaves in the winter. This row of trees is clearly planted:

And, though mostly leafless, there were some leaves still on the trees:

As with the previous post on this, please weigh in with plant identifications!