Traveling
Sometimes you have to get away. No matter how you spend your time on a regular basis, and it doesn’t matter if you truly enjoy what you do, sometimes you have to get away. That’s the whole premise behind the idea of having a vacation. When you go on vacation you step away from the daily routine, and in some instances you accentuate the sense of stepping away by actually traveling somewhere beyond your usual sphere of movement in order to experience a different place.
Working in a horticultural pursuit often means adjusting personal activities to accommodate seasonal demands. In my case, that means never going on vacation while the plants are actively growing. From spring through the long summer months and on into early autumn, being away from work for any extended length of time is just not a reasonable thing for me to do. The little trees need daily attention during the growing season and we have so many of them. To be away then would require shirking responsibilities, which in turn would negate any potential benefits to taking a break because irresponsibility has consequences, and neglected bonsai keep no secrets. For this reason I usually wait until the month of November before taking any time off.
This year having a vacation meant more than simply getting away from the work routine for a little while. All the troubles visited upon western North Carolina as a result of the recent storm provided another reason for desiring a little escape. People reading this Journal who live somewhere else, people who live in a place that didn’t get turned upside down by Hurricane Helene, might well be tired of reading about the effects of the storm. But those effects are still very much a daily presence to those of us who live here. I went down to the Swannanoa River yesterday, driving along a very small portion of the river road that has been reopened to traffic. It’s been more than eight weeks since the storm, yet to see what it looks like down at the riverside a person might think the floodwaters receded only yesterday. It is an inconceivable mess. Elsewhere, driving around town, it’s still common to see long piles of tree debris lining the side of the road, waiting to be hauled off and processed. In many places these piles are higher than a person is tall and include tree trunks two or three feet in diameter. The portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway that’s within Asheville city limits has reopened to traffic, but now it’s a scenic road through a disaster area. The loss of tree life in certain areas is absolutely staggering.
Enough. That’s how it is here now and there’s no denying it, but who wants to read about it? I’m tired of writing about it, too. I bring it up only to highlight how badly I needed to have a vacation this year, and how helpful it was to clear out of town for awhile. I made two trips, one of which was a brief overnighter. The other getaway was a little longer — three overnights — and that trip is the subject of the photo essay that follows.
The third week of November my wife, Christine, and I drove across the breadth of North Carolina and landed in the town of Edenton, situated in the northeast corner of our fair state. It’s a small town with a population of about 5,000 people, located on Albemarle Sound at the mouth of the Chowan River. I learned about Edenton from my friend, Charlie, who recommended it as a scenic, historic, quiet little burg not too far from the Outer Banks. That all sounded good to me. This vacation was enjoyable for a variety reasons, but there will be no broad account here of all that was encountered and experienced. Instead, I want to focus entirely on a subject most pertinent to this Journal: Trees.
Everywhere I go I look for and pay attention to trees. North Carolina is a big enough state that the tree species found in the coastal region in the east vary considerably from those found in the mountainous region in the west.
On the first day in Edenton we took a walk to the historic downtown area, which is right on the shore of Albemarle Sound. This was the view from the Visitor’s Center:
Those are baldcypress trees (Taxodium distichum) standing in the water. What appears to be a small island under them is a mass of baldcypress knees. This is not a scene of flooding; it is the normal condition in which this group of trees naturally makes its living. The ability to grow with roots completely submerged in water is a compelling feature of baldcypress. A short walk along the shoreline brought us to another picturesque scene prominently enhanced by the presence of these southeastern favorites:
Baldcypress is highly adaptable and need not grow in or right alongside the water. They also find favor as a landscape tree:
There are numerous fine old houses in Edenton, reminiscent of those found in Charleston or Savannah but fewer in number because the town is on a smaller scale. These old houses often have old trees in their landscapes. Here is an aged and substantial southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) out in front of a brick mansion from the 1800s:
Baldcypress and southern magnolia are both species native to the coastal region of North Carolina. A non-native tree commonly found in coastal towns like Charleston, Savannah and Edenton is crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica). Crape myrtle grows in Asheville, too, but the tree does better in warmer climes. I care about promoting native species, but a beautiful tree is a beautiful tree, and crape myrtles with some age on them can be most impressive. They seem to go particularly well with older-style architecture:
The base of the tree pictured below has run out of room on the street corner at which it grows. The tree is a willow oak (Quercus phellos), a common native tree in North Carolina outside of the mountain region. Take note of the yellow paint sprayed on the tree, delineating the pathway of some utility running beneath it:
Edenton offered a pleasing selection of trees growing in the midst of a human-made environment. The town is a tourist attraction and the trees are a substantial component of its appeal, as trees generally are in any neighborhood. Take trees out of any place of human habitation and the quality of life is diminished.
With Edenton as our base of operation, we were in position to make an easy drive to the Outer Banks on the second day of our visit. I hadn’t been to the Outer Banks in nearly forty years and not surprisingly it has changed a great deal in that span of time. Large and extravagant houses predominate now, but there are still small pockets of the natural landscape protected from commercial exploitation. One such place is the Currituck Banks Nature Preserve, just beyond the town of Corolla on the northern end of the Outer Banks. Here we took a trail through a remnant of the maritime forest that once covered much of the southeastern Atlantic coastline.
Live oak (Quercus virginiana) and loblolly pines (Pinus taeda) are the main tree species in this unique ecosystem. Sandy soil and the often harsh conditions of strong wind, salt spray and sun exposure give the trees, especially the live oaks, a gnarly, rugged character:
On the third and final day of our visit, we made a half hour drive north of Edenton and visited Merchants Millpond State Park. The park itself is comprised of three thousand five hundred twenty acres, with a two hundred year old millpond that covers seven hundred acres. The Nature Conservancy was instrumental in protecting this land and it had long been on my list of places to see. A big attraction was the presence of baldcypress in a swamp environment, and these we encountered early on along the trail we chose to follow:
After skirting along the swampy edge of the millpond, the trail veered off into a wonderfully diverse, mature forest. There were many species of oak, along with sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), American holly (Ilex opaca), loblolly pine and longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), but the trees that stole the show were American beeches (Fagus grandifolia). With their smooth, light gray bark, beeches easily attract the eye. The beech trees in the Merchants Millpond forest were all the more impressive for their great size and overall abundance, and the fact that they were at the height of their autumn color. A walk in a forest dominated by great old beech trees is rare treat to be savored with each respectful step:
The trail eventually brought us back to the millpond at a site called Lassiter Swamp. Here again baldcypress were the dominant trees, their distinctive fluted-based forms accented by the brilliantly colorful autumn foliage of red maples (Acer rubrum) growing amongst them:
The trail left the pond and headed into the woods once again. This time the forest was mostly composed of loblolly and longleaf pine trees, all of them singed black at the base from the controlled burning employed by the park as a forest management tool:
We ran out of time before we ran out of trail. We were obliged to turn around and walk out the same path we had been following, but the scenery didn’t suffer from repeated viewing. A change in lighting brought about by the passage of several hours can make the same scene look surprisingly different:
Earlier I alluded to having recently made two vacation trips. The other, shorter trip also took me out to the other end of North Carolina, this time to the southeastern section of the state. This second excursion was specifically for the purpose of seeing trees - very special trees in a very special place:
More about this adventure in next week’s Journal entry.