Category: Virginia forestry

Garland Gray Forestry Center will ship 30 million loblolly seedlings for planting next spring. The weather has been favorable for the seedlings and there will be more than ever, but demand still will exceed supply. These trees have been developed for the specifics of Virginia climate and conditions.

Loblolly pines grow naturally from Florida to New Jersey, but the trees that grow well in Florida are not ideal for colder Virginia. Virginia’s weather is unreliable during the spring planting season. The trees from Garland Gray go completely dormant during the winter, so that will not as easily perish if there is a cold snap or prolonged dry spell. This cost a little in terms of growth. A Florida loblolly pine will be quicker out of the start, great if the weather is warm and moist, deadly if not. A Virginia loblolly seedling may turn reddish brown if it gets cold before its roots are established, but it will usually come back.

We are past the third generation of loblolly pine in Virginia. In the first generation, they just gathered cones. The idea was simple reforestation and the ordinary native true was okay. But they improved, taking the seeds from the strongest, straightest and fastest growing.

The newest generation of loblolly is as different from the first as a Chihuahua is from a German shepherd. They are the same species but you wouldn’t know to look at them, even after only a few years. The natural loblolly is a bit of a weedy tree. It tends to grow crooked and branches. It is also susceptible to various maladies. The newer versions just genetically superior. They grow better on the same sites with less fertilizer.

The loblolly became the premier tree of the American South for good reasons. These reasons were man-made as much as natural. As mentioned above, the varieties developed are much better than the natural tree. On the “natural” side, the loblolly is relatively easy to manipulate genetically. It breeds true to its parents’ characteristics. (A contrary example is an apple. Apples do not breed true and the apple you plant from a side will not closely resemble its parents. For that reason, almost all the apples we eat come from clones.) The loblolly also responds especially well to fertilization and release, i.e. if you cut the trees around a loblolly it will grow more rapidly. Most other species do not respond as well.
This is not all to the good. Loblolly has replaced other timber trees in wide areas. The more worrying trend, IMO, relates to the length of rotations. This has more to do with prices than with the trees themselves, but the rapid development of loblolly may facilitate it. Let me explain.

The standard loblolly rotation used to be about thirty-five years in Virginia. This meant that you thinned the trees twice, at about fifteen years and again at twenty-four, and then harvested saw timber at the end. This is not a very long rotation, but it does provide a relatively mature forest. When combined with stream management zones, largely left perpetually uncut, you provided a productive wildlife habitat and good protection for soil and water.

New developments permit the use of smaller diameter wood. The prices of saw timber, i.e. bigger logs, and the smaller pulp timber have been converging. You do not get that much more money from saw timber. This means that the payoff from growing trees longer is less but the risks have not diminished. There is also the time value of money. Waiting an additional fifteen or twenty years for the payoff from your forestry requires patience and maybe you will be dead before you get the benefit of your investment. Some experts are advising that we harvest trees on shorter rotation, maybe as little as twelve years. The trees never mature and we never have a true forest. We just maximize fiber production. It is more like a field crop. I don’t like this even a little. While I can see the profit possibilities, I did not get into forestry for this. But I digress.

The loblolly seedlings have also improved over the years. You can see from the pictures that the soil at Garland Gray Forestry Center is very sandy. This make cultivation much easier. They have a machine that trims the roots underground, both horizontally and vertically. The roots are trimmed to about five inches long. This is because most of the tools used to plant trees dig down about seven inches. This makes planting more effective and prevents the development of “J-roots”. They also trim the tops so that seedlings are uniform height. In the old days, they would need to plant more than 700 trees per acre because many were expected to die. Today, they plant only around 450 because almost all of them survive. Loblolly pines need to planted deep, even below the root collar. This is a contrast to longleaf that need to be planted shallow. All the loblolly pines produced at Garland Gray are bare root. All longleaf for Virginia are grown in North Carolina and they are containerized.

Only five people work at Garland Gray. Most of the work is done by machines. They are precise. It is very important that the rows be straight, so that the fertilizer can be applied and so that the machines that lift the seedlings can be used properly.

My pictures show the little pine trees. They have a machine that plants them. It works kind of like a paint brush. You can see the size in relation to my pen. They remind me of those little trees that they use in model train sets. Picture #3 shows the sign for the Garland Gray Center. The last picture shows a longleaf plantation. They represent trees from various states to show which grow the best in Virginia.

My latest contribution to “Virginia Forests” Magazine. This issue concentrates on urban forestry. They will no doubt edit and improve it, but the draft is what I wanted to say.
The new forestry frontier
The American Tree Farm System had a rural upbringing with people living on the land, experiencing nature first-hand, often and intimately. Today about 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

These are not necessarily places bereft of nature. You can find big trees and inspiring natural landscapes within urban boundaries. They are managed, protected and often pampered by local authorities, and this is precisely the challenge of urban forestry. People’s relationships to nature are shaped by interactions. In an urban area, people often interact with nature episodically and as spectators. Their activities are limited; stay on the path, don’t touch, leave nothing and take nothing. People are guests, passive. They leave decisions to professionals.

Tree farming is participatory. Tree farmers are responsible for the ground they stand on and they feel it. They put things onto the land and take them off, make decision about what will happen years after they are gone. The great conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote about this in when describing his land ethic in Sand County Almanac. “A conservationist,” he wrote “is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of an axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.”

Eight out of ten Americans live in cities. This is a cause of concern but not despair.
Leaders in urban centers are developing more sophisticated understanding of nature in the context of a human-built environment. They are coming to appreciate the value of so-called green infrastructure for both the bottom line and also for their more elusive but indispensable contributions to the human spirit.

We live within a system of constraints, natural and societal, and a world of opportunities. The ingredients are fixed; genius lives in the right mix. The essence of sustainability is prospering within constraints. Profit is the price of survival. We must “sell” the economic value of green infrastructure and we can. Working with nature can often save millions of dollars, as governments and private firms are coming to appreciate. The more we understand, the better it gets.

There need be no long term-conflict between conservation and economic utility. It is an art and a source of human happiness to find the elegant solution that sustains and progresses both. This is a role for urban forestry. We could imagine trees being harvested sustainably and helping educate people about the constancy of change and the requirement to get involved. Good green infrastructure principles can be (and increasingly are) applied to things like control of invasive species, urban wildlife and the prosaic but crucial storm water diversion. Forests connect these things.

The missing piece is education, not only in school but in the living and experiential sense. Being involved in nature’s complexity, being a conservationist in Leopold’s definition, protecting nature while calming and ennobling the human spirit.

An ethical relationship to our environment requires love of our land and gratefulness for our part in its changing face, as well as a recognition of its economic value and value beyond economics. We can find a trail-head in classrooms and books but come to a fully-developed relationship only with boots-on-the-ground participation in natural processes over significant time. Tree farming has been capstone education for those lucky enough to do it, but this is not the only path on this pilgrimage. Mindful involvement in world around us is the key. It may be easier to see on tree farms, but nature exists everywhere, also in cities. Since that is where the people are, cities are where human-nature relationships will develop and prosper and cities are where conservationists also need to be.

My pictures are from the Aldo Leopold Foundation. The first one is Leopold’s shack. You can see it in the middle if you look very closely. He planted the trees. They have grown very big. Next is one of the oak savannas maintained by periodic fire. Picture #3 is the Wisconsin River from Leopold’s farm and finally is the memorial where Aldo Leopold died fighting a fire. Fire can be a useful friend or a deadly enemy, but it cannot be ignored or excluded. He died of a heat attack, not as the result of the fire.
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Lots of things are prickly or troublesome on my land. Some are useful but annoying.
A good example are the blackberries. They proliferate anyplace there is a disturbance and sometimes seem to have a malevolent intelligence. As you push through them, the branches whip backwards, hitting you in the back of the head and sometimes knocking off your hat. But blackberries are good in that they provide significant food for wildlife and habitat. You can eat them yourself. They taste good but they are small and you have to take a lot of thorns for your meager meal.

Longleaf used to be the dominant ecosystem in much of the tidewater south and even into the piedmont. It was an extremely diverse and rich ecosystem, combining a forest and a grassland. Longleaf pine cannot compete well with other woody plants or even with lots of herbaceous plants. The seeds will germinate only on mineral soils and the seedlings are easily overtopped. However, they have one big and decisive advantage. Longleaf pine is as close to fireproof as a tree can be. Fire passes over the seedlings and the thick bark of the bigger ones protects them. That nature range of longleaf corresponds very closely to areas with regular small burns.

Longleaf went into decline because of overcutting (they are great timber trees), because of hogs and more than anything else because of fire suppression. The overcutting is obvious and I will explain more about the fire, but what about the hogs? Hogs were semi-feral in Virginia. People let their hogs roam and they had big hog round-ups. The hogs ate almost anything, but they were especially fond of longleaf pine seedling, which are especially rich in carbohydrates. They ate the seedling and rooted around to wreck those they did not eat.
The hogs did damage but longleaf did not return after the hogs were mostly gone because fire was also mostly gone. Longleaf pine seeds germinate in fall, which is odd for a pine and they will germinate only on mineral soil, which requires a disturbance like fire to get rid of the duff. Longleaf is one of the few pine species that can grow in the shade, at least for a while, so longleaf forests could be uneven aged, with new pines growing in gaps caused by fires or other natural disturbances.

A longleaf pine stays in the grass stage (you can see in my picture) for at least a couple years and maybe more than seven. In that time, it does not grow up but it sets down a root system at least six feet deep. At this stage, it is immune to most fires that will kill hardwoods or loblolly. This is the secret to its success and lack of fire the explanation of its failure. The only time the longleaf is vulnerable to fire is when it is three to six feet high. It has grown beyond the safe and compact size, but still not tall enough to put its terminal buds are beyond the flame reach.

Once it gets to a decent size, longleaf can compete well, but fire is still needed to keep the rest of its ecology healthy and allow for the next generations, so a burn every 2-5 years works well. A good rotation is to burn after two growing seasons. Do it in the winter, so it is a cooler fire. After that, burn when they are more than six feet high and then every couple of years. A quicker fire is better, so a header fire is better than a backing fire.
Loblolly grows much faster in the first two years and will out-compete longleaf absent fire. A loblolly is not fire resistant until it is around eight years old. Studies show that longleaf catch up with loblolly at about age seventeen and are a little bigger by age twenty-eight. Longleaf live longer and have a longer rotation. The oldest longleaf on record was 468 years old. Loblolly live only half as long and many are in decline even a little more than thirty years. Nevertheless, loblolly is better if you are interested only in timber income. The short rotations will usually make more money. Even though longleaf timber is better, mills are unwilling to pay a premium in most cases.

Observers used to think that longleaf pine preferred sandy and dry soils because that is where they found them. In fact, they can grow on a variety of soils. The reason they were found on the poor and sandy sites is because those were the places left after settlers and farmers cleared the better land for agriculture. Beyond that, longleaf CAN live on poor sites where others cannot do as well.

The first picture shows South Quay Sandhills Natural Area and one of the only remnant stands of indigenous Virginia longleaf. This is where the seeds come from for longleaf planting in Virginia. Virginia does not grow the seeds. They are sent down to North Carolina. They do it for Virginia, since they currently have more experience. The next picture shows the cones of the longleaf (big) and loblolly. It also shows the sands and weak soil. The reason the longleaf are still here is that the soils do not support agriculture or competitors. The trees in picture #1 are about eighty years old. They are so small because of those soil conditions, but they may be the progenitors of trees all over Virginia. Sometimes it is lucky to be poor.

Third is  a burned over area planted with longleaf seedlings. You cannot see the seedlings, but this is the environment they need. The next picture is four years later. This is a bit of a problem. They missed the burning after two growing seasons and the competition has gotten out of hand. They cannot burn now because the longleaf are in the vulnerable stage. It can still be salvaged, but it is not good.