Pinus palustris

Before the South was farms and pavement it was, in great part, longleaf: an open, sunlit forest of widely spaced pines over a ground layer so rich a single square yard could hold dozens of species, the whole thing held together by fire. They ran across tens of millions of acres of the coastal plain, by some counts as many as ninety million, from Virginia to east Texas, and almost all of it is gone now, which is the quiet grief behind every longleaf you meet. They gave the South tar, pitch, and turpentine, the naval stores that caulked the wooden fleets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earned North Carolinians the nickname tar heels. Pinus palustris is the patient one. A seedling spends years as a dense green tussock, looking for all the world like a clump of grass and fooling everyone who doesn't know better, while underground they drive a deep taproot and wait out the fires that clear their rivals. Then they bolt, throwing up a single thick candle of a stem before they bother with branches. The needles are the longest of any eastern pine, well past a foot, hanging in soft fountains and catching wind like nothing else in the genus. Give one sun and room and you are planting the architecture the gopher tortoise and the red-cockaded woodpecker were waiting for. They ask only for patience, and they reward it for three hundred years.