From the middle of Rehoboth Bay our boat bobs from a mild chop on the water, churned up by a warm, eastern breeze, and in every direction I look the horizon is made up of a steady rolling line of dark, deep green. These are Loblolly pines (Pinus taeda). They are impressive in their ability to grow in a wide range of habitats, and are one of the most common, widely distributed of the southern pines. In the boggy, coastal floodplains here in Delaware, where the loblolly roots clench the sandy floor of the earth, I can’t help but to think of them as a constant vacationer in their own back yard. More boats are pulling up to the sand bar as the afternoon draws out: families and friends enjoying July in the bay. It is a wonder to me that Jimmy Buffett didn’t sing more about these evergreens. Surely the Loblolly must be native to Margaritaville, too.

This Delaware coastal forest where trees meet the brackish waters of the bay is a place of rich biodiversity, as you might expect in any place where water laps over the edge of the land, two worlds in one. There is the deep blue of the sky, and the tan-white of the beach sand, the light green of marsh grass and that dark, evergreen horizon. A pastel picture before you. Trolling through the waters here against the backdrop of the 3-bundled needles of the Loblollies, you see purple martins rolling and gliding over the baywater, and osprey nest platforms where you may spy several feathery little heads poking over the tangled dead branches of the nest. The nest platforms and the knot of branches that sit atop them are bleached driftwood gray from the salty Atlantic sun; it is the same ghostly color of the standing dead Loblollies interspersed throughout the landscape, all of them still holding a hundred prickly black cones.

 

And along all of the skinny fingers of the bay that weave into the little coastal neighborhoods, of course, there are docks and pilings. The dark, wavy grain of each piling seems to bend and turn like the edge of the falling and raising tide, in a constant serpentine outline. An internet search of wood piling lumber brought up a US Forest Service station paper (station paper no. 53 by Myron D Ostrander) from 1953 that documents the heavy use of Loblolly Pine for wood piling material. And although more than half a century ago, in Delaware alone out of the 800,000 linear board feet harvested for wood piling construction, 600,000 feet of that tally was-you guessed it-Loblolly (along with pitch and shortleaf). This is the infrastructure along the water. The osprey nest platforms, the docks and the pilings. It is no wonder that much of this wood is Loblolly. It is everywhere. The tree weaves through everything like its unbroken, organic grain. Just as it stands as a single community in the landscape, a collection of dark stems on every horizon, the Loblolly also carries the community of people and wildlife along the water on it’s shoulders, or at least on its lignin.

When Otis left his house in Georgia and headed for the Frisco Bay, I can now see the Loblollies in his rearview mirror, maybe a few needle bundles trapped in between the window and the hood, and a prickly cone on his dashboard as a memory for later.

And I’m reminded that sometimes there’s nothing better than just sittin’ on the dock of the bay, wastin’ time.

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/sp/sp_ne057.pdf