The Backyard Naturalist

Scrub is an acquired taste – landscape of wind-scoured ancient sand dunes left high and dry by retreating Ice Age oceans and populated by stands of longleaf pine and threadbare forests of dwarf oaks. A wild land of staunch deformity where fire and drought play good cop/bad cop and shafts of naked sunlight slash through overwrought spikiness and gnarl.

The scrub yields its beauty less to the eye than to the imagination, and only after prolonged intimacy. It cannot be grasped in its particulars, but is ultimately seductive for its hard-headed stand against the best of nature’s fierceness – in the exquisite ways its creatures have evolved to fit like perfect cogs into the precision machinery of their harsh environment.

In the scrub, nature scribbles terse prescriptions. Animals learn to hold their breath and plants to suck life out of the sand. Covenants are made between tree roots and mushrooms. Strange bedfellows, algae and fungi, swap body fluids to their mutual benefit.

Read the entire article in the Summer 2002 issue