Resurrecting Virginia's longleaf

American Forests, Summer, 2005 by Tim Wright

A heavy sleet is falling through the pines, but Lytton Musselman, a biologist at Old Dominion University, is oblivious as he races about with childlike glee. The object of his excitement is a Virginia rarity: a massive longleaf pine.

In this southeast corner of Virginia, an area known for its swamps, briny water, and access to the sea, Musselman is helping the state's last known stand of longleaf pine make a comeback. Although it has a long way to go, the open, park-like environment of the longleaf is beginning to return to an area where the idea is almost impossible to imagine.

Longleaf pines were once plentiful in this corner of Virginia, its northernmost appearance along the Eastern Seaboard. In Tidewater's early days, the pine's tall trunks, sap, and timber were vital elements for shipbuilding, and it was harvested almost to the point of extinction.

"It's the tree that built Tidewater," says Musselman, referring to the area surrounding the harbor at Norfolk.

Decades of fire prevention almost finished it off as the forests became choked with trees. But here in the isolated Zuni Pine Barrens, the sandy soil still nurtures the longleaf pine. Musselman manages the 300-plus-acre Blackwater Ecologic Preserve for Old Dominion University, which was given the land in 1985 by a timber company.

The sleet turns to rain as Musselman, ignoring the droplets collecting on his glasses, dashes from one tiny, spidery, green sprout to another. With a web-like delicacy, the longleaf pine sprouts are just starting to poke through a brown matt of needles covering the forest floor where a controlled burn took place last year.

In Tidewater the term "forest" usually brings to mind the thickness of the Great Dismal Swamp Refuge, a forest so thick that even refuge workers get lost just footsteps away from their vehicles. But given that fire helps longleaf to germinate and thrive, Musselman immediately initiated prescribed burning. And if he gets his way and the Zuni Pine Barrens are regularly burned as they were for countless generations, the forest here will again deserve the description "park-like."

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