Black and white, plus a hopeful red

Though most of the Bastrop forest is dead, authorities are looking ahead. That’s what the little red flags are about: each one marks a newly planted loblolly pine sapling. As I drove through Bastrop State Park on March 3rd, I saw plots of ground that were covered with hundreds of red flags, and the plan is for millions of saplings to be planted. Decades or generations from now, though I won’t be here to see it, the forest may again look and smell the way I’ll always remember it.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Black and white

The color of mourning in China is white, while in the West it’s black. Look at this picture that I took on March 3rd of this year and you’ll see that both colors amount to the same thing: either way, black or white, all these trees are dead. Long-time readers of this blog and people in central Texas know about the Bastrop County Complex Fire that occurred near the end of the great drought of 2011. The blaze burned for weeks and destroyed not only some 1700 homes but also most of the forest in Bastrop State Park and on adjacent land. This region had been home to various kinds of trees, including the famous “Lost Pines,” miles of loblolly pines, Pinus taeda, that had become cut off over the millennia from the much greater forest of them in east Texas. Now the Lost Pines really are the lost pines.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman