A tree becomes a dominant species if it adapts better than others. Florida’s big three do just that.
You cannot leave your house without seeing one: a southern live oak, a cabbage palm, or a slash pine.
The majestic southern live oak is found in yards and parks and along streets. Many grace West Venice Avenue from downtown to the beach.
The cabbage palm tree, also known as the sabal palm, is the one seen most frequently throughout Florida. The slash pine, often found in our forests, claimed its role in the Big Three after its predecessor (the longleaf pine) was clearcut for lumber when it could no longer provide tar and turpentine.
LIVE OAK USAGE THROUGH HISTORY
Old Ironsides (officially the USS Constitution) is a three-masted, heavy-hulled frigate that was launched in 1797. Her hull planking and decking are white oak, but most of her ribs and framing came from southern live oak timber because of the curve of the tree’s lumbering limbs.
She may have been known as Ironsides, but her structural integrity came from southern live oak.
Live Oaks were so important for building U.S. warships that John Quincy Adams created the first national tree farm, called the Naval Live Oak Reservation.
It bordered Pensacola Bay on the Panhandle. Until the Civil War, the federal government had a virtual monopoly on the supply of live oak.
The southern live oak gets its name because, although deciduous, it sheds its old spoon-shaped leaves and acquires a new mantle quickly. In March, during the shedding process, the yellow, caterpillar-like catkins (the male pollen bearing flowers) appear.
They drop their yellow pollen most noticeably on your car. That pollen also finds its way to the tiny female flowers on the same or different tree, thus ensuring cross-fertilization.
The shiny new leaves emerge not long after, and the fertilized female flowers will provide the squirrels, blue jays, and scrub jays with their acorn feasts in the fall.
Live oaks spread their majestic, twisting arms, creating broad canopies that provide year-round shade for us and shelter for their residents. And just like us, Spanish moss hangs out under the oak’s canopy.
There’s a belief that Spanish moss is a parasite. Not so. It occupies branches under a tree’s canopy and does not block the leaf factories from the sun’s rays.
Spanish moss does not feed on the oak; it simply hangs from branches to gain nutrients from air and moisture.
GOOD AGAINST HURRICANES
The southern live oak, considered a large tree, can handle hurricane force winds, serving as a buffer to our homes if well positioned. That may seem counter to the downed live oaks during Hurricane Ian and the damage sustained as a result.
However, most of the blame lies in planting them at the wrong place. That 8-foot sapling that fit nicely on a 75 x 110-foot lot, 20 years later is 30 feet tall, has a canopy fifty feet wide, and requires a lateral root system that should be two to three times larger than its canopy.
Trees planted between two house foundations and a street nearby are trapped in an area much smaller than their natural footprint. The live oak does not send its roots under houses or under streets because there is insufficient water and dissolved minerals to make it worth the journey.
The roots are trapped in too small a space. When the ground gets saturated with water, the lateral roots begin to slip and slide; and when the wind increases, the tree’s foundation, now weakened, begins to lever itself out of the ground.
Its lateral root system isn’t its only line of defense against 75-mph wind. As the wind strengthens, the tree is quick to give up more and more of its small twigs and leaves.
At the same time, this causes the wind speed around the tree and nearby structures to drop.
If you’ve walked our local preserves, you have observed large live oak clusters with plenty of space to spread their roots. Their roots intermingle with their neighbors, increasing their resistance to wind.
CABBAGE PALMS
The cabbage palm, or saw palmetto, is native to Florida and is the state tree.
It gets its name — cabbage palm — from the edible immature fronds or heart of palm at its top. The heart of palm has a cabbage-like flavor and texture.
Although, to harvest it is to kill it! Florida indigenous people used its palm fronds for waterproof roofing, its trunks for shelter construction, its fibers for fish nets, and the hearts for food. The early settlers mixed the cabbage tops with fatback to make swamp cabbage.
Unfortunately, large swaths of palm forests in South America are being clearcut to harvest the heart of palm with little or no attempt to replace them.
There have been attempts to create multi-stalked, quick-growing smaller palms in Costa Rica and Ecuador, but the illegal harvesting of large palms continues.
Today, Florida uses cabbage palms extensively along its highways, especially noticeable at interstate interchanges and overpasses.
Their attributes make them the perfect tree: low maintenance, drought tolerant, no irrigation needed, slow growing, long-lived, hurricane helpful, disease resistant, also ease of planting large specimens that are quick to set roots to anchor them.
Cabbage palms in the wild are mini habitats for other plants and animals. Their dead fronds do not easily surrender their hold on the tree.
Grape vines find easy footholds on the trunks, encircling the dead fronds to create a diverse village within. The most common flora residents are resurrection and rabbit’s foot ferns, epiphytes, smilax vines, and Virginia creepers.
These plants in turn attract anoles, toads, snakes, raccoons, squirrels, and bats. Then throw in a few hundred types of insects, spiders, beetles, and worms and you have a thriving community.
Are you familiar with the palm hurricane cut? The intent is to strip most of older fronds, leaving only the young, tender fronds to minimize the potential for wind damage to property. However, this has an adverse effect on cabbage palms.
A tree survey after Hurricane Andrew revealed that 93% of cabbage palms survived in forest areas where there were no hurricane cuts. Their fronds are active food-producing factories and storage units, even the old ones.
Cutting the fronds weakens the palm and exposes the palm heart to injury from high winds, and can result in its death.
Although we refer to the cabbage palm as a tree, it is not exactly a tree. It has grass characteristics. It lacks bark, has no cambium layer that we know as growth rings, and has no heart wood that provides the rigid strength we associate with trees.
Finally, its growth is exclusively from the very top of its stalk. Like a blade of grass, its flexible stem bends but does not break in the wind.
SLASH PINES
Now one of the Big Three, the slash pine dominance came after the decline of the longleaf pine. Before Venice was a city, it was covered with longleaf pines.
By 1920, the longleaf forests that covered all of what we now know as Venice was clearcut for timber after the longleaf pines’ turpentine usefulness dried up.
These trees were nearly wiped out because wooden ships required huge amounts of the byproducts of tar, turpentine, resins, and lumber. You will find a small stand in nearby Curry Creek Preserve West, just off Pinebrook Road.
Slash pines were one of the dominant replants that we see today. As a harvestable pine, the slash pine grows faster than longleaf pine and thus is considered more desirable for timber production.
Slash pines are not used extensively in landscaping because they are problematic: they are thirsty surface water consumers, and their root systems compete with lawns and shrubs; the needles fall at any time; the pinecones are messy as the hungry squirrels attack the cones for the pine nuts; and their self-shedding branches at the base of the tree result in tall, bare trunks.
Our southern Florida slash pine is well-adapted to frequent natural fires as was the longleaf pine.
During its childhood, its needles look like a clump of short grass. It’s living tip is buried in the short, robust grasslike needles. Most of its growth is going into a tap root, where it stores carbohydrates for its next stage.
If there is a fire, the needles are consumed, not the living tip. After three years, it enters the adolescent stage with its rate of growth jumping 3 to 5 feet annually.
This is called the candle stage. Now that vulnerable tip of its childhood is above most ground fires. The bark of the adolescent and adult looks like thin erratic slabs, which, when subject to fire, burn quickly and fall from the trunk.
As the tree matures, its bottom branches fall off, keeping flames from leaping into the tree’s canopy.
Today, our forests do not burn with nature’s regularity. Forests that once burned regularly had a smaller buildup of fallen branches and leaves. The fires had less fuel to consume and moved quickly through the forests, causing little damage to their elevated inhabitants.
We are obliged to prevent forest fires because of the proximity of housing and industrial development. The detritus now must be mechanically removed or kept in check by prescribed burns.
The significance of trees in our lives cannot be over-estimated. What makes them so special? Well, the tree is one of the most dynamic companies on our good Earth —probably one of our better investments.
My next commentary will feature the tree as a vertically structured company.
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