The majestic live oak, emblem of the South in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’ve always loved trees, ever since I was a child growing up in New Orleans. We kids spent a lot of time in quite imaginative play in our back yard. Against the fence back there were four tall hackberry trees. They were kind of strange trees, as they had weird little wood-like protuberances all over the bark and lots of small berries covering the leaves. My brother often climbed up those trees. I never did, being more earthbound and sensible, but as the older brother it seems to me I came up with the ideas for our play projects.

Because of those childhood hackberry memories, I developed a love for and keen interest in trees, reading about them in our encyclopedia and learning as much as I could about them. Looking back this was kind of unusual for someone so young, but it was also an early indication of my life-long love of Nature.

It helped, too, that the native forests of South Louisiana were very dense and tropical appearing, like you would imagine a jungle on a faraway continent. This fact didn’t escape us when we explored the woods around our new house in the suburbs in 1961. Those fabulous, mysterious “jungles” of our later childhood, were where we cut saplings for spears and glided stealthily through the dense undergrowth seeking our quarry.

Later on in life as I traveled across the country, I became acquainted with many of the eastern U.S. deciduous trees such as ash, red and white oaks, hickories, sweet gums, tulip poplars, and, out West, cottonwoods along every desert river, eucalyptus trees in California, and Douglas firs and hemlocks in the Pacific Northwest.

But my favorite tree has to be, indisputably, the majestic live oaks which grew on every street in New Orleans and everywhere in our new neighborhood where I lived in the Sixties. Live oaks surround me where I live even now, decades later, abundant planted in the city and growing wild as a native species in the immediate coastal plain of South Carolina where I live.

What’s most unusual and beautiful about live oaks is the way their massive limbs branch out in all directions and bend and sway in the wind, often adorned with Spanish moss, which gives them a very mysterious Deep South appearance. The South and live oaks are as inextricably linked as are the wide swath of pine trees that cover much of the South.

I photographed live oak for many years, decades actually, and they never cease to amaze me with their sturdy, seemingly immortal solidity and grandeur, especially as they grow older and ever outward, mood-evoking and awe-inspiring.

I took this series of photos of live oak within a radius of about 35 miles from where I live over the past three months.

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/sEfdGp

An article on live oaks with lots of photos:

https://southcarolinalowcountry.com/the-mighty-southern-live-oak-tree/