Southern Live Oak
Quercus virginiana · Trees - Deciduous
Evening under the live oaks
Savannah, 16 February 2025
The canopy from ground level, park benches and a gas lamp underneath it.
Live oaks like these are what Savannah's squares were designed and planted around from the city's founding, and most of what stands now is well over a century old. The name means evergreen - the tree holds its leaves through winter and drops them in spring as the new ones come - and the timber was the frame of the USS Constitution, hard enough that cannonballs bounced off it.
Live oaks over Forsyth Park
Savannah, 16 February 2025
Resurrection fern growing straight out of the bark along the horizontal limbs, Spanish moss hanging off everything below it. Neither is a parasite. Both just use the tree as a place to perch, taking nothing from it but a foothold above the ground.
The fern is named for what it does in drought: it curls up brown and apparently dead, and greens again within hours of rain. It can lose three quarters of its water and come back.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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