Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A katydid balances atop a ripening cranberry, one of the wild crops of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
“Sand-hills . . . are sometimes one hundred feet high and of every variety of form, like snow drifts, or Arab
tents, and are continually shifting . . . Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad of
little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and erelong go to the bot-
tom,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Cape Cod. Thoreau was substantially correct in crediting beach grass
with anchoring the dunes of Cape Cod, but the pine-shrub oak forest also plays its part in preventing the cape's
signature landforms from blowing away.
Scrub Oak is particularly abundant on the cape, where it clusters to form a dense and tangled understory.
Most mature trees reach only 1 to 3 meters (3 to 9 feet), though some can achieve heights of 6 meters (20 feet).
They often grow in association with other oaks, including post oak, which with pitch pine forms the wind-
shaped, stunted forest typical of Cape Cod.
The largest and finest example of this pine-oak forest type in northeastern North America is found in the in-
terior of New Jersey. The pine-oak forests and dwarf pine plains occur in an otherwise deciduous forest cli-
mate zone, primarily because the sandy soils have a low water and nutrient-holding capacity that subjects the
vegetation to periodic drought as well as to frequent fire. The Pine Barrens remains largely undeveloped des-
pite its location in the otherwise densely populated urban corridor between Washington and Boston. On one
side is Philadelphia and on the other lies New York; as New Yorker writer John McPhee has observed, “on a
very clear night a bright light in the pines would be visible from the Empire State Building.”
The region is referred to by the pejorative term “barrens,” largely because the early settlers found the sandy
soils unamenable to raising traditional crops. Even today, the two main agricultural commodities produced in
the Pine Barrens are essentially wild ones: blueberries and cranberries.
Although the Pine Barrens remains sparsely populated to this day, vegetation has been shaped by human ac-
tion, especially repeated fires, which in the historic period have occurred every ten to thirty years. Early ex-
plorers commented on the use of fire by the native Lenni Lenape, or Delaware, as a hunting technique. In
1632, off Cape May, the Dutch navigator David de Vries recorded that he
. . . smelt the land, which gave a sweet perfume as the wind came from the northwest, which blew off the
land, and caused these sweet odors. This comes from the Indians setting fire at this time of the year, to the
woods and thickets, in order to hunt; and the land is full of sweet-smelling herbs, as sassafras, which has a
