The Pine-Barrens of the Southern States are celebrated as healthful retreats for the inhabitants of seaport towns, whither they resort in summer for security from the prevailing fevers.  They are of a mixed character, consisting of the Northern Pitch-Pine, the Broom-Pine, and the Cypress, intermixed with Red Maples, Sweet Gums, and other deciduous trees.  The Pines, however, are the dominant growth:  but here they do not grow so compactly as in colder regions, standing widely apart, with a frequent intervening growth of Willows and shrubbery.  The sparseness of these woods may be in part attributed to the practice of tapping the trees for their turpentine, which has caused them for a century past to be gradually thinned by consequent decay.  Their tall, gaunt forms and almost branchless trunks show that they obtained their principal growth in a dense wood.

The first time I entered one of these Pine-Barrens was some years since, in the month of June, when vegetation was in its prime, before the summer droughts had seared the green herbage, and when the flowering trees and shrubs were in all their glory.  During my botanical rambles in the wood, I was struck with the multitude of beautiful flowers in its shady retreats,—­seeming the more numerous to me, as I had previously confined my researches to Northern woods.  The Phlox grew here in all its native grace and delicacy, where it had never known the fostering hand of Art.  Crimson Rhexias, called by the inhabitants Deer-Weed, were distributed among the grassy knolls, like clusters of Picotees.  Variegated Passion-Flowers were conspicuous on the bare white sand that checkered the ground, displaying their emblematic forms on their low repent vines, and reminding the wanderer in these almost trackless solitudes of that Faith which was founded on humility and crowned with martyrdom.  Here, too, the Spiderwort of our gardens, in a meeker form of beauty and with a paler radiance, luxuriated under the protection of the wood.  Already I observed the predominance of luxuriant vines, indicating our nearness to the tropic, wreathed gayly over the tall and branchless trunks of the trees:  some, like the Bignonia, in a full blaze of crimson; others, like the Climbing Fern, draping the trees in continual verdure.

These Pines constitute a great part of the timber of the flat country between the mountains and the coast, and render a journey through that region singularly monotonous and gloomy.  In the low grounds, a considerable proportion of the wood consists of the Southern Cypress, a graceful and magnificent tree, whose appearance would be very lively and cheerful, were it not for the abundance of long trailing “moss” (usnea) that hangs, like funereal drapery, from its branches, and darkens the whole forest.  This parasitic appendant wreathes the woods sometimes almost in darkness, especially in those immense tracts on the borders of the Mexican Gulf that consist entirely of Cypress.  There it has been poetically styled the “Garlands of Death,” as significant of the fevers that prevail wherever it is abundant.