The Beauty and Troubling Legacies of Plants: A Southern Field Study

By Jabari Jordan-Walker

“I hope you didn’t pick that up from off the ground,” a colleague of mine exclaimed after I showed him a piece of Tillandsia usneoides, more commonly known as Spanish moss. I picked up the moss (which isn’t really a moss but a monocot in the same family as the pineapple) during an overnight stop in New Bern, North Carolina’s colonial capital just off the Pamlico Sound. I quickly assured him that it didn’t come off the ground but was equally anxious to know why he asked. “The chiggers!” he exclaimed, which in their larval stage typically find refuge in Spanish moss that has lost its epiphytic nature and has thus fallen to the ground. The name for these small larvae may come from the Wolof or Yoruba word “jiga,” which loosely translates to “insect.”

The reason for gathering the moss was part of a journaling exercise in which I aimed to document our Southern trip through samples of plant life from each stop, including gas stations and rest stops. These samples were then meant to represent a reflection upon the various expressions of the Southern landscape I experienced along our journey.

Believing the relationship was exclusive to cypress and oak, I was taken aback when I witnessed Spanish moss dressed over groups of crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) in New Bern’s historic downtown and various places across the Lowcountry. Crape myrtle, with its cheerful pink inflorescence, flecked the sunbaked sidewalk along a bend in S. Front Street near our hotel for the night and where John Hawkes’ (1731-1790) rebuilt eighteenth-century brick Georgian Royal Governor’s mansion called Tryon Palace proudly sits.

Brought to the colonies from its native China, the crape myrtle spread its roots in the southern colonies through Charleston, South Carolina when French botanist André Michaux (1746-1802) introduced the future Southern horticultural icon to colonial plantation garden schemes via his botanical garden, the French Garden, located ten miles north of Charleston’s busy port and just across the Ashley River from Drayton Hall and Middleton Place.

Spanish moss, on the other hand, a plant native to the American South, has served importantly as economic utility for the enslaved as well as a backdrop to a southern charm enjoyed by millions.
Although more attention has been paid to Spanish moss as part of a romanticized imagery of the South, it was common for the enslaved population to use the moss personally for stuffing mattresses and other household functions. The enslaved also gathered moss for sale by enslavers, or occasionally, through their own access to secondary markets. Its apparent symbiosis with crape myrtle reminds me of the imported beauty of Palladian and Greek architectural typologies that also mark the Southern landscape.
Thus I feel an entanglement of beauty and troubled legacies existing not only in architecture but in the many plants found in the Southern United States, most notably industrially cultivated cotton and tobacco, with the latter prized also in gardens as an annual.

From here, I find my senses challenged by the natural beauty and troubling legacy of plants that represent an elite class who were central to fomenting the colonial landscapes we preserve today as a reminder of our nation’s complex cultural heritage.

Just remember, if you want to pick some of that Spanish beard, not to pick it up from the ground but from a tree!