Southern Matters--Supplemental Images

Dendrochronology is a science in its own right, and certainly I am no expert. Notwithstanding, I distinguished 278 rings (above cross-section) and used that number as a minimum estimate of the trees's age, as the inner core was indistinct. The ring structure provides a visual image of the good times and bad times for this tree. (The unfamiliar will likely be surprised at the massive sizes of some cypresses, as this growth from a stump that I stand by in 2006 in a swamp near the Aucilla River attests to.)

Never mind the details. What this tree has seen!!! Young boys headed to the creek from the fields for a lunch-time splash, as told to me by my mother's brother Herbert Watson. Turpentiners, owners, & tenants coming, then going. Big events like the plane crash, epidemics, and wars. Storms and lightning, especially lightning, which was this tree's downfall. Indeed, I would not have cut it (August, 2002) except that it had been recently hit . . .

A Young Bowl with a Long History Before the cruel civil war that left the American South decimated, even before the Native Americans ceded South Georgia to the European interlopers, indeed before a number of disgruntled colonists split from the Mother Country and their neighbors, in fact, actually about the time that Oglethorpe negotiated with Tomochichi on the Yamacraw Bluff for a foothold to form the Georgia colony, a cypress tree sprouted along what was first known as the Allapacoochee Creek on the W.H. Outlaw Farm. I will briefly discuss that tree and the bowl that was made from it.

Dendrochronology is a science in its own right, and certainly I am no expert. Notwithstanding, I distinguished 278 rings (above cross-section) and used that number as a minimum estimate of the trees's age, as the inner core was indistinct. The ring structure provides a visual image of the good times and bad times for this tree. (The unfamiliar will likely be surprised at the massive sizes of some cypresses, as this growth from a stump that I stand by in 2006 in a swamp near the Aucilla River attests to.) Never mind the details. What this tree has seen!!! Young boys headed to the creek from the fields for a lunch-time splash, as told to me by my mother's brother Herbert Watson. Turpentiners, owners, & tenants coming, then going. Big events like the plane crash, epidemics, and wars. Storms and lightning, especially lightning, which was this tree's downfall. Indeed, I would not have cut it (August, 2002) except that it had been recently hit . . .

by lightning (and as I discovered later, an earlier lightning strike recorded in the tree's core already rendered it useless for construction).	Perhaps that first lightning strike--see above--saved it from a century of logging. (Many thanks to Tommy Watson whose energy and generosity provided the means for me to get this log out of the swamp.)

The tree did not die when I cut it, it took on a new life. Jerry Griffin, above, carved a portion of it into a beautiful bowl. Linda, Jerry's spouse, stands at Jerry's right, appropriate as she finished the bottom of the bowl with an artistic inscription and carving.	We cherish the bowl, above, for its beauty, its history, and the associations that brought it to us.
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