At the Department of Forestry’s nursery in Sussex County last week, a small group of staff and volunteers formed an “I Love Lucy”-style assembly line along a large machine.
The product they were manufacturing: longleaf pine seeds. About 200,000 of them, which will eventually be planted throughout southeastern Virginia.
The annual “seed sowing” is part of a long-term effort to restore longleaf pines to the region.
The iconic species once dominated the Southeast landscape and helped fuel the military might of early America. But longleafs were decimated by years of logging and development.
The Longleaf Cooperators of Virginia, a coalition of state agencies, nonprofits and universities, has been working to bring back the trees.
“It’s amazing to see those seeds and know some of them could become trees for 400 years,” said Brian van Eerden, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Virginia Pineland Program. “We have the ability to control the fate of the forest.”
Longleaf is part of Virginia’s natural heritage, “arguably more so than tobacco,” said Rebecca Wilson, a longleaf pine restoration specialist with the state Department of Conservation and Recreation.
The tall, straight trees were an important source of lumber, which was used in shipbuilding. The species also has lots of sap that was extracted for resin and tar, supporting the naval fleet.
“It was a very important stepping stone for colonization of this whole region,” Wilson said. “It was one of the most valuable commodities that existed here when Europeans first came.”
Virginia is the northernmost extent of the longleaf’s range. The trees once spanned more than 90 million acres from Florida and eastern Texas through just south of Richmond.
More than 1 million acres were in Virginia. By the 1990s, only 200 trees remained, mostly in the South Quay Sandhills Natural Area Preserve.
Van Eerden has worked to restore longleaf for three decades with the Nature Conservancy. He said the strategy has been to buy land to protect, and plant longleafs there.
For example, the state is buying nearly 2,000 acres of forestland in Suffolk and plans to replace many loblolly pines with longleafs.
Each of those trees starts with a seed. And each seed runs through the Sussex nursery.
At the start of the year, state agencies, conservation groups and landowners submit requests to the Department of Forestry outlining how many longleaf trees they want to plant in the fall.
Forestry officials then estimate how many seeds will be needed, based on their expected germination and viability.
Enter the assembly line.
The machine dumps soil into trays and sends them down a conveyor belt, where an air suction device picks seeds up and places them into holes on the tray, 128 on each.
As the tray moves along, volunteers manually ensure each hole, or “plug,” contains a prized pine seed.
“Because we have such a limited supply of longleaf seed, because we don't have a lot of Virginia genetic stock to collect from, it's very valuable that we make sure we have one seed per cell on that tray,” said Andi Clinton, a restoration specialist with the Nature Conservancy.
Lastly, a small irrigation system tops the trays with water and sawdust to retain moisture, and they’re stacked into pallets and placed in a separate room to germinate.
A few days later, workers will sow them onto the state’s neighboring plot of land and let them grow through the summer. In the fall, officials will plant the sprouted seedlings at conservation sites throughout the region.
The seeds come from pinecones collected from the small number of “relic trees” and from some longleafs grown at a state orchard in New Kent County.
Jim Schroering, longleaf pine coordinator with the forestry department, said they expect about half of the 200,000 seeds to make it once planted.
Meanwhile, the process is getting more sophisticated.
“We don't just want to grow Virginia longleaf trees, we want to grow the best ones,” Schroering said. “The straighter ones, the ones that survive better, the more healthy ones, the disease-resistant ones.”
To that end, the state is studying the species’ genetics and associated characteristics.
Restoration efforts don’t stop with putting longleafs in the ground. Within a few years, the trees need fire to grow, which officials facilitate through controlled burns.
“This is a really interesting species, because it has different life cycle patterns that are adapted to be competitive in the presence of low intensity, frequent fire,” Wilson said. “Which is what existed on the landscape prior to European settlement,” largely from lightning storms.
Longleafs also provide a unique habitat known as a pine savanna, where the trees are spread out through a field, rather than standing densely together. The open canopy allows sunlight to filter through.
These ecosystems in Virginia have been shown to host more than 135 plant species in just a 100-square-meter plot, along with insects, amphibians and other critters that dwell on the forest floor.
That’s “the equivalent diversity of the Amazon rainforest,” Clinton said.
“Longleaf is really resilient, and that will also help the sustainability of our forest moving into the future.”
