Notes from the Gulf Coast

After the azaleas have finished their spring blossoming, the prettiest things to see on the flat land between Pensacola and New Orleans are the newly leaved pecan groves. The large, open trees with their light-gray bark have an elegance like art, a spatial rhythm as if Poussin or Cézanne had pruned their branches. Often, half a dozen trees are pleasantly grouped around a small farm house, but an expansion of scale adds grandeur to charm.

On the point of Alabama that makes one side of Mobile Bay, the pecan trees, planted forty feet apart, are grown in exact rows that form great squares of fifty or sixty acres. The dappled sunlight, dropping through the fresh leaves, fills the space under the high branches with a green-gold shadow-cooled glow. From the ground between the rows of trees, shoots of corn or oats thrust out, or thick green field grass.

JB

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James Burnham

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After the azaleas have finished their spring blossoming, the prettiest things to see on the flat land between Pensacola and New Orleans are the newly leaved pecan groves. The large, open trees with their light-gray bark have an elegance like art, a spatial rhythm as if Poussin or Cézanne had pruned their branches. Often, half a dozen trees are pleasantly grouped around a small farm house, but an expansion of scale adds grandeur to charm.

On the point of Alabama that makes one side of Mobile Bay, the pecan trees, planted forty feet apart, are grown in exact rows that form great squares of fifty or sixty acres. The dappled sunlight, dropping through the fresh leaves, fills the space under the high branches with a green-gold shadow-cooled glow. From the ground between the rows of trees, shoots of corn or oats thrust out, or thick green field grass.