At last year's Georgia Organics Conference, the keynote speaker was Janisse Ray.  Her book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, tells her story of growing up in a junkyard on Highway 1 in the heart of the rural South.  She reminds us of our Celtic origins and the forest of Longleaf Pine that once surrounded our ancestors. 

On the Longleaf Alliance site, Ray's testimonial begins:

"The landscape that owns my body is the longleaf pine. I was born to it, as my ancestors for seven generations were born to it, although as a child I did not know its name, or its habits, or the names of its inhabitants. All this I have come to know.

Maybe through my genes I inherited a vision of the original longleaf pine flatwoods, because I seem to remember their endlessness. I recollect when the coastal plains of the South were one daybreak-to-dark, rust-and-bronze longleaf forest. It is a monotony one learns to love, through days and seasons and years, for this is a landscape of loyalty, that you devote yourself to more with the passing years, like a beloved friend. The more you know of it, the more you love it. The more it gives you, the more you give in return. A longleaf pine forest never tells its secrets at first meeting, but reveals them slowly over time—and a longleaf forest is full of secrets.

In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog. The tip of each needle carries a single drop of silver. The trees are so well spaced that their limbs seldom touch and sunlight streams between and within them. Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall, richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground. Purple liatris gestures across the landscape. Our eyes seek the flowers like they seek the flashes of Bachman’s sparrows and ruby-crowned kinglets, and the careful crossings of fox squirrels and gopher tortoises."