For years, Jean Huffman gave no thought to the woods behind her house. “I just presumed that it was old agricultural land,” she says, “like most of all the land around here.” Much of Tallahassee is considered old field, a term for abandoned farm fields.
She didn’t think those woods were anything special, but they added to the rural, quiet feel of the Miccosukee Land Co-op. Then, one day, that land went up for sale. She and her neighbors feared that they would find themselves next to a subdivision, and so Jean finally walked into those woods. Her expectations were low; she certainly didn’t expect to find anything that would help their cause. And yet, she did.
“When I finally went out on the site and looked at it, I was quite surprised because it had hickory trees,” Jean said. “It had also some unusual herbaceous species, unusual wildflowers that I had never seen anywhere else.” Dr. Jean Huffman is a dendrochronologist with Tall Timbers Research Station, and she has spent a career working in Florida ecosystems. Her plant finds started her researching, and she found something surprising: this was an ecosystem she had never heard of before. Not only that, it was one that researchers had only recently recognized in north Florida.
This is the story of the land behind her house, which she and her neighbors have dubbed the Hickory Preserve. It is also the story of the shortleaf/ oak/ hickory habitat. If you’re a Tallahasseean who has never heard of it, get ready to learn something about where you live.
Old fields and shortleaf pine
Jean’s research led her to a paper by Dr. Andre Clewell, a retired botanist who works with Tall Timbers. He, too, had wondered about land that had been classified as old field. The dominant tree species in the Coastal Plain of the American southeast is longleaf pine. If an agricultural field replaced longleaf pine habitat, and was then abandoned, tree species moved in from lower-lying areas. This includes different pine species.
Dr. Kevin Robertson, Director of the Fire Ecology Program at Tall Timbers, elaborates. “Tradition in the Red Hills region that’s between Tallahassee and Thomasville and the surrounding area was that, if it was native habitat, then it was longleaf pine/ wiregrass, and if it had shortleaf pine and loblolly pine, then it was old field.”
I talked to Kevin in a section of Tall Timbers called the Scrub Course. The dominant tree species here is shortleaf pine. “When people saw the shortleaf pine in this part of the property, they just assumed, well, this is an old field because it’s got shortleaf pine.
“One thing it doesn’t have is loblolly pine, which is one of those species that we call mesophytic species. It’s a fancy word for species that, in the past, used to be down in the wet areas, but, because of different land use changes have kind of jumped up into the uplands and these old fields when they abandoned them.”
Other mesophytic species include water and live oaks, and sweetgum. These are present at the Hickory Preserve. Both the Scrub Course and Hickory Preserve have post and red oaks, and mockernut and pignut hickories.
Ground cover in the shortleaf/ oak/ hickory habitat
We often name ecosystems for their trees; they are the foundation. The ground cover species have much to tell us as well, especially when it comes to identifying an old field.
“We thought this was an old field for a long time,” Kevin says. “But when we started to look at it more carefully, we realized there are a lot of species here that you typically only see in longleaf pine/ wiregrass, native communities… you don’t have the longleaf pine, you don’t have the wiregrass, but you have a lot of these other native ground cover species that only occur in places that don’t have a history of agriculture.”
Agriculture disturbs soil, and certain plant species won’t grow in disturbed soil. Tall Timbers was once a cotton plantation, and the longleaf areas on their property don’t have wiregrass. The Scrub Course doesn’t have wiregrass, but it has other native grass species found in longleaf habitats. Even though the Hickory Preserve has more of the mesophytic tree species and a closed canopy, Jean noticed some of these wildflowers there as well.
Both locations have wildflowers typical of longleaf habitats, but they also have species not associated with longleaf or old field.
“What’s kind of interesting, too,” Kevin says, “is that there are certain species that we found tend to only occur in this shortleaf native habitat, in particular, that we don’t find in the longleaf pine/ wiregrass. So that was even more evidence that this is kind of a special, unique community that kind of deserves its own name and its own recognition from a conservation standpoint.”
A uniquely Red Hills habitat
Andre Clewell found evidence of this habitat throughout the Red Hills region.
“The area between Tallahassee and Thomasville, and between the Apalachicola River and the Aucilla River, has higher clay content than the surrounding Coastal Plain,” Kevin says. “So the whole area is a little bit more clay-rich.
“This area has the finer soil, higher nutrient levels, higher nitrogen, higher mineral nutrients. And there’s something about that that seems to foster this shortleaf pine community as opposed to longleaf pine/ wiregrass.”
Kevin says that you can find examples of shortleaf/ oak/ hickory at various points along Meridian Road, at Faith Presbyterian Church, Londontown Apartments, and Lakeshore Estates. Jean pointed to places within Miccosukee Greenway and Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park. We see some of the Klapp-Phipps habitat in the video.
We can see the trees in these locations, but not always the ground cover. Both Hickory Preserve and the Scrub Course have the shortleaf-specific wildflowers. This means that these places had never been farmed- they’re old growth.
They’re both old-growth, and yet you can see how different they look. Hickory Preserve is full of live and water oaks, and sweet gum, much like an old field. Contrast it with the Scrub Course, which has an open canopy not unlike a longleaf savanna.
The difference? Fire.
An open shortleaf canopy
Jean stands among the knee-high grasses and wildflowers of the Scrub Course. There is no wiregrass here; shortleaf/ oak/ hickory is dominated by little bluestem grass.
“The process of restoration for Hickory Preserve would be to, first, open up the canopy. To remove some of the water oaks and sweet gums and all the little things that have moved in and kind of closed the canopy. When those are removed, then it opens up the canopy like this, so sunlight reaches the ground. When sunlight reaches the ground, plants that have been suppressed start coming back. That’s what we are hoping to do there. And also, to reintroduce fire.”
Tall Timbers burns the Scrub Course every two years. It’s not as open a canopy as longleaf systems, but it still has the grasses needed to carry fire. While the Hickory Preserve had never been farmed, it also hasn’t seen fire for several decades. That’s why trees associated with old fields moved in among the post oaks, hickories, and shortleaf pines. Before the Hickory Preserve can reintroduce fire, they’ll have to mechanically clear those trees.
As I write this in April of 2026, Jean and her neighbors have made progress in protecting this land. They’ve raised the funds to purchase much of the property, and are working to protect it under a conservation easement from the Northwest Florida Water Management District. They’re also, in partnership with Tall Timbers, applying for federal money to restore the property.
Another Ice Age Story?
Throughout its range, shortleaf pine is found in upland communities. So, why had it been associated with these other old field species that moved up from lower areas?
One reason is likely that it has such a small range in Florida, almost entirely where we find clay-rich soils not typical in most of the state. The Red Hills are an island in the Coastal Plain. However, this kind of shortleaf pine habitat isn’t unique to north Florida.
“The shortleaf pine community here also corresponds to the more global distribution of shortleaf pine in terms of its soil type,” says Kevin Robertson. “A lot of the areas where you find shortleaf like this are farther north. They’re places like Tennessee and Kentucky and Arkansas, northern Louisiana and Texas. So, people aren’t used to seeing it this far south, which is one of the reasons people didn’t recognize it at first.
“A lot of times when our colleagues come down from Missouri or Arkansas and they look at this, they say, oh, this feels like home. They recognize it right away.”
Kevin says this is an ice age remnant. During glacial periods, plant and animal species migrated south to warmer areas. This shortleaf community found soils similar to where it had originated, and permanently settled in this new area. Something similar happened with many plant and animal species in the region directly to the west of the Red Hills, the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines. The Red Hills have soils unique for Florida, and this area is hilly in a flat state. The Bluffs and Ravines likewise have a more pronounced topography, and deep, cool ravines hospitable to Appalachian plants.
Our atypical (for Florida) geology is a big part of this area’s biodiversity, and not a small part of the fulfillment I receive as an ecology producer here.
A final note, about the red in Red Hills
The Red Hills gets its name from its most eye-catching soil: Orangeburg sandy loam. It’s a mix of sand and red clay. Our area has other sandy loams, like Norfolk, but Orangeburg is iconic in our area. But we’re not really supposed to see so much of it.
“That red soil that you used to seeing in the south, like out in the peanut farms of south Georgia, that’s supposed to be underground,” says Kevin Robertson. “But because of erosion, it’s had that red soil exposed. That’s not really a natural phenomenon.”
Undisturbed soils have a sand cap.
“When you have a native soil that that wasn’t farmed, you tend to have almost pure sand, between 30 to 50 centimeters in the shortleaf habitat. It goes down to a meter to two meters in the longleaf pine/ wiregrass habitat.
“This is the way soil is supposed to be. And walking around here, there’s a little bit of a bouncy feel to it that you often won’t find in an old field, or your typically heavier managed areas.”
The sand cap is favorable to burrowing species, such as pocket gophers and gopher tortoises.
Another final note, about an uncommon bee
As I was typing the first final note, talking about burrowing animals, I thought of a bee.
A couple of years ago, I photographed an interesting bee near the Scrub Course. It was a southeastern sunflower burrowing-resin bee (Paranthidium jugatorium ssp. lepidum), a ground-nesting species. It got a little attention on iNaturalist because it was a couple of hundred miles out of its range. It wasn’t the first observation for our area; there was one more near Tall Timbers.
It’s curious that there is this population of bees around Lake Iamonia, and then nowhere else for hundreds of miles. But, if this plant community was stranded in Florida during the ice age, maybe this bee came along with it? Or maybe not. North Florida ecology is full of mysteries and surprises.
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