Hello, friends! I’ve gotta draw out the details of this map:
…and I reckoned that now’s as good a time as any to make myself the (start of the) tree reference I’ve been meaning to do.
I’ve done plenty of in-the-woods sketches but that’s more to get a sense of how the trees work, rather than what they ARE, and since I want this story to feel regionally aligned with the area that inspired it, I want to make sure I have the right sort of trees, and that they’re the right scale to each other, since I usually see them from their trunks but, as in some wide shots and this map, will need a better sense of what they look like from a distance.
To that end, I made up a little reference sheet for myself. It’ll be a while before I have to draw in-the-woods again (almost a hundred pages), and so I’ll probably draw a little bark-texture-guide to go over each one, but for now, this is all I need.
My notion is that a lot of the woods we see are gonna be first-growth, so they’ll be a bit bigger than the ones we’re generally used to outside specific areas. And although they won’t come into play until a later book, the smokies still have some two-hundredish-foot Yellow Poplar/Tulip trees (we’ve got one ourselves that’s probably about 150, 160 feet tall in the Schweizer mountains on the Tennessee/North Carolina border – there’s no level ground anywhere near so that measuring trick they teach you in school doesn’t apply, but it’s absurdly tall), and so those’ll be my arboreal giants.
And in looking to see how big old Sassafras can grow, I learned that the world’s largest sassafras tree (at least on record) is in the nearest large town to me! Who knew? So we might take a family trip over there in the next couple of weeks to take it in in person.
I DID forget to put in hemlocks, red spruces, and Fraser firs, mostly because I tend to steer clear of sappers cause I don’t wanna get sticky and since I rarely seek them out, it didn’t occur to me to include them! But I oughtta, resin or no, so I’ll add those in before starting the map tomorrow (today is finalizing edits on the book’s print files). But I already made the little video, so I’ll post it now.
Anyway, just thought I’d share! Later in the series we’ll see some longleaf pines, cyprus, and cottonwood, and probably some other stuff, but not for the first three books, at least.
Chris