Specializing in Native/Carolinian trees and shrubs.
Liz Marshall or Dale Sawyer
call: 519-692-4714 | text: 519-350-4244
email: heavenlyearth.ca@gmail.com
The Carolinian Zone
Early French explorers in what is now southern Ontario… especially the region between the Niagara and Detroit rivers, noted with amazement the character and diversity of the flora. In variety and lushness, it seemed to belong to a much warmer climate. European botanists, such as Kalm and Rafinesque, who came to North America in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, noted the phenomenon, but since the continent was still under a single sovereignty had no occasion to relate their observations to a political boundary. The creation of the United States offered a new point of view: when, in the last years before 1800 and the first decades immediately following, travellers from that country passed through the southern part of Upper Canada, they were very conscious of having crossed a frontier.
Little by little it dawned upon studious observers that …despite the interposition of a formal frontier and the broad span of inland seas, the territory under observation was a unit. From its northern limit, somewhere in Canada, it stretched into the southland as far as Tennessee and the Carolinas, and even beyond. It even reached out westward and southwestward across the Mississippi. Captivated by a name redolent of the south, one investigator called, quite appropriately, the vast roughly defined expanse, the Carolinian zone.
(Fox & Soper 1952)