Please visit my Pinelands photography site.
The New Jersey Pinelands is home to plant communities found nowhere else on earth, and a growing number of individual species can be found only in our Pinelands, because they have been or are being wiped out in the rest of their natural range. The community of plants found here also does not exist anywhere else, as the New Jersey Pinelands is a unique mixture of southern and northern species which found a haven here after the last ice age and the warming cycles of the past 10,000 years. All this means that we have something very special to protect – and even cultivate. The New Jersey Pine Barrens isn’t barren at all. It’s just different from most other regions of North America. It was called “barren” by early European settlers who found they could not grow their row crops in the sandy, droughty, low-nutrient upland soils. The negative epithet stuck, creating the false impression that things don’t grow in the Pine Barrens.
