They say that towns and subdivisions are often named after that which will no longer exist once they are built: Peaceful Valley or Rural Retreat or even Southern Pines.
    Or Pine Forest.
    Seven Lakes developer Fred Lawrence didn't fall prey to that titular irony, since he created the lakes after which he named his community.
    Botanist Bruce Sorrie, a Whispering Pines-based botanist work works for the state's Natural Heritage Program, identifying plant and animal communities worth preserving, is concerned that the Pine Forest PUD, which will cover nearly 1,700 acres between NC Highways 73 and 211, will fall in to the former category rather than the latter. Once MHK Development is done installing a resort hotel, three golf courses, two gated communities and assorted retail shops, there may not be much pine forest left in Pine Forest.
    And that will be particularly tragic in this case, Sorrie told The Times, because the 1,700 acre Pine Forest tract is a particularly fine example of the sort of longleaf pine forest that once dominated not just Moore County, but stretched across the Coastal Plain from Virginia to Texas, covering tens of million of acres when Europeans first explored what they called "The New World."

A unique ecosystem

    Longleaf pine forest is a unique ecosystem with many variations, home to hundreds if not thousands of species adapted to live there and nowhere else, but there are two big players in the species list: the longleaf pine tree itself and wiregrass. If you are reading this in Moore County, you probably know what a longleaf pine looks like — you probably have one or more in your yard. So no explanation needed there. Wiregrass may be less familiar to you, since its absence is what makes so many of our urbanized pine forests ghosts of their former selves, instead of healthy forests.
    Wiregrass is a bunch grass that has adapted to living in the dry sandy soil of the Sandhills by forming clumps that seem as much dead as alive. The typical clump of wiregrass has more dead leaves than live ones and even the live parts of the plant are woody and fibrous. It looks like it would burn like crazy, and it does, which is what makes it so important.
    In its natural state, the longleaf pine forest ecosystem is adapted to the regular fires, sparked by lightning from the frequent Spring and Summer thunderstorms in the coastal plain. The fires kill off the seedlings of competing species — like the jack oaks that Lakers are forever culling from their properties — and open up the forest floor so that the new longleafs can find room to grow.
    The dry wiregrass is the perfect fuel for the fires the longleafs need.

A unique tract

    What makes the Pine Forest tract unique, Sorrie told The Times in a recent interview, is that it preserves this longleaf-wiregrass community intact. It is "a functioning natural longleaf pine forest," he said. The wiregrass is there, and so age longleaf pine trees of varying ages — a sign that there is natural regeneration of the population.
    It was preserved that way because the folks who owned it for decades let it be. They didn't log off all the pine trees. And though pinestraw was harvested from some areas, it was hand-raked. Bringing in tractors to rake straw tends to kill off the wiregrass, which can't stand the pressure of the tractor tires.
    It's not an "old growth" forest, Sorrie explained, because almost all the longleaf pines in the Sandhills were cut down in the early years of the last century. The pine forest on Pine Forest is an old and well-preserved regrowth from that time.
    Sorrie, whose job it is to know such things, says it's the largest functioning natural longleaf pine forest in the Moore County, and maybe in all of the North Carolina Sandhills, outside of Fort Bragg and the Sandhills Gamelands preserve.

A problem for Preservationists

    So why hasn't the state or the Nature Conservancy or some other preservation group bought it to preserve it. Sorrie told The Times that he and other folks who, like him, look for the unique natural environments that are worthy of preservation, only found out about the tract three or four years ago — about the same time that it began to interest developers. It was in private hands and no one had looked at it, Sorrie said.
    The NC Department of Agriculture's Plant Conservation Program [PCP] has expressed some interest in acquiring the property for preservation, he told The Times, but they are limited to paying market rates for the forest land, and the property is worth far more than that to a developer. So the PCP couldn't come up with the money.
    The Nature Conservancy folks and their allies in this part of the state are very focused on acquiring land that will connect the natural areas around Ft. Bragg with the Sandhills Gamelands. That will create a corridor for wildlife to move over a larger area, something that ecologists have more recently understood is crucial to a long-term preservation strategy. Pine Forest lies isolated outside that corridor.
    On the other hand, there is some PCP-owned property near Pine Forest, as well as some private land in conservation easements. Acquiring Pine Forest would "give them many more options for doing landscape management," Sorrie said.
    Noting the projected growth in the western part of the county around West End and Seven Lakes and toward Carthage, Sorrie said,"The towns of Seven Lakes and West End are going to need some open space, ultimately. Big chunk of land like this would be a big open area with a lot of possibilities.
    He mentioned grass parking areas and perhaps a network of trails as options — and maybe even a connection with Weymouth Woods State Park — as public access options.
    "We'd like to try to convince the developer that building homes in there wouldn't be the best use for the property," he told The Times.
    Pine Forest's proposed PUD rezoning is expected to come before the Moore County Planning Board in a public meeting on November 5.