I have personally worked on an EPA superfund site here in pennsylvania that was in the process of being restored. This particular site looked like the moon not long ago...just rocks....and sun bleached skeletons of fallen trees. All the top soil had washed away after the vegetation was killed due to industrial pollution. Starting in the 1990s mushroom soil and biosolids were brought in to rebuild the soil. Various grass species were then seeded. After it was left to regrow on its own. For over 20 years it was left untouched...unfortunately many invasive species started to invade and i was hired to control it. There was a severe problem with butterfly bush and tree of heaven. Once the invasives were mostly removed large fenced in areas were created and planted with native trees. The most important of these were American Chestnuts with blight resistance. Today these trees stand 8 feet tall. There are still ongoing efforts to restore this area. Every year it gets a little more green but is still mostly scrub/grassland. There are two big obstacles to natural forest succession and that would be overpopulation of deer and invasive species.

Most any forest in the east US has been cut before, sometimes more than once. It's fortunate that, unlike west NA conifers, many of the eastern hardwood species resprout -- witness all the multi-trunked trees. A couple trees I cut down in the forest where I was in western VA indicated the date they resprouted -- the mid 1930's.

I have a Liveoak/cedar brush land in Central Texas. It was clear cut at the beginning of the century probably and then ranched. Soil is gone on the slopes. Cows striped it. I am now culling some cedar and encouraging other species like escarpment black cherry, Madrone, toothache tree, red oaks. I am woking establishing more grasses, and underbrush species. I choose the trees I want and cull out the small ones, creating berms to hold soil and animal piles with the slash. I don't burn the slash.

I have gone to seminars at a ranch that has been hugely helpful since they have been at it since the 60's. The county agents of Texas have a Master Naturalist Program that I keep wanting to do. Also the NPSOT ( Native Plants Of Texas) has been a resource. They have chapters around the country. I have found some blogs of people doing what I am doing. I also help at a 4000acre park near by and that has been an education. I get info anyway that I can. I would also like to learn how to burn my front field by going to a burn school. Some ranchers run a co-op doing that. So much and so little time.

Nice combintion of trees! I dont see that you have to do much other then not mess it up.

I like that you have beech, tupelo and hickory to "step in" when the pines get old. I find people don't plant much hickory or American Beech in their yards...so I worry in future generations these species will be missing from smaller patches of forest without nearby older forests for the original colonists to come from.

Maybe look for and remove Norway Maple, Callery Pear, Tree of Heaven, and Autumn Olive? Gather hickory nuts and acorns and scatter them in vacant lots along the highway?

A botanist looked at my woods and thought that I should thin out the trees where it was thick and choose the ones that I wanted to encourage and let those have breathing space so they do not have to compete for the limited resources. At first I trimmed too heavily. Now I trim to the canopy, Or keeping a good canopy above but thinning below. I can always and do go back when things get crowded again. I find the trees grow faster with breathing room but a certain amount of tight canopy keep the trees growing straight. The canopy keeps the soil from being eroded in gully washers , and we get them a lot. Our forrest is thinner than yours, and our slopes are steep. The steeper the slope, the tighter the canopy that I leave. I have an almost monoculture of mountain ashe juniper so I need to encourage any tree that is not one. I cage a lot of areas to keep those dang dear out where a mature endangered tree is growing so I can get more babies started .

Getting a botanist to come out and help me with my plan has been invaluable for Tree IDing and techniques and just telling me different things to do . To do things more or lighten up on things in certain areas. It is worth the money to me.

Viper, interesting work with restoration! I am happy to hear blight resistant chesnuts were added to the land. It is always surprising how invasives can just muscle their way into a space and claim it as their own, even though I have seen ut happen over and over (I am currently battling englisj ivy in my yard, it is awful.)

Also interesting how few trees seemed to naturally establish themselves on the site. (I would think they would have grown on their own much sooner, but goes to show what I know!)

The fight against kudzu, english ivy, honesuckle, and privet is never ending around my neck of the woods.

beng, you are totally right. Isn't it interesting to find the multi-trunked trees indicative of an older tree (or maybe I should say the same tree, just with newer sprouts)? There is a really cool 7-trunked Bigleaf Magnolia in a park near me. The 7 trunks are pretty well established, too.

Atlanta is a bit unique, in that just 200 years ago, the whole area was old growth forest. There are still small pockets, reminents, and occassionally an old growth tree or stand of trees interspliced between Atlanta's notorious sprawl. 14 areas here were recently inducted into the Old Growth Forest Network. My yard was not one of them, lolol. But, that is why I described my yard that way (in case snybody was familiar with the forests here and was wondering.) Definitely not old growth...but several larger trees.

Kennswoods, thank you for sharing! What a great idea about the inventory. That is absolutely crazy to hear about the cold sink phenomena and rhe record low for that area. I have read that '85 was a cold winter, but wow!

Thanks for sharing your experience with how the trees emerged on your land. I hope the foredt doesn't outpower what I am planting in the understory, but I guess time will tell. My itention is to slowly thin the scraggly loblollies, to imitate a "sped up" process of them falling. (And also, so they don't fall on my house.) I plan to leave some pine logs to rot slowly as I have read that dead rotting trees are very important.

(I was surprised about my hickories and oaks, as there is not a single white oak or hickory on my street, and I rarely see squirrels in my yard.) I would have guessed more sweet gums, with as many sweet gums are around, but they rarely ever sprout. Based on what you have shared, I guess it is too shaded for them at this point.

Wanton, thank you for sharing about your efforts in Texas! I don't know too much about plants and forests in Texas, so I find your post intriguing. Great ideas with the programs and groups yu are reaching out to and thinking about.

Fantastic sharing about the canopy and trimming, and about the botantist too. My forest has a very high canopy. There are the several bigger pines, but there are many "matchstick" pines, a little thinner than a telephone pole, that just shot up to the sky to occupy their own tiny little part of the canopy. They look like truffula trees.

I want to thin them out, and your sharing confirms I should do it slowly and not in one fell swoop. I have one red maple which is growing with a single leader, because of how the canopy is right now. I would orefer most of what grows to more or less grow up (rather than out.)

Ed, thank you! The younger trees are all very small, and not as well "placed" since squirrels are not the best landscape architects or forest planners. I have a handful of each that I think might do really well over time. But, there is always a risk of messing it up.

Will keep an eye out for invasives or "bad trees and plants". In my area, the worst offenders are pear, mimosa, princess tree. For native plants, poison ivy, violets, and poke weed seem to love my yard.

There are tons of beech in the Appalachian foothills. They are all "on fire" now. However, the beech are only in these "recovering forests." Once developed (aka land being clear cut and bulldozed (I never see the beech. I rarely see beech in nurseries, but found 2 this year (at 2" caliper) so I bought them. I also dug up 2 beech from a development site and they took hold in my yard as well!

Hickories are interesting trees. When they are a foot tall, their taproot may already be upwards of three feet long! Some of the nurseries are developing longer planting containers to pot hickories, but not sure if "Average Joe" is going to want to rent an auger to dig such a deep hole.

I don't know much about your area either. I did find lots of help reaching out in all directions. I bet there are projects and state and county resources around you for educating the small landowner in your area.

I googled "Land Stewards Georgia" and "Forest Stewards georgia" , Forest restoration Georgia and came up with gobs of different sites. I bet you can figure out many other terms to google to get good organizations. I can't tell which ones would be good for you.

Thinning is more for aesthetics and your convenience then for any ecological benefit to the trees. No one manually thins the wilderness. Fall is a good time for it though...you can choose which trees to keep in part on the basis of how good their Fall color is. (Individual white oaks vary a lot in this).

Beech aren't planted much because few have the patience to wait for them to mature. Also they don't like the compacted soil on construction sites.
Kudos on rescuing one from a construction site.

I tend to think hickory are a tree that lends itself to being planted from seed. You could easily get a bucet of nuts if youkn ow someone with a couple hickory. (Preferably one of those people with an old growth one, so you know it is a wild tree native to the area). You could do the same with beeches in the woods.

Watch out for English Ivy or Norway Maple.

I have found that the thinning helps trees get bigger quicker. It does here where I live. Also the cedar will kill off the red oaks and other trees by their ability to grow so quick. and thick. It is a different forest.

I know people hate to do this but sometimes, to help the forest succession in the long-term, you have to cut down trees if they are growing too close to each other, or in the case of stumps with multiple sprouts take the stump out. If many trees are growing too close to each other, it prevents any single tree from growing too big. Natural processes will eventually correct this but it will take an extra 100 or 200 years, until those trees start to die off.

Also large areas of clear cut forest tend to dry out, making it more difficult for new seedling trees to grow and become established. The presence of a forest definitely has a microclimate effect on temperatures and humidity levels. So it can take a long time for a reversal of a clear cut area. Typically the regrowth of new trees proceeds along the edges of already established forest.

In my area, the majority of the forest was originally Longleaf pine which was kept maintained by fire, but in lower lying areas where the fires didn't go you had hardwood forests with water oak, southern magnolia, red maple, Sweetbay, American holly, etc... I suspect my property was the latter type judging by my soil.

The property on one side of mine has been untouched for the past 40 years, and it is totally choked out with Chinese Privet. There were some larger water oaks, but many of those were blown down in a 2004 hurricane, and the privet never misses an opportunity to invade an area with increased light. I'm not sure how long it would take native hardwoods to grow up through the privet and shade it out, probably 100 years, if ever.