Recovery Zone

In the early marketing and media coverage of the Desert of Maine, there were vast exaggerations of how much sand was exposed. Some brochures said there were 300 or even 500 acres of sand, and almost everyone who talked about the Desert ominously warned that it was growing and might soon take over the whole town.

In reality, it was the other way around. After a period of expansion, the forest started reclaiming the land from the dunes in a process called “reforestation.” From 1940 to 1973, the area of exposed sand went from 110 to 52 acres. By 2003, there were 30 acres of exposed sand, and now there are only around 25. You can think of the sand as kind of like a skinned knee. The “skin” or topsoil was scraped off due to intensive farming, but it’s healing around the edges, just as a wound would do.

The plants in the recovery zone on the edges have many strategies that help them grow in these harsh conditions. The pines have very high growth rates, the mosses are smaller (tiny but mighty), and many other plants have large numbers of small, abundant, easily dispersed seeds. Still others, like willow trees, are able to tap into seepages by rooting far down into the sand. Nature is very resilient, as we can see just by looking at this landscape.

Let’s follow the loop trail and head back to the barn.