I'm from the DFW area in Texas. (Although I'm dwelling at the moment in College Station, same state...) If you look at a geographic map (as opposed to political) of the U.S., you'll see that the eastern half of the country is green. The western half, for the most part, is tan or brown. The diving line between green and brown runs through the middle of the DFW Metroplex. East of Dallas, the land is forested, at times heavily - pine trees! West of Fort Worth, the land is treeless, rolling, grassy hills. I've seen these hills black and charred from the grassfires we deal with all too often in the warm months (i.e. most of the year).
My home, in the city but close to more rural areas, is between Fort Worth and Dallas. I couldn't get more on the line! The local manifestations are scrubby post oak trees, interspersed with the unbiquitous tall grass, only green in March, when there's plenty of rain.
Doesn't sound very inviting, does it? And yet I love it. I've traveled so much through Texas; it's so varied, so hard to describe in terms of one place. If anything, I'd say it resembles Eregion more than anything. I get the idea of windswept open lands with vegetation varying from scrub to tall trees. We haven't many tall trees in my part of Texas, nothing like 80-foot Georgia pines; but I love our pecan trees. They are beautiful trees, and some of the biggest that grow here. (They don't grow in College Station voluntarily... grr.)
The thing that knocks out Eregion as a possibility is the overall climate. Being drier than coastal areas, our summer highs routinely top 100 (Fahrenheit). We starting taking notice when we set streaks of consecutive 100+ days; the record is 113. A few summers ago we went well over a month at 100+, and if I recall correctly we went more than two months without any measurable precipitation. Those
were records, and not the ordinary. But our winters are probably, to most of you, very warm as well. Getting down in the teens is very cold to us - it happens about once a winter - and single-digits are quite unusual. The winter after I was born was very cold: it didn't just get into the teens for one night, it stayed there for some time. That was so cold it killed many, many plants and shrubs. My grandparents had to replace the entire hedge around their yard. So temperature-wise, we belong south of Mordor - perhaps even in Umbar!
I won't start into the College Station climate. Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, the city is built on the soggy Brazos River flood plain, afflicted with Gulf of Mexico humidty, and vegetated by 20-foot 'trees.' I have grown to like live oaks, though. (
Here's a picture of one famous one on my campus.) Live oaks have dark green, glossy, oval-shaped leaves, similar to holly without the spines. They're called 'live' because they don't lose them all winter. Instead, they drop them in the spring, just in time for the new leaves. The live oak leaves are falling right now.
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But here and there are beech groves, which are very lovely and delightful, and which act a bit like mallorns in that they keep their faded-golden leaves through the winter (at least, they try) and their trunks are a lovely silver-grey.
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Helen, I love beech trees! I've only ever seen them in Ukraine, nearly two years ago. I wonder if there's any way to grow them here.
