Rice, moss and oysters: a daytrip to McClellanville

If I were a tree, I think I would be a live oak. The ones we saw today were certainly having a bad hair day - and that's exactly what I'm having 7 days a week. On our way from Georgetown to McClellanville (yes, we drove with the top down) we stopped at Hampton Plantation historic site. Lucky us, it wasn't really overcrowded there, so we could walk through the gardens and sit on the porch in the sun in perfect privacy. We took a lot of pictures of the trees overgrown with Spanish moss which would have made them look like ghost trees if it hadn't been so awfully sunny today. Despite the name, Spanish moss is not biologically related to either mosses or lichens, it is a flowering plant that especially likes live oak and bald cypress because these trees have high rates of mineral leaching and thus provide nutrients to the plant. I'm so happy I have finally found my spirit epiphyte! My botanical soul mate! Hang on, my hairy friends! Of course the Spanish moss wasn't really the main attraction at Hampton Plantation. We walked out on the boardwalk into the former rice field and peeked inside the mansion which unfortunately is only open Thursday thru Sunday. Or was it Tuesday thru Saturday? Whatever - when we were there, it was closed. Rice cultivation (that had started in South Carolina in the 18th century) has created the economic prosperity of the area. In 1850 alone Hampton Plantation produced 250,000 pounds of rice! Of course this was only possible with the cheap labor of that time. Whole families of slaves worked in the rice fields - and it must have been a very hard and unpleasant work when you consider that even today the management of the park warns visitors of snakes, wild boars and nasty bugs. 

Now to something completely different: oysters. I'm not sure if oysters and I will ever be good friends, so I certainly like the local attitude towards these slimy little creatures. They are food, and that's it. You go oystering like you're going fishing, nothing fancy or posh about it. In McClellanville I even saw an oyster shell recycling truck - in Germany that would be like a public recycling bin for Moet & Chandon bottles! Oyster shell recyling is actually pretty important, because the oyster larvae have to attach to a hard substrate in order to survive and develop, ideally another oyster shell. So replanting oyster shells helps ensure there is a suitable habitat for further generations.