A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
pocosin
A pocosin is a raised evergreen shrub bog of the southeastern American coastal plain, standing on deep peat with no stream running through it, fed entirely by rain. It sits higher than the land around it and drains outward. The vegetation is dense low evergreen shrubs and scattered pond pine, and the ground beneath is waterlogged, acid, and extremely poor.
Etymology
The word came into English from an Algonquian language of the Virginia and Carolina coast, and it is usually glossed as swamp on a hill, which describes the defining oddity precisely: a wetland that occupies high ground. English took very few landscape words from the eastern Algonquian languages and this is the most distinctive of them.
Notes
Pocosins burn, and the vegetation depends on it. Pond pine resprouts from buds under the bark after fire, which is unusual for a pine, and several of the shrubs regrow from underground stems. The peat itself will burn in a dry year and can smolder underground for months. The Venus flytrap grows in pocosin margins and in nowhere else on earth outside a small area of the Carolinas.