In the Longleaf's Shade

The wild and wondrous life of Caroline Dormon

by

People & Places

In what is perhaps the most famous photograph of the revered Louisiana naturalist Caroline C. Dormon, she is captured leaning against the body of a longleaf pine. The tree is massive, its knotted base shrouded in needles. Dormon sits—knees tucked in, wearing a collared dress, glasses, hair pulled back. Her body is poised, pressed against the trunk, cheek not quite touching the surface, a thin hand splayed comfortably across the bark. Her mouth is unsmiling, a serious, thoughtful line. This is “Grandpappy,” a centuries-old longleaf pine Dormon always deemed her favorite, which still stands in the forested region of northeast Natchitoches Parish: “My very soul lives in that beautiful old gnarled and weather-beaten tree,” she once said. “Oh, my, the tales he could tell of his rugged survival through the storms of life.”

A Louisiana legend, Dormon’s interests and expertise spanned forestry, botany, horticulture, conservation, ornithology, archaeology, ethnology, literature, art, education, and preservation, all fueled by an unassuming yet steadfast passion for all things wild. Born in 1888 at her family’s summer estate near Saline, Louisiana—called “Briarwood”—Dormon came of age at a time when women were largely absent from the fields in which she would thrive. She was a Renaissance woman, an intellectual ahead of her time who kept up a relentless pace to safeguard her corner of the world and all its natural beauty.

Dormon’s passion for nature, and all it held, began when she was a child, spending her days running wild through the overgrown woods of northern Louisiana. She was one of eight children. Her family lived in Arcadia and would spend an annual six-week vacation at Briarwood amid the cool serenity of the forest’s longleaf pines. Dormon’s mother, Caroline, an author who published a novel titled Under the Magnolias (1902), and her father, James, a respected attorney, placed a premium on education. An avid reader throughout her life, Dormon was able to write at the age of three.

[Read more about Caroline Dormon in this story : "Where the Wild Things Are—Caroline Dormon and the Briarwood Nature preserve"]

“Her father was not just an attorney—he was a brilliant man who loved nature,” said Fran Holman, Dormon’s biographer and author of The Gift of the Wild Things: The Life of Caroline Dormon. “It was her family that was the remarkable influence on her. The other thing they valued that you see throughout her life is the value of education … and more than formal education, though they all got degrees: the idea of knowledge for its own sake.”

At Briarwood, Dormon and her siblings would splash in creeks, build treehouses, fashion rope swings, and spy on birds. “Carrie” made tree-climbing her specialty, much to the appreciation of her brothers, one of whom had a carefully curated egg collection and regularly reaped the bounty of her excursions. Once, she found a nest of rare gnatcatcher eggs, and carried her treasure all the way down the tree, secure in her mouth.

“My guardian angel had little time for loafing,” Dormon once wrote in her column for the Shreveport Times, hearkening back to her untrammeled youth.

“My guardian angel had little time for loafing.” —Caroline Dormon

When she was sixteen, Dormon enrolled at Judson, a private Alabama college, where she received a formal education in literature and art (a more traditional educational route for women at that time than the sciences, despite her interests, noted Holman). A contemplative, intelligent woman, Dormon managed to find friends and a certain acceptance at school—though she felt wholly divorced from the social norms and the polite veneer society demanded of her gender, later recalling, “I still belonged to the wild.”

Upon graduation, she taught primary school classes, and later high school, managing to infuse nature outings and education into her singing and art courses. However, at only thirty years old, Dormon sought retirement at Briarwood due to chronic health issues, such as regular bouts of the flu, persistent arthritis, and unresolved heart problems. Her sister, Virginia, joined her there in a small log cabin after her marriage ended, taking on administrative duties in the household as Dormon devoted her time to native plants, art, and local conservation efforts.

“She moved back to Briarwood and wanted to dedicate her life to flora and fauna,” said Bayli Q. Brossette, curator at Briarwood Nature Preserve, which today operates as a nonprofit sanctuary and continuation of Dormon’s vision. “It wasn’t just plants; it was birds too. She wanted to conserve those native species.”

In the peaceful surroundings of Briarwood, Dormon befriended a number of animals—welcome and frequent visitors. These included a mockingbird named “Shelley,” and a speckled king snake named “Hezekiah.” Her appreciation of birds was such that she refused curtained windows (which would obstruct her view) and even allowed her feathered friends to fly in and out of her house, building nests in her room.

At one point, Dormon was sitting on the porch watching the birds when a titmouse spied her “uncombed and fuzzy hair,” deeming it useful material for a nest, and plucking several strands from her very head.

Dormon, characteristically, was ecstatic.

Although she would become a revered giant in the naturalist community, renowned internationally and sought after by the likes of Thomas Edison, Dormon’s love of old-growth forests and native plants remained a powerful, insistent throughline that always anchored her to Briarwood. And while she pursued countless initiatives and careers, rarely did she venture beyond Louisiana, too intent on conservation work in her home state, and access to the plants and animals that inspired her.

It was from these humble surroundings that Dormon would actualize her greatest accomplishments. Distraught by the rapid expansion of the logging industry into old-growth forests in the early twentieth century, she spent more than a decade pressuring officials to save the Kisatchie Wold—“a name as musical as the wind in the pines,” she once wrote—campaigning to turn it into a national forest. She spent long days motoring around the uplands in a Model T Ford, driven by Virginia, to identify possible areas ideal for protection.

“The great pines came right to the water’s edge on these lovely clear creeks, with only an occasional Magnolia [sic] and dainty wild azalea and ferns,” Dormon wrote in her account of the forest’s preservation. “There the idea was born—this unspoiled beauty must be preserved for future generations to enjoy. Since childhood, my love for the kingly longleaf pines had been an obsession with me, and here they grew to perfection in an idyllic setting.”

Because of her efforts, Kisatchie—today comprising more than 600,000 acres—was designated a National Forest, with all of the protections that encompasses. Dormon named the site herself, choosing a Native American word for “long cane” that was also a tribute to the Kichai Indians (part of the Caddoan Confederacy), who called themselves “Kisatchie.” She, in turn, is remembered as the “Mother of Kisatchie.”

Dormon’s interest in Native American archaeology and ethnography prompted her to forge friendships and connections within the Chitimacha and Tunica-Biloxi tribes, among others, finding in these communities a shared love and respect for nature. Into these spaces she brought archaeologists, liaising with representatives at the Smithsonian to highlight diverse Native American cultures. Dormon wrote articles about different tribes' pottery designs and basket-making, publishing them in popular magazines like Art and Archaeology and Holland’s, the Magazine of the South, granting the tribes new exposure. For the Chitimacha, she pressured the Office of Indian Affairs to build a school that revitalized Indigenous crafts after an extended period of cultural suppression; today, the Chitimacha are internationally recognized for these baskets.

“She encouraged them to keep going. That was not something people were doing in those days, said H.F. “Pete” Gregory, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. “She knew them as people, as individuals. She didn’t want them to lose the culture, so she did a lot of things to help them keep that.”

Though distinguished by her fight for Kisatchie, Dormon’s quiet, stubborn battle to preserve nature for future generations was waged on numerous fronts.

Beginning in 1919, she served as State Chairman of Conservation and Forestry, in which capacity she lectured at schools, clubs, churches, and youth groups—appealing to the wives of wealthy and powerful men as she sought to carve out locations for state parks. A year later, she was appointed to the Legislative Committee of the Louisiana Forestry Association, promoting forestry education programs. Dormon was so effective in her campaigns that she caught the eye of the state commissioner for the Department of Conservation in 1921, who made her an education specialist in the Division of Forestry.

“I was born with something—I call it ‘the gift of the wild things.” —Caroline Dormon

In this role, Dormon was a powerhouse—despite her lack of formal forestry training. She developed her own teaching materials and programs, wrote books, and conducted workshops for teachers, among other efforts. Crucially, she showed teachers how to instill forestry knowledge into everyday lessons, bringing an organic appreciation and understanding of the natural world to basic classroom instruction. According to American Forests magazine, Dormon was listed as the only woman employed in forestry in the United States in 1922. She would later be elected as an Associate Member of the Society of American Foresters, an honor that led to “the only time in [her] life [she] ever had the swell-head.”

Other roles—too numerous to mention in full—include working as a “highway beautification consultant” with the Louisiana Department of Highways, heading the initiative to establish the Louisiana State Arboretum, and representing Louisiana on the De Soto Commission through an appointment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At Longue Vue House & Gardens, Dormon’s quieter victories return each and every April, even now. Sponsored by philanthropist Edith Rosenwald Stern, in concert with landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman, Dormon’s Wild Garden at the historic home is populated exclusively with native Louisiana plants—including, today, 3,500 irises.

Dormon loved irises, and on a 1920 trip to South Louisiana spied a few blooms in the swamps and bogs. She retrieved these, transplanting them in her northerly Briarwood, where they flourished under her care. In conversation with Dr. J.K. Small, curator of the New York Botanical Garden, Dormon began studying the Louisiana iris. Her work led in no small part to providing the scientific nomenclature required to expand the irises’ distribution, and her forays into hybridization produced colorful specimens of Louisiana irises that remain famous the world over. Once a relatively rare sight hidden in the black bogs of South Louisiana, Dormon wrote that the “swamp debutante has become a horticultural queen.”

According to Dr. Jared Barnes, an associate professor of horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University, Dormon was ahead of her time in her advocacy for growing and protecting native plants. The native plant “movement” didn’t gain widespread popularity until decades later in the 1980s and ‘90s, when people became more aware of habitat degradation as insect numbers began to decline.

[Read this: Chasing the Louisiana Iris]

“The southeast is very blessed with a wide assortment of great native plants that grow really well in our heat and humidity conditions,” said Barnes. “One of the things I love about Briarwood and Caroline Dormon is that she was an early proponent of some of these species. We’re fortunate some people had the forethought to look ahead and see the benefit of these species.”

Ever enamored with the botanical, Dormon also authored several books on her home region’s particular flora, including Wild Flowers of Louisiana (1934), Forest Trees of Louisiana (1941), Flowers Native to the Deep South (1958), and Natives Preferred (1965) a few years before her death.

“I think that, of course, the flowers—that was her passion,” Holman said. “And she could not only write about them because of her vast knowledge, but she could paint them.”

Dormon was indeed a prolific artist. She would frequently visit Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, where she would sketch or paint native plants, often getting lost in her depths of concentration.

During her lifetime, Dormon received more acclaim for her achievements in places like Australia and England than Louisiana (“There’s something, perhaps, to that adage, ‘you can’t be a prophet in your own land,’” Holman noted).

“At first [my neighbors] strained their minds trying to understand what it was all about…” Dormon wrote at one point after receiving national recognition for her work in forestry. “A woman that spends all her time foolin’ with bushes and weeds … At last they have just given me up as hopeless. They know I am crazy, but harmless, so anything I do is all right.”

For all of her successes—including those tempered by the roadblocks of bureaucracy and politics, of which there were many—Dormon lived in relative financial strain for her entire adult life. She and Virginia tried many different avenues to make ends meet, but Dormon often grew distracted or ill, focusing on other projects or spending necessary time resting to keep her health in check.

Dormon did not seek wealth, in any case. “She never had money,” said Holman. “And if she did, she bought a flower.” She was, rather, burdened by the indomitable drive to keep doing important things, whether or not they paid anything at all.

As she advanced in years, Dormon wrote that her life was full, “even if it did look very quiet and uneventful to others.”

“Carrie even claimed that she was too busy to die,” wrote James P. Barnett and Sarah M. Troncale in a USDA report titled, “Caroline Dormon: The South’s Exceptional Forest Conservationist and Naturalist.” “She simply had to keep living if for no other reason than to record the results of her hybridization experiments with irises.”

In many ways, both literal and figurative, Briarwood’s beauty—the plants, the animals, the trees, even the weather—were Dormon’s constant companions: “I was born with something—I call it ‘the gift of the wild things,’” she wrote. In the endless and ordinary moments of nature, she found breathtaking joy, and her purpose.

Before she died in 1971, Dormon donated her home to a foundation that, today, is a hub for conservation and educational purposes—an opportunity for the public to glimpse the natural beauty that Dormon worked so hard to preserve. 

briarwoodnp.org.