Category : Alabama

Alabama runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the southern end of the Appalachians, which is further than it sounds photographically. On the coast, live oak is the best shade tree in this guide — dense, broad, low-spreading and evergreen, with Spanish moss hanging from it that transmits light and glows when backlit — and the beaches are nearly pure white quartz, as bright as snow and fooling every meter. In the Black Belt the soil is dark prairie clay, the ground is open grassland and the sightlines are long. In the northeast the Appalachian ridges give the state's highest ground and its best autumn.

And across most of the middle, it is pine country, which matters more than anything: southern pine filters rather than blocks, so a stand looks like woodland and behaves like a colonnade. Finding the magnolia and the hardwoods is the first job at almost every venue here.

Three things run through the guides below. Humidity is a working condition rather than weather: it softens contrast, reduces clarity at distance so a July ridge view is a grey wash where a January one is sharp, and warms and diffuses the light at the ends of the day into something long and gentle. The calendar runs late — hardwood colour arrives from the last week of October into mid-November, weeks after New England, which makes late October and early November the best dates at almost every venue in this state.

And severe weather is real rather than a footnote: Alabama sits in one of the most tornado-prone regions in the country, with a pronounced spring peak from March through May and a second in November, which makes a named covered alternative with real capacity a requirement rather than a courtesy. Each guide names the shade, the hour, the exposure decision and the covered alternative, and says plainly where the shade is not. We have not photographed at every venue here, and where we have not, we say so.