Al, the roses are beautiful!!!!
To answer your question, and Carl answered it pretty well....other than the 2040' tall dunes on the Gulf Coast
....I am sure that he meant 20-40' tall...that scenery picture is a beach sand dune....it would be a secondary sand dune along the beach. If you look at this picture, though it is blurry, you can see that dune line in the back ground.
Behind the palm trees, growing along the backside of the dune are scrub oaks of some kind. In the foreground you have morning glories growing as vines, the yellow flowers are Beach Sunflowers, that area also usually gets a lot of Indian Blanket growing and blooming there in the summer, there are sea oats and a few various grasses, thistles, as well as prickly pear cactus that creeps through the dunes. But it is pretty much all sand. On the back side of the dune there is probably somewhat better soil, but hardly better. That area of FL is mainly made up of what we call sugar sand....super fine, white sand. That's what the dunes are made up of and somehow those flowers and plants make a living in it.
So, I guess YUP the hill started as drifting sand. However, the primary dune is mostly gone due to some of the big hurricanes that have come up the east coast of FL so it wouldn't take much to totally destroy the secondary dune line. Jacksonville (and most of the counties along the eastern coast of FL) spent a good deal of money trying to rebuild that primary dune line (Matthew was really bad when he blew through). It seems to be helping a little now that the sea oats and grasses are getting re-established but that primary dune gets moved further back with each nasty storm that comes through and it shrinks considerably each time.
To answer your question, and Carl answered it pretty well....other than the 2040' tall dunes on the Gulf Coast
....I am sure that he meant 20-40' tall...that scenery picture is a beach sand dune....it would be a secondary sand dune along the beach. If you look at this picture, though it is blurry, you can see that dune line in the back ground. Behind the palm trees, growing along the backside of the dune are scrub oaks of some kind. In the foreground you have morning glories growing as vines, the yellow flowers are Beach Sunflowers, that area also usually gets a lot of Indian Blanket growing and blooming there in the summer, there are sea oats and a few various grasses, thistles, as well as prickly pear cactus that creeps through the dunes. But it is pretty much all sand. On the back side of the dune there is probably somewhat better soil, but hardly better. That area of FL is mainly made up of what we call sugar sand....super fine, white sand. That's what the dunes are made up of and somehow those flowers and plants make a living in it.
So, I guess YUP the hill started as drifting sand. However, the primary dune is mostly gone due to some of the big hurricanes that have come up the east coast of FL so it wouldn't take much to totally destroy the secondary dune line. Jacksonville (and most of the counties along the eastern coast of FL) spent a good deal of money trying to rebuild that primary dune line (Matthew was really bad when he blew through). It seems to be helping a little now that the sea oats and grasses are getting re-established but that primary dune gets moved further back with each nasty storm that comes through and it shrinks considerably each time.
