State guide

South Carolina Nature Guide

South Carolina packs a remarkable gradient into a short east-to-west drive — from the live-oak and Spanish-moss Lowcountry, where the ACE Basin forms one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the East Coast, across the sandy longleaf-pine Sandhills and the rolling red-clay Piedmont, to the Blue Ridge escarpment of the Upstate, where Caesars Head looks out over a great autumn hawk migration. That sweep delivers some of the Southeast's signature wildlife: Painted Buntings and Wood Storks along the coast, Red-cockaded Woodpeckers in the longleaf savannas, Swallow-tailed Kites over the river swamps, wintering waterfowl in the ACE Basin, and the famed synchronous fireflies of Congaree National Park's old-growth bottomland in late May. From USDA zone 7a in the mountains to 9a on the warmest coast, the climate runs humid subtropical and the growing season is long.