What makes a city a city, gives it an indelible, like-no-other-place character?  It’s some kind of alchemy between landscape, location, culture and planning.  In Savannah one essential element is the giant old live oak trees draped with clouds of spanish moss along the sidewalks and in the squares.

Along with ravaged socialites and fresh-faced SCAD students, these great, graceful trees are real city characters.  Their enormous branches are twisted into demented, expressive shapes, as if they had been imagined by Edward Gorey.  At daybreak the clouds of moss filter sunlight so that only a soft, skittish haze reaches the ground below.  At dusk they sway slightly in the breeze and give off the faintest, phosphorescent glow, as if they’re sentient creatures, suffocating the trees and poisoning the air.  It’s an old world, gothic feeling that’s part of the city’s allure.