A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
chenier
A chenier is a long, low ridge of sand and shell sitting on top of coastal mud, running parallel to the shore and standing a few feet to twenty above the marsh around it. Because it is higher and drains, it grows trees where nothing else does. Cheniers form when a river’s sediment supply shifts away and waves winnow the mudflat, leaving the coarse material behind as a ridge.
Etymology
The word is Louisiana French for an oak grove, from chêne, oak. The ridges in southwest Louisiana carry live oaks along their crests, visible for miles across flat marsh as a line of trees, and that is what people named. Two geologists, Russell and Howe, took the local word into the scientific literature in 1935, and it is now the international term for the landform wherever it turns up.
Notes
A chenier plain is a stack of them, each ridge older than the one seaward of it, so the sequence records where the river used to be. Communities sit on them for the obvious reason: Grand Chenier, Pecan Island, Cheniere Caminada. The cheniers of the Colorado River delta in Baja California are built almost entirely from the shells of one clam.