Signs of Fall 12: Trees in My Yard (Part 1)!

(Click on this link to listen to an audio version of this blog …..Trees in my yard part 1

I just finished reading Richard Powers’ remarkable novel, The Overstory and am full of renewed wonder and awe regarding the ecology and mythology of trees. In his novel, Powers uses trees as plot structuring devices to both follow and guide his diverse and highly fragmented characters through the labyrinths of their lives. Branching tree limbs shadow the twists and turns of fate and chance that drives these isolated individuals through their existences. Images of the great root systems of the trees, so interconnected and vital, represent the hidden matrix that holds all living organisms, however distantly they exist from each other, into one, unified system. The ongoing evolution of new type of trees with novel ways to survive and thrive represents the power of growth and change that enables us all, hopefully, to make the most of our very short span of years on Earth.

Each major character in The Overstory is connected to a single type of tree and, more specifically, a specific individual tree of that type. A white mulberry, an American chestnut, a Spanish oak, a maple, a banyon and a giant redwood all play critical roles along with cameo appearances by ponderosa pines, apple trees and the diverse array of exotic tree species growing in a garden at Stanford University. Each tree is the start of a life process. Each tree is both a beginning and also an end.

I have written frequently about trees. On my long hikes through the forests of Pennsylvania and vacation treks through the Rocky Mountains, trees have been a major focus that have helped me understand the deep history and immediate ecology of the pristine and also the damaged ecosystems I was visiting. The trees that I have come across on these hikes, though, are just passing acquaintances. They are not the deep, life shaping entities about which Powers writes so eloquently.

Our house in Apollo. Photo by D. Sillman

I have been wondering about my own deep trees and have decided that they must be the trees I lived with for over thirty years in my old home yard and field back in Pennsylvania. Our house was set on two acres up on a hill over Apollo, PA.  The yards, fields and woodlots of this property were rich in flora and fauna and history. The trees on that property dug their roots deeply into my intellect and also into my heart and soul. Lately, I have been mentally walking around this wonderful yard re-visiting my old friends trying to better understand what they had been trying to tell me.

When we moved to Apollo in 1989 the house was lined on its west side by a dozen, tall (30 to 40 feet high)  blue spruces ( Picea pungens). Our immediate love of this house was due, in large part, to the elegance and beauty of these spruces and to the protective way they wrapped around the house! These spruces must have been planted just after the house was built in the late 1940’s. They were full, robust trees with interwoven branches that hung over a heavily shaded soil floor that was carpeted with many decades of accumulated spruce needles. The lowest rung of branches drooped down and enclosed the soil/mulch space making a hidden “fort” in which my children and their friends played all year round.

Photo by D. Sillman

In this moist, shaded “fort” space there were also biological events going on about which we would know nothing until, in 2006, a violent microburst from a thunderstorm rolling across Apollo knocked down almost all of these spruces and even sent one of them flying over the top of the house! Over the next fifteen years, we watched the rapid growth of a cohort of oak trees (white oak, red oak, black oak) spring up from bird-transported acorns that had fallen under the spruces over the years and germinated into shade suppressed seedlings. When they were released from the shade by the destruction of the spruces we soon had a dense stand of young oak trees, many of which had reached 20 feet in height by the time we moved in 2020. One white oak had even started to make its own acorns the last summer we were there!

Photo by D. Sillman

The 2006 blow-down left five or six blue spruces standing scattered around the yard. They no longer formed a line or intermeshed their branches to make a protected space. Several of these trees subsequently blew down over the coming decade including one to which I had attached a bat house in a vain hope to attract summer bats (mostly the very stressed and endangered Little Brown Bat). The blue spruces here in Pennsylvania were planted well outside of their geographic and climatological ranges. The long, hot, wet summers in particular stressed them so much that up and down my street and all across Western Pennsylvania these frequently planted landscape trees began to succumb to progressive, fatal fungal infections. They had survived, and thrived, for more than fifty years but could not withstand the inevitable, physiological erosion caused by environmental stress and disease.

Arborvitae, 1989. Photo by D. Sillman

On the east side of the Apollo house was a straight line of carefully planted, columnar arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis). These cylindrically shaped tree/shrubs were ornamental cultivars of northern white cedar (which is also called “eastern red cedar,”  just to add an extra level of common name confusion). When we moved in to the Apollo house, these cedars were between three and five feet tall and had significant spaces in between them. When we moved out, 31 years later, the line of cedars were 12 to 14 feet tall and had grown together into a solid wall of dense green foliage. They had grown so slowly over those three decades that we honestly hadn’t noticed them changing from year to year. Their diminutive, 1989 appearance, though, (in old pictures of the house that I came across looking for images to highlight this essay) absolutely shocked me!

The arborvitae were the preferred nesting and night roosting site for our flocks of northern cardinals. In the spring and summer the cardinals built nest after nest and raised their hatchlings and fledges in their sheltering branches , and in the winter these same branches provided refuge and protection for the night roosting birds.

The north/south line of arborvitae ended at a east/west planting of eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) that our northeast, kitty-corner neighbor planted to make a barrier between their yard and our immediate, eastside neighbor’s yard (the two households were having problems in the two years before we moved in, and a “good fences make good (or at least better) neighbors” policy was enacted). The hemlocks were planted in 1987 and arranged close enough together so that in just a few years the trees formed a dense, privacy barrier between the two yards. The trees continued to grow and thicken years after the feud was forgotten and kept on growing even after the first eastside neighbor moved away and another couple had taken their place.

By the time we moved away from Apollo the hemlocks were huge! Each tree was 25 to 30 feet tall with a dense, branch-spread around each trunk that was at least six to eight feet in diameter. Neighborhood cats used this hemlock thicket to escape pursuing dogs and children.  The cardinals extended their arborvitae nesting sites and night roosts into their branches, and the local sharp-shinned hawk used the hemlocks’ concealing foliage as a hunting perch from which she could make her rapid, often deadly hunting swoops down onto the unsuspecting feeder birds in my yard. The hemlocks were magnificent!

We have recently heard from our old neighbors, though, that during the year since we left Apollo, these hemlocks had been attacked by wooly adelgids. Probably most of North America’s hemlocks are going to fall to these exotic, invasive pests. The neighbors were looking for ways to save the trees, but the Apollo hemlock barrier is very unlikely to survive!

Crab apple trees. Photo by D. Sillman

Across the back (northern) boundary of the Apollo property there was a straggly group of crabapple trees that had three, tall, black locusts and one remarkably healthy American chestnut tree intermixed with them. The locusts were interesting in that they were typically the last trees to leaf out in the spring and the first to lose their leaflets in the late summer and early fall. They were spindly looking things that were 50 or 60 feet tall with few side branches and very minimal crowns. The female sharp-shinned hawk used the top of one of these locusts as a calling perch to the male sharp-shin during mating, and the great horned owl often perched on top of one of these locusts when she was taking a pause in her night-time hunting or settling down for a good’s day’s sleep. From the high perches of the locusts, the entire neighborhood could be surveyed! I never understood, though, how such a meager set of leaflets could fix enough energy in their very limited season to keep these tall trees alive!

The American chestnut growing on the back line of the property was a handsome, medium-sized tree (about 20 feet tall) with a thick, branching trunk with two, major forks that grew into three, relatively equally sized, vertical limbs that each continued to branch and spread as they rose. The tree’s long, shiny green, saw-toothed leaves stood out distinctly from the softer colored and softer shaped foliage around it. The green, spiny nut burrs that encased the chestnuts filled the tree through the summer and covered the ground in the fall. My dog, Izzy, hated to go out walking under the chestnut tree in the fall because of the burr spines that inevitably poked into her foot pads. I had to race the squirrels each fall in order to get even a handful of the nuts!

Photo by D. Sillman

Most people know the story of the American chestnut: the horrible fungal blight, the rapid death of the trees over a wide geographic range and the human mistakes that made this disaster even worse and made the annihilation of the chestnuts even more complete. There are very few large American chestnuts left out in our woods and fields. Most of the survivors have taken on a shrub-like existence with frequent above-ground die-backs followed by energetic root sprouting.

Over the years, I cut down several, tall, skinny chestnut pole-trees that were growing in the shade of my red maple close to the large, healthy chestnut tree. These trees had sprouted from old stumps and roots and grew for a decade or so until the fungus killed them back. New sprouts should have been possible from the narrow, cut stumps, but only one regrowth happened after my pruning. That regrown chestnut then died back after a decade or so and did not return.

I once watched a gray squirrel carrying a burr-covered chestnut away from this tree. The squirrel kept dropping the burr as he ran along. I speculated that the spines of the burr shifted in his mouth as he ran and poked into his sensitive lips and cheeks. The pain must have startled him because he would pause, drop the nut and with a little shudder pick it up again and continue his run. I am not sure why that squirrel didn’t just peel away the covering burr and run off with the soft, delicious nut!

That squirrel, though, persevered and got the chestnut all the way to the nearby red maple. There with the burred nut still in his mouth, he ran up the trunk up to a high fork and dove into his leafy nest. I assume that he then enjoyed his chestnut-meal in private! At some distances form the chestnut tree, I did find other, less successfully transported burred-chestnuts scattered across the yard and field. It struck me that the clinging, spiky burrs are an excellent mechanism to increase the chance of seed dispersal for the chestnut tree! If they poke the squirrel often enough, he may just leave them behind, possibly to germinate in place, and then go off to find less painful food!

Chestnut seedling. Photo by D. Sillman

As a reward for donating to the SUNY-ESF Chestnut Fund, I received three American chestnut seeds with detailed instructions as to how to cold stratify and then plant them. The three chestnuts stayed in my refrigerator through the winter and then were carefully planted in in starter pots in the Spring. All three chestnuts germinated and grew rapidly.

I planted the three seedlings in my garden in the Fall, and by spring two were still alive and well. I let them grow for a

Young chestnut tree. Photo by D. Sillman

year in the garden and then transplanted them the next Spring, well away from the established chestnut tree. I put a wire fence around the growing chestnuts to protect them from the deer and the rabbits, and they then had three years of steady growth before we moved away. The trees were eight feet tall when we left and beginning to take on a hearty fullness. There was no sign of any fungus yet!  The intention of the ESF program was to get broad populations of “normal” American chestnut trees growing all across the eastern U.S. so that their genetic structure could be sampled and compared to the trans-genetic chestnuts being developed in the ESF chestnut lab. I hope that the new owner of the Apollo property recognizes that these are important trees, but chestnut trees are not common anymore, and they may appear to an uneducated eye as undesirable foliage.  The new property owner might regard them as woody weeds! Their fate, though, is out of my hands.

The crabapples along the back-north, property boundary were always covered with fruit in the late Summer and early Fall. The deer herd, led by a large, “eldress” doe, walked in single file past the low branches and nibbled fruit and browsed its woody twigs throughout the winter. Sometimes the deer would rise up on their back legs to get a quick bite at some of the higher hanging fruit! On two occasions, several years apart, I saw flocks of cedar waxwings descend on the crabapples and noisily devour most of the fruit in less than an hour. The waxwings then flew on and were seldom seen anywhere else on our two acres. The regular appearance of fruitless tops of the crabapple trees, however, made me think that the cedar waxwings must have been regular visitors to the back of my yard. I only had the chance to see them, though, on two occasions.

(Continued next week!)