Painting of our Apollo house by W. Hamilton
(Click on the link to listen to an audio version of this blog: Trees in my yard part 2
(Continuing the walk through the trees of my old home in Pennsylvania)
Just west of the line of blue spruces next to my house in Apollo was an orchard of fruit trees that probably had been planted even before our house was built and this acreage was part of a small farm. By the time we moved into the Apollo house these fruit trees had fallen into neglect and had each grown into wild, knotted, un-pruned, twiggy contortions that became loaded through the summer with abundant, but wormy, very small fruits. There were three apple trees that ran in a straight line from our southside street, followed by a seckle pear and then a sour cherry.
The sour cherry tree was claimed by my son, Joe, as his tree (his sister had already picked one of the red maples as her own). The cherry was a large and very handsome tree with dark bark and a spreading, graceful shape. In the summer the branches came alive with cardinals devouring the bright red fruit. Next to this cherry was a Bartlett pear tree and then another, very large but crumbling sour cherry back by the north edge of the property that was well wrapped with poison ivy and Virginia creeper vines. The wood of both cherry trees were softened by fungi. Fallen branches lay broken and spongy on the ground.
Apple tree
We called the three apple trees, Tree #1, Tree #2 and Tree #3. When she was four years old, my daughter, Marian, loved to climb their conveniently arranged low branches always repeating our climbing awareness mantra, “hands and feet, hands and feet” while she did so. We seldom picked or ate these apples preferring to leave them (and all of their intrinsic insect larvae) to the deer, woodchucks and yellow jackets. The deer, in particular, had a great fondness for these apples. The fawns would even eat the sour green apples that blew off of the trees in the summer. Their contorted faces and tongue-lolling head shakes while they were eating these sour fruits were hilarious to watch!
The two sour cherry trees eventually succumbed to the fungal-induced weaknesses of the wood in their trunks and limbs. Branches fell from both trees quite regularly. Eventually, the wood was no longer able to support the living weight of the tree. The first cherry tree went down in the microburst that knocked down the spruces in 2006. The second went down in August 2020, a month after we moved away from Apollo but about a week before we closed on the sale of the property. The realtor told me about the fallen tree, and I called one of my old neighbors who ran a tree trimming business. He and his crew went out and cut up and removed the old cherry tree. It was mostly a matrix for poison ivy and Virginia creeper vines. I had to pay extra because of all of the poison ivy!
Sour cherry tree in flower
I tried to add to the fruit tree orchard by planting a plum tree. I got a rather expensive plum tree from a local nursery and planted it on the “fruit tree line” between the seckle pear and the end sour cherry around 1991 or so. That tree died that winter, but it come with a replacement guarantee, so I replanted, and the second plum tree survived and grew for another year or so. Then I read that you can only get fruit from a plum tree if that tree has another plum tree to pollinate it! So I went to Kmart and bought a cheap “second plum” tree and planted it.
That next winter my expensive, replacement plum tree died, and I gave up my fruit tree experiment. The plum tree from Kmart, though, survived and grew for 25 more years until it eventually was blown over in a windstorm. It never had any fruit, but I bet that its plums would have been delicious!
The western side of our property ran down a gentle slope out across a broad, open field and ended somewhere in what began in 1989 as weedy thicket but over the years grew into a dense woodlot. The field was by and large ignored by the people who owned the house before us and was left to grow wild with grasses and weeds. They had a local farmer come in once or twice a year to mow it, but it had been only minimally maintained. We decided, though, that we wanted this field to be an open, grassy meadow suitable for ball playing and other outdoor pursuits. I only had a push mower, however, and did not have enough time in a week to hand-mow the entire field. So we compromised and mowed about two-thirds of the field into a lawn-like grass cover and left the other third (the lower section that butted up to the west boundary of the property) go wild.
Photo by D. Sillman
The mowed grass did what you would expect mowed grass to do: not much. We did have sufficient space, though, to play softball and soccer, and frequently set up badminton and volleyball nets especially when we had outdoor picnics and parties. I also, eventually, carved out large squares in the center of the field for a substantial garden that produced an abundance of tomatoes, beans, sweet corn, peppers, peas and pumpkins! Eventually, the deer and the woodchucks took over the garden, but that’s another story all together!
Garden in field. Photo by D. Sillman
The wild end-third of the field changed rapidly over the intervening years. At first it was simply a thorny thicket dominated by blackberries (“jagger bushes” to use the local nomenclature), raspberries (abundant and delicious!), golden rod and multiflora rose. It grew into a thick, hedge -like mass that blocked the view to and from our western neighbor’s yard and ours and also prevented the passage of all but the heartiest (or smallest) of animals through those yards. On the deed of our property there was mention of an old well down in this area, so I was very happy to let the vegetation grow into a barrier around and over it. I never did locate the well, but could almost sense its presence down in the hollow at the base of the field.
The lower part of the field rapidly changed in just a few years. A dense thicket of fast growing trees filled in the spaces and, eventually, shaded out most of thorny underbrush. At the border between the grassy field and the growing woodlot an ecotone barrier of thorn-covered canes and stems grew up. The thorns ripped at me as I went past on my riding mower (I upgraded my lawn equipment over the years). They tore the skin of my arms and legs and even occasionally grabbed my baseball cap right off of my head.
Slippery elm thicket. Photo by Mbrickn, Wikimedia Commons
The trees in this low field thicket were almost all slippery elms (Ulmas rubra). There must have been an old slippery elm tree back on the forested hollow down below our property that had dumped great loads of its samaras into the fertile space of the lower field. The tall, skinny trunks of the elms grew so closely together that it was difficult to work your way across the space. The deer really liked the elm labyrinth, though, and spent the hot hours of most summer days tucked into its protective spaces and shade. By the time we moved from Apollo, these elms were 25 to 30 feet tall but still remarkably skinny and densely packed together.
Slippery elms, like American elms (Ulmas americana) are susceptible to the invasive fungus that causes Dutch elm disease. American elms were once one of the most common street trees planted in towns and cities all across America. Their sudden loss due to this fungal blight denuded many formerly shady neighborhoods all across the East and Midwest. American elms do not succumb to the Dutch elm fungus until they reach maturity, and, possibly, the slippery elms exhibit a similar, late-in-life response. The trees on the lower field, after thirty years, looked quite healthy to me. The next twenty years, though, will probably determine whether they survive much further into the 21st Century.
The slope of the lower field converged on the southwest corner of our two acres. This was the wettest part of the property and had the densest vegetation and was, I assume, the location of the mysterious old well. There was enough drop in the surface topography from the top of the field to this lowest corner to allow excellent sledding down the hill on those few, winter days when we were blessed with a sufficiently thick snow cover. The danger in doing this sled run, though, involved plowing into the thorny ecotone on the edge of the copse of elms.
Red mulberry tree. K. Schulz, Wikimedia Commons
Just to give this danger some more definition and structure, there were two red mulberry trees (Morus rubra) growing just outside the thorny boundary of the “jagger” bushes. These mulberries were undoubtedly planted by passing birds (probably American robins) who had feasted on some June ripening mulberries nearby and then in passing (as they did regularly every June onto my parked car out in front of my house) deposited the mulberry seeds (along with their own special mix of fertilizer in their purple stained feces) in some fertile spot in the lower boundary of the field. The mulberry trunks were five feet apart and made a perfect “gap” for brave sled riders to shoot for on their run down the slope. Hitting the gap, dodging the thorn bushes and even crossing another, smaller gap between two outlying elm trees became the seldom achieved goal of our sledding competitions.
Kozmo. Photo by D. Sillman
These slides down the hill into the vegetation were almost always in the company of our dog, Kozmo. Kozmo loved ripping hats off of peoples’ heads as they raced downhill on their sleds. Once he got a hat, he danced joyfully around the field, shaking and tossing the hat up into the air. Sometimes, he even tore out a hunk of hair when he grabbed the hat, but his infectious joy at having secured the precious head covering made even the pain of the scalping tolerable. Sometimes, Kozmo would even grab the entire sled and run off with it. He was a snow dog supreme!
Silver maple in spring. Photo by D. Sillman
On a little rise in the lower northwest corner of the field was the largest tree on my property. It was a silver maple (Acer saccharinum) that one of my neighbor’s quite energetically insisted was an oak. It was a tall, gracefully shaped tree that stood almost exactly on the property corner like a marker tree of old land surveys. This tree was almost always surrounded by fallen branches. Mowing grass down in this corner inevitably involved getting off the mower and gathering and carrying great piles of wood out of the mower’s path. This tree was also the earliest “sign of spring” in my limited Apollo ecosystem. Often, as early as mid-February this tree would open its flower buds and stand covered in tiny, red flowers even through the inevitable February and March snow storms. This silver maple let you know that the Spring would come … eventually!
(Continued next week!)
What a joyful read! So fitting in Thanksgiving week!