Red maple. Photo by D. Sillman
(Click on the link to listen to an audio version of this blog: Trees in my yard part 4
(Finishing the walk through the trees in my old home in Pennsylvania)
The red maple (Acer rubrum) is a fast growing, relatively short-lived tree, that is frequently planted in urban and suburban landscapes. It is also a hearty generalist that went from being a very uncommon component of the North American forested ecosystems to possibly being the most abundant tree species in the frequently cut and almost continuously disturbed forests of the Eastern United States.
There were initially two, large red maples on the Apollo property when we bought the house in 1989. The maples were planted, like the line of blue spruces, when the house was built in the late 1940’s. These trees must have looked widely scattered across the property when they were planted, but they had many decades to both grow larger and closer and closer together. The first red maple was located near the street on the southern edge of the line of blue spruces, and the second was right behind the north side of the house in an open area ringed by the back line of the spruces. Both maples were solid looking with stout, gray trunks and thick, low spreading branches. They each shaded a broad area of the yard and produced abundant seed samaras in the spring and staggering masses of leaves that turned bright red in the fall.
Photo by D. Sillman
The red maple leaves accumulated in great piles when they fell. These were the leaves that I raked up into the scattered leaf piles around the property. In the fall the fresh piles were three or four feet tall and often 15 or 20 yards long! These were the leaf piles my children and I jumped and played in. These were the leaves that fed the insects and other invertebrates that then fed the hunter-gatherer bird species that dug through the piles all through the winter and into the next spring and summer. By summer the piles were only a foot or so high. The leaves from previous years slowly turned to compost beneath the newest layers, and the soil beneath the compost layer was dark and almost always moist and full of nightcrawlers.
The maple on the north side of the house was designed as “Marian’s tree.” Marian was tall enough when she was 6 or 7 years old to jump up and grab one of the lower branches and pull herself up into the dense network of mostly horizontal branches. She would climb disturbingly high into the tree while either Deborah and I walked about on the ground muttering nervous words of caution.
Under Marian’s tree was a sandbox (pictured above) that was the site of hours and hours of imaginative play and also not just a few territorial or possessional arguments. Usually Marian and Joe played quite contentedly with the sand pails and shovels and trucks and toy soldiers, but when neighborhood children joined them, feelings were easily hurt.
Diseased maple trunk. Public domain.
In the summer of 2019, the year before we moved from Pennsylvania, the red maple near the street suddenly lost all of its leaves. It fell victim to a soil fungus (verticillium) that entered the tree’s vascular system through its roots and then killed it by preventing the circulation of water and nutrients. Usually, verticillium wilt is a slow, progressive disease, but in the case of this first red maple it hit fast and hard. With great sadness I had to have the maple cut down. The wood was still sound enough to be used for firewood, but the tree was gone.
I watched Marian’s tree all the rest of that summer and saw tell-tale signs that verticillium was moving through its tissues, too. First one branch’s leaves turned yellow and fell and then another. There was a large, dead branch that extended from the main trunk back over the house. I was worried that it would fall on the roof in a winter storm, so I had the tree trimmers in to cut it off. They also cut back the dead branches and quickly Marian’s tree was no longer accessible from the ground. There were no more low, horizontal branches that could be grabbed off a jump. There was no more easy network of climbing limbs to take you up and through the crown of the tree. Plus, there was always the fear that the wood was weakened by the fungus, so there was no more confidence in the safety of the tree!
When we moved Marian’s tree was still alive but failing. It was up to the new owner of the property to decide what to do with it and when.
Photo by Dcrjsr, Wikimedia Commons
Both red maples produced abundant samaras in the spring. Small breezes would send clouds of the little, red and green helicopter seed packets swirling out away from the trees Most of these seeds fell on unfavorable surfaces and shriveled up and died. A few must have been eaten by the squirrels, chipmunks and ground feeding birds, but I have to admit that I never saw them doing that. The maple near the street, though, was close to a wide, mulched flower bed. The samaras that fell here, at least, had a chance to germinate, and in the summer the bed was usually full of 6 to 8 inch tall red maple seedlings.
Red maple planted by Marian. Photo by D. Sillman
One summer morning in 1992, Marian (who was 6 years old) and I got our wagon and carefully pulled as many of the red maple seedlings as we could out of the flower bed mulch. We then took these probably 30 or 40 seedlings out around the edge of our field and the southern woodlot boundary and planted them. Most of the seedlings, of course, did not survive, but a half dozen or so did beat the odds of our crude transplanting and grew into tall, graceful trees. Those trees were still intact and thriving when we moved away in 2020. I hope they are still green and growing!
At the front, south corner of the house, just to the west side of the driveway was a large Norway spruce tree (Picea albies). It must have been planted at the same time as the blue spruces and red maples. Unlike the blue spruce, the Norway spruce, a native of northern Europe, was in an ideal climate zone and soil type here in Western Pennsylvania. There was no hint of disease or weakness in the tree. It main trunk was over 60 feet tall and 2 ½ feet in diameter. Its swirl of branches covered over a circular area that was 25 feet in diameter at ground level.
Norway spruce. Photo by D. Sillman
The Norway spruce’s lower branches drooped all the way to the ground with only a single opening into the room-like space over on the side that was shaded by the street-side red maple. The “spruce room” was a popular place to walk the dog on cold, winter mornings. The needle-covered soil beneath the spruce was almost always clear of ice and snow: a perfect place for a dog to do her “business.” Our cats loved this spruce needle “room,” too. In the summer, on hot days, there was a bit of an odor about the tree!
No branches ever fell from the Norway spruce. No storm ever threatened to hurt it. It was flexible and vital under wind stress and felt like a “forever” tree. It guarded the front of our house. It shielded us from view from the street. It covered my car with yellow pollen in the spring and was full of huge cones that were perfect for spruce-cone fights and for use in complex imagination games.
The trunk of the Norway spruce, though, was not perfectly vertical. It leaned toward the driveway and the house. If it had been a blue spruce or almost any other tree, I would have worried about the potential for that tilt to carry the tree down and across our roof in a storm. The strength of the Norway spruce wood, though, and it’s healthy flexibility, erased any seed of doubt about the tree and its durability.
My neighbor with the tree trimming business, though, had different ideas about this tree. Over the thirty years we were living in the Apollo house, we had used this neighbor’s services to maintain and remove many diseased, broken and fallen trees. On one of his forays into our woodlot, he came over to me and suggested that we cut down “that pine tree out front.” I asked him what “pine tree” he was talking about, and he pointed at the Norway spruce.
“It’s tilting and is sure to fall,” he said.
I thought for a second about what I should say. It felt appalling that a person who makes his living cutting trees would call a spruce a pine, but he must have been using “pine” as a common name for “conifer.” I also thought that it was appalling that he would want so desperately to cut down such an obviously healthy tree. I thanked him for his advice and said that we’d think about it, but I had no intention, ever, of cutting down this tree.
A month after the new owners moved into the Apollo house, though, they cut down the Norway spruce. The tilt of the tree must have frightened them. I wonder if my old tree-trimming neighbor came by to talk to them and drum up some business. The truck he bought after his incredible payday following our tree carnage after the 2006 microburst disaster was getting a bit creaky and rusty, and maybe it needed to be replaced. I don’t think that I can never visit our old Apollo house again or even look at any new pictures of it because of the wonton destruction of this tree. Its loss is a tragedy and a crime.
Mountain ash. Public Domain
Over the years we planted a few extra trees out and around the Apollo house. I put out three mountain ash trees (Sorbus americana) because I loved their orange-red fruit clusters and thought that they would provide the birds some abundant, fall food. I put two of ashes along the field edge of the street-side woodlot and the third out near the old garden and raspberry patch near the single, surviving plum tree. The placement of the plum and the ash, though, as they grew, generated so much shade that the raspberries, which had grown and thrived independent of care or concern ever since we moved into the house, and which regularly yielded enough raspberries every June to make an entire year’s worth of jam, began to fail. By the last summer we were in the Apollo house there were no raspberries to be picked and no jam to be made!
When my son, Joe, was in second grade, a forester came to talk to his class about Earth Day. The forester brought a bucketful of white pine seedlings (Pinus strobus) and gave one to each student in the class along with a sheet of paper that described how to plant them. That same spring, I gave a talk to a local Boy Scout Troop about the trees that were planted on the grounds of the old ALCOA Research Lab down in New Kensington. ALCOA provided each scout with a Norway spruce seedling and some printed instructions about how to plant them, and there was an extra spruce seedling which I took home.
Joe’s white pine. Photo by D. Sillman
Joe and I planted our trees out in a gap in the east line of arborvitae just outside the kitchen door. They grew there through the summer and made it through the winter. We realized that if they were going to survive and grow we needed to find a place for them with more trunk and branch room, and, so, we carefully dug them up (great root systems already!) and moved them down to the edge of the ecotone at the bottom of our western field. We planted Joe’s white pine in front of the multiflora rose thicket growing at the center of the ecotone, and put the spruce just outside the edge of the slippery elm stand, not very far from the corner-tree silver maple near the northwest edge of our lot.
Both trees grew and thrived. The white pine reached 15 or 20 feet in height within a few years and spread itself out magnificently in the full sun and space of the field. Its central candle (top growth tip), though, was damaged by either insects or possibly by a fungus (“growth tip blight,” maybe?). Loss of this center growth tip activated alternative growth candles on the tree and three major growth zones began to push upwards. The tree took on a massive, almost ball-like shape as it swallowed up the front of the multiflora rose thicket. In response, the multiflora rose sent tendrils of thorny vines into the branches of the pine and the plants became incredibly intertwined.
My spruce grew tall and straight and slender but was quickly overwhelmed by the shading of the nearby and then enveloping elm trees. Each year there were fewer and fewer green needles on the spruce until, at last, it was standing dead, just an outline of what a spruce tree is supposed to look like.
When we moved, the white pine was steadily winning its ecological battle with the rose thicket. It looked like three or four pine trees all grown together, but it anchored the center of the vegetation at the bottom of the field like a great, soft ball of green.
So these are the trees of my Apollo home: cedar, hemlock, crabapple, chestnut, locust, blue spruce, red maple, silver maple, red pine, tree of heaven, mulberry, mountain ash, white pine, Norway spruce, slippery elm, apple, pear and plum.
Which one of these was my “deep” tree? Which connected me to the Earth’s network of existence?
This is one of the big differences between real life and fiction. In fiction you can carve away uncomfortable possibilities and contradictions and leave behind a polished, finished product. You can say that this one tree, this single experience was the driver of all that came later. In real life, though, all of the possibilities rush to the surface all at once and compete for your attention. Which tree was my “deep tree?” I think that all were. They each taught me important things about life and living and death and dying. They each inspired me, focused me and connected me with things much larger than myself.
I am grateful for them all!