The smoothness of their bark makes beech trees, both American and European, among the sexiest and also the most grotesque of trees. Branch scars and other markings that would virtually disappear on trees with more bark-like bark are hard to miss on a beech.
Some beech trees look downright neurotic. But who can blame them? The great beech forests of North America are gone, clearcut two centuries ago to make way for farms, to such an extant that most people who spend anytime outdoors assume that beeches actually prefer the mountainsides and ravines in which they’ve made their last stand. The passenger pigeon, which once visited beech forests the way hurricanes visit Florida, has been extinct for a hundred years. And now a non-native scale insect is helping beech bark disease decimate the remnant stands, though thankfully it hasn’t appeared in Plummer’s Hollow just yet.
It was the trees’ abundant mast that accounted for their popularity with passenger pigeons, of course, and beechnuts still feed many species today. But the grotesqueness of beech trees has wildlife value, too: the frequent hollows in older trees can provide den sites for a wide variety of birds and mammals. Many trees rot out as they age, but beeches seem to get started on it early.
Nor does the grotesquerie end with weird, vaguely human scars and orifices. The self-grafting ability of beech limbs can produce some bizarre effects, as in the above specimen, which grows right next to the Plummer’s Hollow Road.
I am kind of at a loss to explain how this happened… or why it took me so many years to notice it. I don’t know how many more years we’ll have canopy-height beeches in the hollow — not too far north of here, all the big beeches are dead — so I figure I’d better start paying more attention to them now.
Beech bark disease won’t wipe them out completely, but it will probably kill almost all the mature beeches and keep new root sprouts from getting very big, just as the chestnut blight has done for American chestnuts. The grotesquerie will be all but lost, and the tree from which the word “book” is derived may become little more than an asterisk and a footnote.
Watch the full slideshow (13 photos in all) or browse the set (easier for people with slow connections).
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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees. The deadline for the next edition, at The Voltage Gate, is Friday, February 26. See the call for submissions for details on how to participate.
Steady rain turned into a downpour early Sunday evening and didn’t let up for another fifteen hours. And just like that, we had a flood. In the same way that you get flash floods after hard rains in the dry West, here in the winter when the ground is frozen hard and the trees are leafless and dormant, there’s little to keep the water from running into the nearest ravine. We lost hundreds of dollars worth of quarry stone from the Plummer’s Hollow Road in just a few hours.
It would take a solid week of hard rain to get this kind of flood on a forested landscape in the summer. If these rare winter floods serve any purpose, it may be to remind us what would happen — what has happened here in the past — in the absence of forests: every hard rain turns into a flood.
At the bottom of the hollow, the Little Juniata River wasn’t so little anymore. It roared just a couple feet below the deck of our access bridge, which shook as floating logs and tires thudded against the pier. The riverbanks became instant swamps.
Nor was the flooding restricted to low places; the ephemeral ponds at the very top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed grew and merged briefly into one big pond. Then the temperature dropped and everything froze.
By the time I got up there to take pictures yesterday afternoon, the water level had fallen by half a foot, leaving a sagging ice ceiling with little underneath it and nothing but scattered tree trunks to hold it up — an ephemeral architecture, like some boom town gone bust.
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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival. The deadline for the next edition, at the UK-based treeblog, is January 30 — see the call for submissions for details on how to submit.
Also, be sure not to miss the interview with Pablo, Jade and me at the Nature Blog Network. We talk all about the Festival of the Trees: how it got started, why we do it, how it’s not really some kind of freaky tree cult, and why you should join us.
Welcome to the 42nd edition of the Festival of the Trees! When I announced this edition on the coordinating blog, I joked that I felt a little like the Once-ler, the hermit-like narrator of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, who gives the boy a tree seed to plant at the end of the book. I’ve been saying for years that I felt we needed to be focusing on reforestation as a society, but did anyone listen? No, they did not. Until now.
Suddenly, tree planting is hot. This month in Copenhagen, world leaders will assemble to try and hammer out a new climate change agreement, and forest preservation is front and center. Deforestation has been estimated to account for around 20 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide — more than the cumulative total from cars and trucks. Countries from the global South are angling for compensation in return for halting or reversing deforestation, but even developed countries like the United States are seeing a renewed interest in restoring forested landscapes. As Science Daily reports, “Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases.” That’s a quote from a planning expert named Brian Stone, who “recommends slowing what he terms the ‘green loss effect’ through the planting of millions of trees in urbanized areas and through the protection and regeneration of global forests outside of urbanized regions.”
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, wrote back in August:
Scientists predict that as the temperature rises, soils in the tropics will dry up. Trees and forests could die off on a vast scale, and fresh water will be less available. The rivers leaving Kenya’s Mau forest, which replenish many lakes, including those essential to the tourism industry, are drying up. Where government policies are inadequate, communities hungry for agricultural land degrade forests, exacerbating the negative impacts of climate change.
The world hopes that in Copenhagen, governments will be guided by the realities of available scientific evidence, and act accordingly. I welcome the development of new incentive mechanisms, such as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), which should also address degradation of agricultural land. REDD would compensate developing countries for environmental services provided by indigenous forests left standing.
Other mechanisms have been proposed and should be considered, including an “emergency fund” by the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project, which would provide payments from public and private sources to countries that protect their rainforests.
On carbon markets, a lot is yet to be learned. The Green Belt Movement is implementing pilot projects with both the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and voluntary carbon credit schemes, the experience of which is valuable. It’s important that such markets serve the forests, conserve biodiversity and improve the livelihoods of communities.
Public education is also essential. In 2006, the Green Belt Movement partnered with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Prince Albert II of Monaco, and the World Agroforestry Centre to launch the Billion Tree Campaign. In March 2009 we passed the three billion mark for new trees planted by governments, organizations, communities, the private sector, and individuals. Our new goal is planting of an additional seven billion trees by the end of 2009 — roughly equal to what the human population will be then.
Of course, trees and forests are far more than just carbon sinks and preservers of fresh water supplies. To begin with, their sheer aesthetic impact on the human psyche cannot be minimized. Rambling Woods blog presents an unusually comprehensive post on fall foliage, including the transcript for a National Public Radio story from the end of October about how deciduous leaves fall (it turns out they’re actually pushed), as well as precise directions for how to preserve colored leaves. Leslee at 3rd House Journal writes about the “Conservation of Color” in language taken straight from the biology of deciduous trees — but in a fully lyrical, satisfying, short poem. To her, the trees promise
curatives for sharp tongues,
faintness of heart, muddlement,
sensitivity to cold and darkening days.
Jade at Arboreality shows us “Black Cottonwood in Autumn Gold,” a striking sight. At A DC Birding Blog, John watches the sky for red clouds of berries, sign of the winged, shining, flameleaf, or dwarf sumac, A.K.A. Rhus copallinum. Another D.C. blog, The Natural Capital, advises Washingtonians to look for “Witch Hazel, the Last Flowers of the Year.” In addition to the ornamental Asian species, which flowers in the winter, there is apparently native, fall-blooming Hamamelis virginiana in Rock Creek Park.
Witch hazel is also the subject of a post this month at Connecticut-based Hill-Stead’s Nature Blog, whose proprietor sent along a link to post on Sassafras, as well. Both posts blend the personal with the scientific and folkloric into brief but comprehensive posts — tree-blogging at is best, if I may say so. They do have a bit of an unfair advantage with the witch hazel, though: Hill-Stead is right up the road from “the witch hazel capital of the world.”
At Yips and Howls, a species account of the western larch by Elizabeth Enslin mixes the personal with the scientific, while Florida panhandle-based writer Beth Westmark is revisiting Sequoia National Park.
The Ella Bay wilderness in far northern Queensland is home to endangered cassowaries, among other treasures, and it seems the giant, flightless birds are there in part due to a rich diversity of fruiting rainforest trees, according to the blog Ella Bay Forever. Russ Constable not only took great photos but also consulted with three different scientists in the identification and ecological significance of the fruits gathered on just one walk along the beach.
From the island of Oahu in Hawaii this month came word of a hanging potato tree — or so blogger Sarala dubbed it at first. She figured it might be a non-native species, and so it was: Kigelia africana, or sausage tree, native to West Africa. “The island of Oahu seems to have trouble taking care of its native species,” she notes.
Wildlife biologist Ellen Snyder blogged a species sketch of the eastern hemlock at Spicebush Log, drawing attention not only to its identifying characteristics but also to its role in the ecosystem and the threat it faces from an invasive insect pest, the woolly adelgid. Unfortunately, this a threat we’re all too familiar with here in central Pennsylvania.
A New York Times article, “Building with Whole Trees,” by Anne Raver, describes forester and architect Roald Gunderson’s unique approach to building with whole, unmilled trees, often painstakingly shaped into arches while still alive, a process taking years. Most foresters look at the woods with an eye shaped by industrial monoculture, the predominant mindset of forestry schools in agricultural colleges across North America. But the best foresters — such as those employed by mountain villages in Switzerland — are really gardeners, and Gunderson is clearly in this camp. If the Times article is any indication, Gunderson’s homes are beautiful, too.
Here at Via Negativa this month, I blogged about a more typical, destructive approach to timbering on a neighbor’s land — high-grading. On a more positive note, I also shared a photo and short poem about wild apples.
Sometimes, apparently catastrophic die-offs of trees are simply part of the natural cycle, and I hope the climate change mitigation planners recognize this. At the aptly named blog under the ponderosas, Jennifer presents “Reason 645 why my blog readership is so low” — her penchant for telling the unpalatable truth about ponderosa pine forests. They’re fire adapted. They’re meant to burn. “The lodgepole forest is dead; long live the lodgepole forest,” she intones.
But the threats to trees by greedy humans seem never-ending. This month I was incensed to learn that sandalwood trees are under attack from smugglers. “How do we protect these trees?” asks Chennai-based blogger Arati. “Maybe each one of us can do our bit by not patronizing sandalwood products, be they in soaps, powders, oils or perfumes.”
In another post at Trees, Plants and more, Arati wonders about the logic of planting lines of trees from a single species. “If a disease struck one tree would it not strike all others on the same road? Does this not compartmentalize the ecological diversity of the area?” Good question. There’s clearly more to this tree-planting business than meets the eye.
Pablo at Roundrock Journal is taking a decidedly laissez-faire approach to planting trees in his Missouri woods, scattering bald cypress seeds in likely spots around streams and draws in hopes that the next flood will deposit them in optimal locations for sprouting.
Greenspade blog shares tips on planting trees for energy efficiency around your house, but local ecologist takes it a step further, delving into the question of which street trees to plant from an ecosystem standpoint.
Large stature trees — like red oak, London plane tree, or sweetgum — do interfere with overhead wires, but they also provide greater ecosystem benefits than do small stature trees: they sequester (store) more carbon, filter more particulate matter from the air, and intercept more rainfall via leaves, trunk, and soil (and slow runoff into storm drains). And, because of their larger crown spread and evapotranspiration capacity, larger trees cool larger areas of surrounding air (cooling nearby infrastructure and buildings, too).
This is no ordinary blog post; Georgia has done some of the research herself and has the data to back up her claims. Everyone with an interest in urban landscapes needs to read this essay.
Local ecologist does feature lighter pieces, too, including a couple photo-essays this past month on the trees of Sir Winston Churchill Square in Greenwich Village and the St. Louis City Garden.
In addition to the many more obvious values of urban trees (aesthetics, cleaner air, shade), their penchant for making leaf prints on concrete sidewalks can turn an otherwise ordinary stroll through the ‘hood into a magical thing. Neighborhood Nature takes a close and thorough look.
On his North Carolina mountaintop, Christopher C. wakes up one morning to find that a tall black locust tree has split and is threatening to crush a nearby apple. This is a situation I know all too well: the black locusts around the houses here on our Pennsylvania mountaintop have constantly calved limbs over the years. Great as black locusts are for fence posts and for forest restoration projects, they do not make good yard trees!
Crackskull Bob unwinds from watching the Sunday morning talking heads by sketching a broken tree, while the wonderfully cracked artist Christoph Niemann at Abstract City, a New York Times blog, shapes real leaves into a Shel Silversteinian form of biodiversity. His new “finds” include such rarities as Rod-Blogojevich’s-Hair Tree and Eighties-Jeans Tree.
Trees appeal to all kinds of artists, it seems. Withering leaves on the ground inspire UK blogger Suzi Smith, who uses walnut ink to reproduce the “sludgy colours” in her haiku calligraphy.
Photoblogger Catherine Kennedy shares a couple shots of Achray Forest, which is part of the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park in the Trossachs, in Scotland. Just west of Edinburgh, Crafty Green Poet reports on a walk through the Almondell County Park’s ancient woodland, notable for its very old birch trees.
I confess I didn’t realize that Dutch elm disease was a problem in Europe, too, but in a “meeting with a remarkable tree,” the Oxford Elm, British blogger Tony comments that large old elm trees have become scarce “as 80% of Elms succumbed to Dutch Elm disease. Dutch Elm disease has been with us for centuries but in the 1960s a virulent strain arrived on these shores from North America. Some 20 million trees were killed.”
Ashley Peace in Sheffield, England shares a photo-essay on Autumn in Millstone’s Wood, where the ground lies thick in fallen beech leaves.
Arati from Chennai sent along one other post late in the month, reporting on a local Free the Tree campaign: groups of people get together, in this case organized by Arati herself, to remove the hundreds of nails pounded into roadside trees over the years to hold advertisements. The volunteers then fill the wounds with a mixture of soil and turmeric paste to help them heal. I had known that turmeric is considered something of a heal-all for humans, but hadn’t realized it works on trees, too.
Novelist and poet Marly Youmans is someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what trees and humans have in common. She sent along the link to some of her recent treeish poems in the online journal Mezzo Cammin: “The Foliate Head,” and “The Throne of Psyche,” which begins,
A soul’s mysterious as any tree–
It drives a root as deadly low as hell,
It stretches peaceful branches heaven-high,
It harvests light with leaves of memory.
The last submission I received for this month’s festival returns us, once again, to the theme of tree-planting. A post at Nature’s Whispers captures the solemnity, the pathos, and the unintended humor of a tree-planting ceremony to honor two stillborn children.
We had told my 3 year old daughter that today we would be planting a tree. As we all know, the world revolves around every toddler so my daughter obviously understood that to mean that she would be doing the planting. She picked up our precious sapling and flung it around like a majorette twirls her mace before plonking it unceremoniously into the hole, upside down. I heard my intake of breath as my heart rested in my mouth and I gasped ‘be gentle’. It all turned out all right in the end, the tree was planted. My daughter helped pack the earth around the roots with her hands, as she did on the days her sisters were buried. You’ve got to love that girl, I’m sure she was born a healer.
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Thanks to everyone for sending in links and restoring my faith in the long-term viability of this blog carnival! The next edition of the Festival of the Trees will appear at xenogere on January 1, 2010. Email your links to Jason — jason[at]xenogere[dot]com — by December 30.
By the way, if you want to be sure not to miss Festival deadlines and new editions, consider subscribing to the coordinating blog via email. We’re also on Twitter now, and of course the blog has an RSS feed, but nothing beats an emailed reminder.
The last of the quaking aspen leaves have fallen in the night, I notice with a pang. Their naked trunks shine pale in the morning sun where they stand, the four of them, at the edge of the marshy corner of the field. It’s like losing a shortwave radio: how now will I eavesdrop on the murmur and agitation of the larger world? Then this morning I hear that the emerald ash borer is now just two counties away, and I am stricken again.
But what a fossil I am, speaking of shortwave radios in the age of the World-Wide Web! The latest edition of the Festival of the Trees at the Brazilian Blog do Árvores Vivas (Living Trees Blog) reminds us of the possiblities for communication across human language barriers — it’s a fully bilingual edition — as well as, potentially, between humans and trees, if we pay careful enough attention. Go visit.
Also, note that the next edition of the festival one month from now will appear right here at Via Negativa. Send tree-related links to bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line — see here for how to participate.
We seem to have run out of willing hosts for future editions, however, and not too many people send in links anymore, either, so perhaps this will be the last edition. No sense in beating a dead horse (or a live one, for that matter, but I digress). The trouble with blog carnivals, it seems, is that everyone wants to be linked to, but few remember to return the favor, and as the carnival ages, it loses that shiny newness essential to arousing murmurs and agitation on the Web. First people stop linking to it, and then they stop participating altogether.
But maybe I’m wrong, and we’re just in a temporary lull. If you’d like to keep the Festival of the Trees going, please consider volunteering to host, or even easier — and just as important — spreading the word in the most obvious ways possible: by linking to it, blogging about it, Twittering about it, or posting the link to the latest edition on Facebook (things I don’t always remember to do myself). Nothing lasts forever, but if in fact you’d like this unique, tree- and forest-centered blog carnival to continue, you’ll have to start showing it some love. Do it for the trees! Because I am not the Lorax, I am the old Once-ler. And like the Once-ler, I say,
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Festival of the Trees #31, the New Year’s 2009 edition, is worth an extended visit at Rock Paper Lizard. As Hugh says, ’tis the season to take down the Christmas tree — something we just got around to doing this morning up at my parents’ house. Dad kindly undecorated the tree, leaving me with the simpler task of carrying it outside.
If you feed wild birds, discarded Christmas trees make very useful shelters from hawks and inclement weather. I nestled this year’s tree among the skeletons of previous Christmases, four of them, in varying stages of decomposition. Even without the needles, thin, tangled coats of weeds and grasses still offer some protection. The Christmas tree is truly a gift that goes on giving. When I came back with my camera to snap the above picture less than five minutes later, a half-dozen white-throated sparrows flew out. No sooner had it been stripped of the usual myriad of fake bird ornaments than the real thing moved in.
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I’ve just been reading about TreeYoga. I got all excited at first, but it turned out that this was really boring old PeopleYoga — the trees are merely used for a form of non-lethal hanging.
As in the yoga posture (asana) of the Tree Pose (Vrksasana), TreeYoga beckons us to reflect upon a core principle of yoga — balance. Like trees, yogis can now root themselves into the earth and extend gloriously up to the sky. There is great beauty and playfulness in the flowering shapes of yogis sprouting from trees.
If the accompanying photos are any indication, the dangling yogis do indeed resemble some kind of strange fruit. The official TreeYoga website refers to trees as “yoga partners,” which strikes me as presumptuous in the same way I find tree-hugging presumptuous: how do we know the trees really want to be hugged or enlisted as partners?
Still, people have been meditating in or under trees for a very long time, and as I’ve written here in the past, many Central Pennsylvanians practice an annual tree-based meditative activity that probably resembles quite closely the paleolithic, ancestral form of meditation. And because they spend such long hours up there, staying as still as they can, they’re rewarded with all sorts of great wildlife sightings. One of the hunters on our property saw a bobcat from her tree stand this year; another saw a fisher. There were several red fox sightings, which surprised us a little because we haven’t seen any in two or three years, and had assumed they’d all been killed or driven off by the coyotes. And quite regularly of course the hunters draw the attention of small flocks of winter birds. I can only imagine a chickadee’s reaction if it saw a human hanging upside-down, chickadee-fashion, with the help of a TreeYoga swing.
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