Category — Trees

The first beech I ever met was in a graveyard.

Graveyards seemed like a perfectly natural place to admire plants; one of my best friends in high school had a house on a street that dead-ended into an old graveyard, the type with marble obelisks and gravestones like stone boxes that covered the entire grave, like a hard cold twin bed. It also had some of the oldest trees in town, including a copper beech, the type with purple leaves, and the broad statuesque outline of all beeches. Since we were both plant nuts, and it was a pleasant place, we went there often.

I was recently on a visit to the east coast, and there, in another graveyard, I was united with my friend the beech, also known as Fagus sylvatica. While I don’t recall seeing beeches on the west coast (tell me if you know of some), beeches aren’t really an east-coast tree either: they’re European.Even in winter, you can tell it by its elephantine skin, and the prominent ribs in its leaves.

In fact, you can identify lots of trees simply by their bark and their shape. My horticulture teacher says that in cold states in the midwest, universities offer tree-identification classes for dormant trees. I bet you could get to know a lot about trees that way.

This one’s easy: it’s another European tree, but it’s planted all over this country by various civic bodies. The ones out west never seem to get the girth of the ones back east, though:

But a plane tree (Platanus occidentalis), or sycamore as USians usually call them, always has the distinctive mottled bark, shed in little plates. In fall, it has the stickery seed-balls, too, a reminder for some of us that it’s time to put on shoes.

Another east-coast tree with really distinctive bark is, of course, the paper-bark birch, Betula papyrifera, a true east-coast native (although it is also native to pretty much all of Canada, and part of Alaska). The furthest south these birches usually travel is to Washington D.C., but there’s a stand in Boulder, Colorado which is believed to be the last remains of a Pleistocene forest.

My own past with paperbark birches includes the guilty pleasure of peeling off the already-peeling bark, and the righteous indignation I felt toward people who carved into the white soft new bark, leaving roughened dark initials for all time. These are also the trees birch-bark canoes were made from (perhaps people are still making them; I haven’t seen any lately).

 (I did try rotate this photo and the sycamore-bark one, but the rotation doesn’t seem to stay, even though I save the modified photo. Any technical input welcome; it’s a bit embarrassing to put up my trees sideways. After all, I know about gravitropism now.)

The final tree I had a reunion with is a real east-coast tree, the pin oak, Quercus palustris. Now I know why I saw so many of them in my childhood: they are adaptable trees which do fine in wet ground (one of their names is Spanish swamp oak) and drought, and can also tolerate poor soils. They’re the third most common street tree in New York City, which proves they’re resilient. I’m not sure whether the ones I saw from my bedroom window, growing up, were wild or planted, but I can see why they were chosen to be the backbone of suburban trees. I used to love watching the flying squirrels leap from tree to tree; it always seemed they couldn’t possibly make it - then they did. Trapeze artists.

The bark is something you can never forget:

But I’d always been mystified by the common name, “pin oak”. When I was younger, I vaguely thought it was because the leaves were so deeply incised and pointy (leaves that, in several millenia, might evolve to compound leaflets). Then, on my walk through the graveyard, that I had finally figured out the reason for the name “pin oak”. I picked up some acorns, and lo and behold, they had tiny pins in the bottom, like a little top.

But it turns out neither reason is right. Pin oaks have small, unleaved branchlets that stick out from the main branch like little pins bristling out of a pincushion, and that’s what gives them their common name.

And while I was looking that up, I found out something else: pin oaks are a part of the black oak group, the same group as the black oaks I can look at from my west-coast window. You’re never as far from home as you think you are.

Reading my latest catalogue - for a plant lover inclined to be distracted, this time of year has many perils - I discovered, yet again, something new and amazing: hardy date palms. From Russia.

For me, catalogue reading is something akin to a pleasurable meditation with a sacred text. Each entry conjures a slightly different vision of Paradise. I read them over and over, moving my lips to the holy words, making notes in the margins like a Talmudic scholar, probing the deeper meanings. To drag me away from catalogue-reading is to pull me out of Eden.

So when I say that hardy date palms were a revelation to me, you know what it means.

Of course I have seen palms in odd enough places that I knew some were kind of hardy. By kind of, I mean that they tend to look scruffy and discontented, but they persist. There are two palms in my area which live in this kind of half-world: one is protected by an old church wall and courtyard; the other is in a hot spot in a hot microclimate. I’m not good on palms, so I don’t know what type they are: short and stubby, with a few tattered brown-edged leaves, is the best description I can give. No matter how warm or protected the spot, my zone 8 climate (with occasional dips well below freezing) has not been my idea of the place for palms.

When it’s cold, it’s pleasant to dream about a tropical (or at least semi-tropical) paradise. My Western Garden Book showed me that palms are a many-genused  family; Phoenix, the genus date palms are in, has several other species. All palms like shade when they’re young. Considering their natural habitats, this makes sense; bigger trees and shrubs would shade them as seedlings in the wild.  Palms of every variety are used as garden plants, potted plants, and specimens, as far north as Edinburgh, southern Russia, and the Pacific Northwest.

One Green World, whose catalogue gave me the vision of my hardy date palm, is located in Oregon: their palm tree section is headed by a picture of a very healthy-looking Windmill Palm growing in a nearby town. They’ve had a long-term association with breeding programs in the former Soviet Union, resulting in some unusual offerings in fruits and other edibles. (They also have an edible lily from China: the roots are used like water chestnuts.) The eight hardy palms they offer are from the town of Sochi, Russia, where they have naturalized.

Sadly, the date palm they offer does not bear edible fruit (this is often the case with borderline plants), but it is hardy to 12 degrees F (-11 C), which means it would just squeak by in a cold spell in my climate. (It’s a little disconcerting to think that my area has the same climate as southern Russia, but never mind.)

The Jelly Palm, Butia capitata, is a  slow-growing South American tree which “produces long spikes of attractive white flowers followed by juicy, tasty yellowish-orange fruit which ca be eaten fresh and is used to make tasty jams and jellies.” For those who have never had them (I’m sorry), fresh dates are about the same color. I don’t know if the flavor of Jelly Palm fruits is similar, but it’s tempting to try. It’s self-fertile and hardy to 15 degrees F (-9 C), which would make it a possibility…

Here’s one gateway to paradise. Ask yourself : “Where would palm trees fit in my garden?” If you garden in a temperate zone, it brings on Rousseau-like* absinthian surrealistic visions. If you’re in the tropics, it may lead to thoughts of working with the natural landscape, which gets pretty surreal itself, when you think about it deeply. In either case, you’re envisioning a new kind of garden, a place where plants of many cultures meet happily; a place where miracles happen: a Paradise.

*Henri, not Jean-Jacques.

I know only the tiniest bit about bonsai. But when I see trees growing out of rock, wind- and weather-shaped, I can’t help wondering if the inspiration came from high mountain trees like this. (Well, that and the ever-enticing concept of having a small world which you can shape and enter into entirely.) This tree, though huge by bonsai standards (a few feet tall), has a form and surroundings that bring to mind less-shaggy bonsai.

If I’m remembering rightly, Japanese culture has a spiritual and aesthetic reverence for things mountainous.

Including rocks. One my one visit to Japan, I visited one Shinto shrine which had a rock that was famous for curing respiratory diseases. (If you’re interested, I was exposed to a respiratory flu in Japan that lasted for six violent weeks when I got home. After it was over, my susceptibility to bronchitis did seem to taper off.) Buddhist and Shinto shrines always featured rock and plants, in one way or another.

Shinto is the indigenous spiritual practice of Japan; like most indigenous spirituality the world over, it concentrates on the cycles of nature. It was inspiring to me to be in a country where this type of worship had been respected, instead of systematically killed off as much as possible, as it was in Europe and the United States. Shinto seems to thrive along with the different sects of Buddhism, Christianity, and the other religions of Japan. People don’t seem to consider it exceptional to visit more than one kind of worship place; the religions aren’t in competition with each other.

While many Buddhist shrines had beautiful gardens,  I was most fascinated by the tiny plots of ritualized country that formed the Shinto shrines. There were so many of them in Tokyo, in amongst the skyscrapers and traffic noise.  At least one for every neighborhood, it seemed. With the help of an English-language guidebook, I walked to different ones each day and spent time sitting in them, listening to the sound of water from the bamboo fountain, watching suited businessmen come in for a quick prayer before going on with their day.

In my culture, religion is formally separated from nature (although a lot of gardeners heal that rift), a legacy of a time when nature, and those who understood its voices, were enemies of the church/state. In Japan, the connection between nature and spirituality seems to be a given. I can’t help feeling that anyone who has experienced time in nature knows that for truth.

I remember walking by a very small local shrine, a low fence enclosing a small triang

le of bare ground maybe ten square feet on a narrow city corner. I don’t know what kind of shrine it was, and since I had about ten words of Japanese, I couldn’t ask. My book didn’t  say.

I saw many dark rocks, smoothed by time, any carving or elaboration long since worn away. It gave me shivers. Ancient things do that for me. I feel somewhat the same way looking at Sierra granite, still holding on to the polishing glaciers gave it millenia ago.

 This young pine is growing out of an inch or two of granite dust, and pure granite. The red plant next to it is a succulent, probably Sedum obtusatum, a stonecrop.

There’s something elemental about high mountains. Everything’s stripped down.  Rock. Plants. Water. It’s a perfect place to see how soil begins.

As far as I know, soil starts in one of two ways: things rot (usually plants), or rock breaks down. Usually, both are going on at once.

Rock breakdown is slow; we rarely think of it in our gardens at home. But it must be the original place where soil starts. In many of the places where we garden, the rotted plant matter has accrued so much that the soil obscures the place where it came from. (Although in many places where I’ve gardened, the rock layer was not all that far below the soil, and needed breaking up with a pickaxe.) In the mountains, extreme climate and topography mean that soil-making is always in its infancy.

On bare mountain rock, threadlike parts of lichens make a strong acid which breaks down granite, feeding the lichen. High mountain conifers can grow in just a tiny bit of this crushed granite. They then break up more rock with their roots, drop needles and eventually wood which rot and make more soil, so that other kinds of plants can grow there. Animals feeding on the plants do contribute organic matter one way and another, but the bulk of rotting material is plants.

This is the same pine tree as in the picture at the top. This is its root, going straight into crushed and solid granite.

This juniper root gets its nutrients the same way, and has become a large tree.

This dead tree has helped create a small plant community around its roots. It will soon fall over and add to the soil by rotting. Probably rain will wash a great deal of its rotten wood into the lake below, but some will stay in flat places and crevices along the way.

Reference:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Firs and other evergreens are like a skeleton to hang your garden on. Unless you’re planning major logging (which means any garden near your trees will probably be destroyed, too, along with soil compaction), if you live where evergreens grow, you will have them with you as dominating presences.

Red firs (the name comes from the color of the bark) are huge trees, and when there’s a group of them, they dominate the scene. In the nicest kind of way.

A friend of mine who gardens in the mountains has red firs standing at intervals in her yard. Her garden works and weaves through them wonderfully–but she and her husband have had to resign themselves to a shade garden in all but a few spots. Fire laws now mandate that no two tree crowns should touch near a dwelling, so some of their trees have been taken out.
Fire danger is one reason to do selective logging. And there are others. While I’m not in favor of wholesale tree-cutting, some trees become diseased or rot at the root. If these trees are within hitting distance of your house, they could do serious damage in the next storm or high wind. They could also infect the trees next to them.

The red firs in the mountains where I stayed had an epidemic some years back. I believe it was the fir engraver beetle, which gains the upper hand when trees are stressed by drought.  If you think a bark beetle is no big deal, just consider what girdling a tree does. I have seen ponderosa pines in my area, stressed by drought and infested with another kind of beetle, topple their hundred-feet lengths. When there’s a lot of this around, it gets pretty scary.

I’ve got to give the Forest Service credit where credit is due: they marked all of the diseased red firs and had them taken out. While I was horrified at first, to see how many they were marking (at the same time looking at the masses of sick trees on further hillsides), I was pleasantly surprised when the deed was done. This gargantuan tree-cutting project made for a healthier woods, and after a few years you could barely tell what had gone on. (We had some heavy-snow winters after that, which I’m sure helped, since the trees now got enough water for their health.)

In this picture, the  red fir forms a focal point. In the background, more firs repeat the theme, bringing foreground and background subtly together.

For those of you who think of conifers as monochromatic, here’s a  picture to help  change your mind:

One way to tell red firs from other types is their rounded, not pointed, tops. This year, the tops of these seemed uncommonly full of green cones. Maybe we are due for a hard winter. Maybe it’s because we had a very dry winter last year, which tends to make plants fruit frantically with desperation crops, so that their tribe will go on. Or maybe it’s neither one of these. Nature is full of mysteries, and the more of them we figure out, the more of them we find.

Reference:

National Forest Service site