Category — Trees

Every year I get to watch a show.

It only lasts for a week, maybe ten days, so I have to pay attention. And it’s worth paying attention, because when the oaks leaf out, the whole world changes.

The first signs are the swelling buds,  starting to unfurl.

At this point, it’s something you can only see close up. If you’re too busy to look around you, you’ll miss it.

That tiny red tinge expands until it’s noticeable, except to people who are always in a rush. Suddenly, all over the hills, there’s a soft, rusty tinge.

While the rusty leaves are coming out at the bottom of the tree, there is more action up above: some of the leaves that get more sun are already turning an incredible briliant chartreuse, making a beautiful rust-and-green contrast in the trees. I bet you are expecting a spectacular photo right now, but unfortunately I can only say that I try every year – and so far have failed to capture how the light glows through them. I’ll keep trying.

Once the leaves have turned that brilliant, translucent green, I get to see another color show: the contrast of sharp spring green with loud shouting fuchsia blooms of redbud. That’s another show that I haven’t been able to photograph to my satisfaction, and it lasts only a few days. Maybe some things are only meant to be enjoyed live.  I do often wonder, though, why it is that in clothing, say, or room décor, I would loathe the chartreuse-and-fuchsia combo – but in nature, I love it. Maybe it’s something about the light.

Meanwhile, the oaks are going about their business, making the subtle tassel-like flowers that unite the green and rust of the leaves above them.

The leaves are still small enough to let the light through, like a glorious stained-glass window that is constantly overhead.

It’s not long until they become a fluffy opaque green. They’re full size, but they won’t take on their hard, dark green coating for a few weeks. These particular leaves were witness to snow.

In May. (I know I keep saying that, but really: snow in mid-May? For those of you who believe California is a tropical paradise…well, it’s not.)

In fact, this whole show is about a month late this year, like the cranes, the wildflowers, and the temperatures. I’ve heard reports of weird, not to say disastrous, weather in all parts, so I can be grateful that our peculiar weather is just an extension of the cool season. We are lucky.

And I think that I am lucky when I have the chance, each spring, to walk under that original cathedral of shining oak leaves, borne on high, arching branches.

Last week it snowed.

In April.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I live in a state where we have fires in summer, if things aren’t wet enough, and where wells run dry. So I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, we’re about a month behind where we often are this time of year.

The cranes knew it: sandhill cranes fly over at the very beginning of every spring and fall, and they didn’t start until later than usual; I saw the last flight a month ago. The bulbs all knew it; my first daffodils are just fading, when in other years I’d be in the midst of the full spurt of tulips.

And the willows knew it.

Willows are a tree people tend to pass off for most of the year. Oh, there are basket-weavers who keep an eye on their coppices (coppicing is when you prune the willows severely, so that they grow straight and slender, young and smooth and whippy, best for weaving). And there are the famous weeping willows that get celebrated in song and story, most noticeably on blue willowware.

But mostly people pass by the willows; they are often scrubby trees that make disreputable-looking branchy knots with the other creekside, soggy-land shrubs. I’m not even sure of the identity of my own willows (and I’m the kind of person who usually checks). They may be red willows, or one of 14 other species that my usually-reliable Sierra Nevada Natural History lumps together, pictureless and undescribed.

This is the only time of year that most people pay attention to willows, and I know the reason why: their catkins.

You can see several stages of catkin pollination, here

With only soaproot, chickweed, and bittercress doing anything in the garden, it’s wonderful to see any flower.

And there’s something about the furry, quilted texture of willow catkins that’s especially appealing. Maybe the furriness gives us a sense of warmth, subconsciously?

Whatever the appeal, every year I have to go out and cut pussywillows, and bring them in.

In the hothouse of the bottle on my kitchen windowsill, they make little leaves way before they appear on the outside trees.

You can’t see it, but they are making a tangle of roots in the bottom, as well. Willows are notorious for their rooting powers; there are stories (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) of European Americans bringing willow switches from their homes in the east, over the Oregon trail to the west coast, where they stuck them in the ground and sprouted them.

Maybe. I have rooted a willow cutting I left in a bag for a month. (Not a new technique; I just forgot it.)

But I’m going to get the best use out of my willows later on, when I’m taking cuttings. Willow water is famous for helping plants to root; there’s a substance in them called auxin (found in high concentration in tip growth, and used in commercial rooting compounds) which stimulates root growth.

If you want to read more about it, there’s an article by the reliable Fine Gardening here.

Maybe if I had read that article earlier, I would have had more spectacular results. My  laissez-faire attitude: get a five-gallon bucket, put a lot of water in it, cut up a lot of new willow stems (the ones with the smooth skins, not the ones with the rough bark), and let them soak. When I want to water in transplants, I use that water, and I use it on plants that look less than well-established, too. When the water level gets low, I top it up. Sometimes I add more stems. Most of the time, to be honest, the whole thing dries up until next year.

I cut willow stems every year. Because, like willows catkins, they subtly remind us: we have lots more flowers coming. And  fruits to follow.

 I had it all wrong about cottonwoods.

I love the sound of the wind in their leaves,  a sound that mimics flowing water in the way a rainstick echoes rain. I thought they made that sound because they had double-jointed leaves.

It’s one of those things that stuck in my head – wrong, as it turns out. So when I got next to a cottonwood, and started looking at where the petiole meets the branch, and I couldn’t figure out what makes it different. (The petiole is the part that connects the leaf to the stem. In some plants, like willows, it’s very short. In others, such as cottonwoods, it’s extended.) Since I couldn’t make head or tail out of what I was seeing, I went to my old reliable Sierra Nevada Natural History, and looked it up.

I found the clue under aspen (Populus tremuloides). From its species name, tremuloides, it’s easy to guess what trait is being described. From the genus name (Populus), it’s easy to guess that both aspens and cottonwoods are related to poplars, which have the same trembling leaves.  The reason for that, my Sierra Nevada Natural History told me, is that “the leaves, having vertically flat petioles, quiver in any breeze.”

“Vertically flat petioles, vertically flat petioles,” I muttered to myself, unable to configure vertically flat in my mind. So I went out to look.

 Vertically flat petioles look like this:

 And in action, they look like this:

The wide flat edge acts like a miniature sail, so that the least breeze causes leaves to move, and gives them that unique sound.It could be that this allows their seeds – little bits of white fluff that give cottonwood its name – to be scattered farther, increasing their tribe. In any case the sound of the poplar family is unlike any other, a restful sound, as if I were listening to a brook made of air.  Some cottonwoods grow straight up, like their poplar relatives, and others branch out into several trunks. Unlike poplars, however, their crowns are broad and flat.

The bark of the Fremont cottonwood that I was looking at (there are other kinds) is rough and fibrous, a clue to the kind of wood within. A source who knows his firewood told me that it’s next to useless for burning. Since cottonwoods grow only where there’s a high water table, every one of those fibers is filled with water.

So first you have to really dry them out. Then, when you get the into the stove, they burn quickly and dirtily, without much heat, and leave a lot of ash.  If you’re looking for firewood, best look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for a sign – and a sound – of water, cottonwoods will take you there. 

Leaf buds for next year 

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.