After last week’s big windstorm, my kids came in from a trek through the woods to report (with sadness) that the Twisty Pine had been damaged. Now, the Twisty Pine is a behemoth of a tree near the back corner of our property whose twin leaders spiral around one another as they climb into the sky like the double-helix structure of DNA. In recent years we’d seen woodpecker holes appear in one of the leaders, high up, and the green needles on the other began to dwindle. So we knew that things were going downhill. But it was still sad, and a little shocking, to see such a giant so violently topped – a massive weight of limbs and trunk...
Birch trees are among the most versatile trees of the North Woods. Besides being extremely resilient (they are the last hardwoods standing before the Arctic tundra), their wood is valuable for handcraft, their leaves make a wonderful yellow dye for textiles (See Brendan Gaffney’s article in Issue Thirteen), and they can be tapped in the spring to produce birch syrup (cooked down, it tastes like molasses). One of the most useful parts of the tree is the bark – it has been utilized for everything from canoes to shelter to watertight containers to clothing (yes, birchbark clothes were all the rage back in the day). But most importantly, it is highly flammable. A piece of birchbark that has been...
It’s maple sugar season here in New England. When the days are above freezing but the nights are still frosty, the maples (Acer spp.) begin sending copious amounts of sweet sap up the trunk and into the limbs, readying the buds to leaf out when the time comes. We tap a few of our trees every year – rarely more than a dozen. A decent-sized maple can put out more than a gallon of sap per day, per tap, and all this precious liquid must be gathered, cooked down, and finished into syrup or (better yet) maple sugar. It might be the best stuff on earth. Larger producers use food-grade vinyl tubing to pipe all the trees in their “sugarbush” together,...
The woods have been changing. As mornings begin with heavy frost and autumn gales blast their way through every weekend or so, many deciduous trees have dropped their leaves to settle in for the long winter. A few of the alders and beeches are still trying to eke out a couple more weeks of valuable photosynthesis, and the oaks will hold their faded russet leaves a little while longer. The green of the conifers has become just about the only available jolt of color in a forest quickly moving to winter monochrome. Except for one conifer who does things a little differently – the tamarack. Or is it a larch? Larix laricina is commonly called by a number of different...
Some conifers are content to grow as their neighbors, dutifully straight to the sky, branches creating an arrow profile as they march upwards in symmetrical ranks. Often, this predictable pattern of growth ends eventually in the death of the tree – it simply can’t innovate to reach farther than its limited pattern allows and soak in the sunlight needed to thrive within a crowded forest. These trees just put their heads down, stick to the rulebook, and soon die from a lack of captured solar energy. But the Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) suffers no such compunctions. This tree takes risks, sometimes serious risks, in the effort to grab a patch of sunlight. It will send limbs out at often ridiculous angles...
The numbers of tourists visiting Acadia National Park here in Maine are beginning to dwindle for the season, so those of us who live here are increasingly able to enjoy the park again. My family has a specific loop that we walk every autumn, in October as the foliage is peaking in color, and we continued that tradition last weekend. It was a good opportunity to reconsider the maple tree. Our most common maple is the red maple (Acer rubrum), which may take a backseat in prestige to the more widely known sugar maples (Acer saccharum) of New England, legendary for their maple syrup production. But the red maple has another trick up its sleeve. In the fall, when the...
Besides providing wood for making things and keeping warm, forests offer food. But these resources typically go unnoticed by human visitors today. This was not the case in centuries past, when many people relied on the regular, seasonal varieties of wild foods for nutrition. In fact, indigenous populations in North America utilized some 300 different species for food (compared with the 20 to 30 that the typical modern American eats). One of the most recognizable is the acorn. This part of New England primarily features the Northern red oak (Quercus rubra) as we’re at or beyond the northern limit of the white oaks. Red oaks typically have especially bountiful mast production every other year. Last year was productive, even with...
It’s been a wet summer around here – between above-average rainfall and plenty of damp, foggy mornings (it is dark and rainy as I write this), the ducks in the pond are happy and the wild blackberries are productive. But the most unique (to me) evidence of the year’s trends has been the explosion of mushrooms in the woods. They’re everywhere – bursts of weird, vivid colors and shapes that turn the forest floor into a micro version of an old 50’s sci-fi film. Even though several varieties have popped up this year that I’ve never seen before, they’ve always been there, hiding just beneath the soil. Fungi are fascinating things, still little-understood. The mushrooms we see are just the...
