Silvery Russian Autumn

I remember “Russian olive” and “autumn olive” being used interchangeably when I was a kid, planting these exotic shrubs in our yard after purchasing them from the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York. Back in the 1970s the DEC had a program with the goal of getting the public to plant shrubs that provided food for birds. Another species we planted was the “high-bush cranberry” (Viburnum opulus var. americanum). The “olives” are not in fact related to the trees that produce actual olives and the “cranberry” is not related to the creeping woody plant that produces actual cranberries, and both species are now judged to be invasive.

E. umbellata

As it turns out the Russian olive is Elaeagnus angustifolia and the autumn olive is Elaeagnus umbellata, two different species in the same genus, both of them from Asia. As its name suggests the Russian olive has the narrower leaves and its blossoms are a yellowish color, while the autumn olive has more ovate leaves and cream colored to white flowers.

The flowers of both species are extremely aromatic. This time o] f the year if you are downwind, you are likely to smell the shrub before you see it. It is a heavy, sweet odor that reminds me of inexpensive perfume. The petals are joined into a tube with the distal ends free and flaring outward. They hang in clusters from the ends of the branches and bloom for several weeks, starting in May and continuing into June here on Martha’s Vineyard, where they are abundant.

E. angustifolia

Both E. angustifolia and E. umbellata leaves have a silvery sheen to them because of tiny scales on the surfaces. In addition to the difference in the shape of the leaves and the color of the blossoms, the scales fall off the tops of E. umbellata leaves through the growing season while the E. angustifolia leaves remain shiny.

The shrubs I have seen on Martha’s Vineyard have creamy colored flowers and are likely autumn olive. I grows in the usual places that you expect to see “volunteer” species, along roadsides, under fence lines, and in the margins of yards. Because the plant was widely distributed to be bird food, birds that ingest the fruit poop out the seeds anywhere they sit, which is often at the edges of places. I have not seen monocultural groves of the species here, which can apparently happen where it really thrives.

Native to China, Japan, and Korea, E. umbellata was introduced to the U.S. in 1830 as an ornamental, and after the 1950s was promoted for erosion control and wildlife habitat in disturbed areas.Herbivores are not known to browse on it. With the help of nitrogen-fixing nodules on its roots, it can grow in soils that are unfavorable to other species. It is also drought tolerant. Once it takes hold, it can create dense thickets that prevent other plants from germinating.

Autumnberries

A single shrub can produce 200,000 seeds. In order to get rid of a specimen, it is best to do it before it sets fruit, because the act of removing the plant can disperse the seed. It is a weedy species and will grow back more thickly after it is cut down, so it is best to remove it entirely.

Somewhat ironically, the bright red berries are growing in popularity among the forager community. They are rich in vitamins A, C, and E, and in flavonoids and lycopene. It has even been rebranded as “autumnberry” in this context. Foragers boil the berries to make jam, which kills the seeds. This, they say, kills the seeds and is a better way to prevent their spread than using herbicides. The berries of the Russian olives are yellow when young and turn red when mature, but although sweet, they are drier and mealier than autumn olive berries.

Fern That Drops Its “R”s

What exactly does the “Boston” fern have to do with The Hub? (And does anyone call Boston ‘the hub’ anymore?) Nephrolepis exaltata is a subtropical plant, occurring naturally as far north as south Florida and throughout the West Indies, Mexico, Central and South America, Polynesia and Africa. It is classified as an invasive alien in South Africa, where by law it is eradicated on sight.

Wild type Nephrolepis exaltata in a Florida landscape design.

The wild type is often called a sword fern, but that common name is also given to several species of fern in the genus Polystichum. It is so named because its fronds stick nearly straight up in the air to the height of three feet. In the wild it forms thickets throughout south Florida. Nephrolepis cordifolia is invasive in south Florida, forming impenetrable thickets that have to be removed to permit native species to grow.

As a house plant the cultivars are ubiquitous. The pinnae on the fronds are alternate (some ferns are opposite), and in the wild type the sori (which hold the spores) . The gracefully arching fronds that make this fern so popular in hanging baskets and on elevated shelves are the result of a mutation that has been preserved by reproducing the plant through division. The name of the variety is ‘Bostoniensis.’

The “-ensis” suffix is common in the trivial names of plants because it means “of or from <a place>.” Sometimes the reference can be a little esoteric, as in the case of the York groundsel, a species of ragwort, Senecio eboracensis. Eboracum is the Roman name for the modern city of York in northern England. The self-pollinating ragwort grows only between a railway and a parking lot in that city.

The origin of the varietal name of N. exaltata is not definitely known. One story has it that the mutation was discovered in 1894  in a shipment of plants that was sent from Philadelphia to Boston. American botanist David Fairchild claimed that the cultivar was named by a Florida nurseryman who developed it and sent specimens to a friend in Boston.

As popular as they are, Boston ferns are non-trivial to grow, although nearly all the internet plant sites will tell you it is easy to maintain. They are in fact easier to grow indoors compared to most other ferns, most of which need to be kept in terrariums.

Although they are known to be incredibly efficient at improving indoor air (turning carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis), they are also very sensitive to indoor air pollutants, such as coal and wood smoke. They also dislike drafts.

Nephrolepis exaltata ‘Bostoniensis’ spreads via runners.

This latter quality is one particularly true of the ‘Bostoniensis’ cultivar. The species is more tolerant of the cold and was a popular Victorian house plant. The Victorians famously believed in the improving quality of fresh air and routinely opened windows in cold weather to air out their homes. They actually went so far as to make sure no vegetation grew next to the houses that might impede the flow of air.

These ferns need to be kept watered because in addition to producing oxygen they also pump water vapor into the air. The roots should never be allowed to dry out. It is necessary to mist the fronds if the humidity in your house falls below 80 percent. If grown inside it requires bright but filtered light.

“Sword ferns” growing in the wild in Florida.

If grown in a pot, it should be in standard peat-based mixture. Otherwise mix half soil-based mixture with half leaf mold. When the plant’s roots fill the pot, move it to another pot only one size larger. It will just keep growing, so when it gets to the maximum size that you want to tolerate, just trim off the outermost roots and put it back in the pot.

It can be grown outside in USDA Plant Hardiness Zones 8B through 11, roughly South Carolina to Florida on the East Coast, where natural humidity would be adequate. Although the plant will die back during the winter in the northern part of this range, it will sprout new foliage in the spring. The species (without the arching fronds) reaches two to three feet in height and spreads by runners, so it forms a thick monocultural patch wherever you plant it and needs to be thinned periodically.

The Underwater Meadow

Eelgrass (Zostera marina on the U.S. east coast) is a flowering plant that grows submerged in salt water. In other words, it is not a “seaweed,” which are macrophytic algae. Eelgrass is descended from land plant that found a new niche by growing underwater in bays and estuaries where the bottom is shallow enough that a rooted plant can get enough sunlight to survive.

Eelgrass beds on the east coast of the United States have expanded and contracted through recorded history. They are in decline in many places right now because increased development along the coast has led to nutrient loading in shallow marine environments.

Nitrogen is available in usable form in very limited amounts in the natural environment, so photosynthesizing organisms — higher plants, algae, and bacteria — are adapted to this limitation to their growth. Septic systems and fertilizers introduce relatively large amounts of nitrogen (and phosphorus) to the adjacent marine setting. Algae reacts very quickly to the elevated nitrogen levels and “blooms.” These mats of algae block the sunlight and make it difficult for eelgrass to photosynthesize.

Eelgrass has other challenges, including scouring of the seafloor by mooring chains and churning of the water column by boat propellers. Moorings are kept in place by weights and attached to the floats at the surface by chains. At lower tides the extra length of chain drags around the bottom in a circle around the weight, tearing up eelgrass by the roots. Motorboats that drive through eelgrass beds slice through the submerged and floating foliage of the plants.

These are monoecious plants — there are male and female flowers on the same plant — with long narrow leaves. The leaves are 1.2 cm wide and a meter long. The plant reproduces vegetatively via rhizomes and also when pieces of the plant break off and settle elsewhere. It also reproduces sexually by producing seeds that are dispersed by currents. As a result of the vegetative reproduction eelgrass can form extensive beds that are sometimes centuries old. It is a perennial, so the entire plant is present throughout the year.

Seahorse in eelgrass bed

Because eelgrass beds are both extensive and present year round they have become important habitat for other life forms, including bay scallops, immature cod and mature flounder, crabs, and green algae that grow on the higher plants. Many other animals depend on eelgrass for food, including brant, isopods, and sea urchins.

In the early 1930s elevated temperatures in shallow marine environments on both the east and west coasts of the Atlantic Ocean caused an outbreak of mold that decimated eelgrass beds. In places like Buzzards Bay, Mass. the beds did not recover until the early 1960s. In Barnegat Bay, N.J. the disappearance of the eelgrass beds ends a local industry that harvested the plants to use them to insulate homes.

In addition to natural challenges, since the 1950s nitrogen loading has caused eelgrass to disappear in many locations. In Chesapeake Bay there is an effort underway to actively replant eelgrass rather than waiting for it to recover naturally.

Traditional vs. conservation moorings

On Martha’s Vineyard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is teaming up with the Town of Tisbury to finance the introduction of “conservation moorings.” The chains on traditional moorings are replaced by floating plastic tubes that do not scour the bottom. The town has also passed a local law that requires property owners in the watersheds of Lake Tashmoo and the Lagoon Pond to install advanced septic systems that cut down on the amount of nitrogen leaching from the adjacent substrate into the nearby estuaries.

Once eelgrass is lost in an area, it is difficult to reestablish it if there is regular boat activity and if the surface water is regularly made turbulent by wind and tidal currents. All this energy causes the resuspension of fine bottom sediments that are no longer held in place by the eelgrass roots (and the water is no longer calmed by the dense eelgrass foliage). The suspended sediment shades the bottom and makes it difficult for eelgrass to grow.

The Tender Heath

The climate of Martha’s Vineyard is mild and moist. The mildness is reflected in its assignment to USDA Hardiness Zone 7a, which means that temperatures do not descend below 0 to 5 degrees F in the winter. This is the same zone as Philadelphia and Nashville. The Vineyard is also humid; it is an island surrounded by the relatively cold water of the continental shelf. As the island warms relative to the surrounding ocean, the air cannot help but be drawn in over the land, bathing it with moisture evaporated from the sea. It is a miniature version of the Pacific Northwest, where the prevailing westerlies rise up first the coastal range and then the higher Cascades, cooling as they rise and dropping their moisture as rain and a fine mist. The forests of the Oregon coast and the forest of Martha’s Vineyard are both hung with fruticose lichens.

Huckleberries, the red leaved shrub here, are an indicator of a heath community.

The interior of the island is droughty though. It is mostly sand (or a sandy loam) and water that falls quickly sinks into the substrate, out of reach of most crops. It was not settled in until the advent of drilled wells in the 20th century. Much of it was forested, but some of it was heath, which is a plant community dominated by woody shrubs and characteristic of sandy, over-drained areas. So-called anthropogenic heaths are those created and maintained by burning, grazing, or both.

As it happens Thomas Mayhew, the Englishman who bought Martha’s Vineyard in 1642 and settled it, was born in Tisbury in Wiltshire in south of England. The New Forest, which is in fact a patchwork of forest, heathland, and pasture, is in Wiltshire (and Hampshire), so the landscape of the island he settled may not have been as different from his homeland as we might think.

Heather, an indicator of heathlands in the United Kingdom, in flower in Durham in the late summer.

To this day the New Forest is maintained in its patchwork condition by grazing. Blogger Stephen Bolwell describes the forest this way: “The look that is achieved with this approach to management isn’t exactly wild, but neither does it feel agricultural – it’s somewhere in between and usually happens in areas where the soil is too poor to support more intensive forms of agriculture.” Bolwell has been visiting the forest since the 1970s and has watched it decline due over-grazing by cattle and ponies. Plants like heather and bramble are now hard to find.

Once a grassland has replaced a heathland it is a precarious balance. Over-grazing can deplete even the grass leaving exposed sand, which elevates the temperature locally, causing a mesoclimate that makes the vegetation around the sand die and the desertification spreads. Heathlands are threatened in Massachusetts too. Here the threat is grazing, but also fire suppression and fragmentation by development.

A statue of the heath hen by Todd McGrain looks out over the Martha’s Vineyard heath dominated by sheep laurel.

Because the heath is a marginal environment — prone to drought and wide swings in temperature — many plant and animal species are found there and not elsewhere (or are much more rare elsewhere). Bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) and black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata) are indicator species for sandplain heathlands. Sandplain heathlands and sandplain grasslands share about 70 percent of their dominant species: it is the proportion of the species and the resultant structure that separates the types. Sandplain heathlands look shrubby and appear taller and have fewer vascular plant species than do grasslands. Heathlands are structurally similar to maritime dune communities in that each has low shrub, herbaceous and grassy growth with patches of bare soil.

Martha’s Vineyard was the last hold-out of the heath hen, an eastern population of the greater prairie chicken. It was in part the failure to maintain the actual heathlands that led to its extinction in 1932. The Heath Hen Preserve was established in 1908 and a population that had declined to 70 at the end of the 19th century recovered to 2000 birds by the mid 1910s. But the management of the preserve included fire suppression. Not only did this along the open grassland to succeed to scrub, but when fires did occur, they were dangerous. A 1916 conflagration precipitated the final decline of the species.

Short and Spreading Oak

Nearly anywhere you go in the United States you will find oak trees. They are often large and common, so they can often contribute significantly to the look and feel of a place. The effect reaches consciousness if you are a plant nerd. During the year I lived on the Central Coast of California, I was somewhat distracted by the fact that several species of oak did not lose their leaves in the winter. And what could be more different than the spreading, moss-draped live oaks of the Southeast versus the upright, austere red and black oaks of the Northeast?

Spreading post oak in Texas

I have been reading that before the European settlement period Martha’s Vineyard was not as heavily dominated by oak forest as it is now. (When I repeated this statement to a naturalist in the employee of The Nature Conservancy, she contested it. And David Foster’s book A Meeting of Land and Sea indicates that it is a lot more complicated than that.) Supposedly, the up-island portion of Martha’s Vineyard, which is higher, rockier, and less sandy than down-island, was once more of a northern hardwoods assemblage, characterized by beech, maple (mostly red), black tupelo (locally called beetlebung).

But clearing of the forests for sheep raising between the 17th and 19th centuries led to erosion of organic-rich top soil, so when animal husbandry and farming faded and the island became a site for second homes, the forest that returned was one more adapted to drier sites with more mineral-dominated soils. In the Northeast, this tends to be the preferred habitat of the post oak (Quercus stellata).

I am not familiar with this species. It is a common oak in the South and southern Midwest, but is confined to marginal areas in the Northeast: sand barrens and rocky ledges. In Massachusetts it is found in Bristol and Barnstable counties on the mainland (Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod) and on the Islands. This represents the northeastern corner of its range; it extends southward along the Connecticut coast and on Long Island.

“Maltese cross” shape of the post oak leaf

It is a famously slow-growing species and the wood is rot-resistant. It gets its common name from its sturdiness as a component of fence construction. It often takes a spreading form, the branches assuming sinuous shapes, and generally reaches the height of 50 feet, although it can grow to twice that height in a suitable location.

It is in the white oak group, so the lobes of the leaves are rounded and without the terminal ‘pins’. The acorns mature in one year and are sweet tasting. White oaks also readily hybridize among species, making identifying characters somewhat variable from tree to tree. The post oak usually has leaves that are said to resemble a Maltese cross; they are narrow at the base and have three broad, squared off lobes at the distal end. The underside of the leaves are covered with fine hairs called trichomes. In the post oak these have a star-shaped cross-section, hence the trivial name stellata.

Allen’s Farm, Martha’s Vineyard

Oak leaves are poisonous to sheep and goats, so it seems odd that they are so common on this island, where sheep raising was such an important part of the economy. Apparently the sheep won’t each the leaves if there is enough grass around. Sheep are consummate grazers, even less likely to browse than cattle or horses.

When you wander the conservation lands of Martha’s Vineyard, you frequently encounter stone walls that now wend their way through the woods, but once delimited the boundaries of sheep meadows. Amid the younger trees you find larger, spreading trees — they are occasionally post oaks — that must have been there to provide shade for sheep and shepherd. I still have some questions about whether eating oak leaves was a concern, but it is a pleasant picture to conjure.

A New Kind of Ancient

Ancient woodlands path on Martha’s Vineyard. Photo: David R. Foster

I recently learned a new term to describe a forest ecosystem. The water district of Oak Bluffs, a town on the northern tip of Martha’s Vineyard, proposed going “green” at the site of their pumps and wells. They would add solar panels to the site to make electricity to power the pumps that supply the town center with drinking water. The plan was shot down by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the regional planning council, on the grounds the project would entail entirely clearing between 6 and 10 acres of the site to build the frames that hold the panels. David R. Foster, the director of Harvard Forest, which is in central Massachusetts, happens to live in West Tisbury, which is on the island. He told the commission that “ancient woodlands” would be destroyed should the project go forward.

“Ancient woodlands” was initially a baffling term to me (although I found it is used routinely in the United Kingdom). The forests of the island date from the 19^th century, generally speaking. As is the case for much of New England, particularly the southern portion, the land was almost entirely cleared for agriculture, pasturage, and for firewood, between the 17^th and the 19^th centuries.

Beeches on Gay Head Moraine terrain. Photo: David R. Foster

Martha’s Vineyard was settled by Europeans after 1641 when Thomas Mayhew purchased the island from the Earl of Sterling and Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The Wampanoag had (and have) inhabited the place since you could walk to it on dry land after the last Ice Age. Like other coastal tribes they burned the land to keep it clear for agriculture and for hunting. Parts of the Vineyard, the portion that is glacial outwash plain, was also open heathland (home to the heath hen), perhaps even before the Wampanoag began burning it systematically, and not forest at all. But in a March 2016 letter (included in an August 2016 letter) to the commission Foster, the author of a monograph about the island’s forests, stated that 40 percent of the Vineyard’s woodlands had come through the historical clearances intact, and the Oak Bluffs water district site was within the largest remaining tract.

Foster explained that an ancient forest is not really about the age of the trees; it is about the age of the ecosystem. The parcel owned by the Oak Bluffs water district turned out to be a piece of land that had never been tilled. The soil architecture and its attendant microbial and invertebrate ecosystems had never been disturbed. It therefore supports a sub-aerial floral communities that is similarly continuous. These are not majestic, old growth forests with towering trees and haunted silences. Instead it is a scrubby-looking tract populated by several species of oak in the canopy and a sub-canopy somewhat oversubscribed with ericads. There is, of course, more to it than that, but that is definitely what meets the eye of the casual observer.

The carbon cycle

This is an ecosystem distinct from an old-growth forest. Old-growth as defined by non-foresters includes the idea that the mature trees in a stand have never been felled by a lumbering operation. Old-growth forests presumably share a lot of sub-surface characteristics with ancient forests, but the sub-aerial expression is quite different. No one claimed that the trees at the water district site were hundreds of years old, but Foster said that the ecosystem had been undisturbed by human activity for millennia:

These ancient woods are particularly important because their soils are intact, their vegetation has continuity on the landscape going back thousands of years, the resprouting trees on these sites are many hundreds of years old, and the habitat that they provide is globally rare and valuable to many unusual as well as common species. (excerpted from Foster’s March 6 letter)

Foster and other opponents argued that the forest was doing its job sequestering carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere, and it was “counterintuitive” to remove it and build solar panels, which were after all meant to contribute to the switch away from carbon-based fuels. Although there is a difference between the short-term storage of carbon in a forest and long-term in a coal deposit, we have little hope of actively creating or maintaining long-term storage (although Freeman Dyson and some others do feel otherwise) and maintaining our ancient woodlands where we still have them seems prudent. Especially, as Foster points out, there are so many roof tops, gravel pits and other disturbed sites where solar panels can be erected.

Holding the Beach in Place

I guess I had never visited the dunes of the Atlantic coast in September before, because I was surprised to discover the seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens) growing amid the beach grass (Ammophila breviligulata) on South Beach, Martha’s Vineyard last weekend. It is an odd-looking goldenrod; most Solidago species have toothed leaves, usually with rough surfaces, and the individual flowers are tiny. Seaside goldenrod flowers are larger than those of other members of the genus and the leaves and stems are fleshier and thicker, an adaptation to living in a salty, windy environment, where preservation of water is important.

Seaside goldenrod at South Beach, Martha’s Vineyard

Coastal beaches on Martha’s Vineyard consist of un-vegetated beach faces and berms, sparsely vegetated foredunes dominated by American beach grass and seaside goldenrod and more stabilized and densely vegetated inner dunes with bayberry, saltspray rose (Rosa rugosa), poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) and winged sumac (Rhus copallina).

S. sempervirens gets its trivial name (“always green”) from its habit of holding on to its leaves through much of the winter and sprouting new ones in February or March. They are red when they emerge and then turn green. It begins flowering in August, along with the other goldenrods, but keeps flowering into November, after the other goldenrods have been felled by frost. Seaside goldenrod can be from 3 to 6 feet tall (some sources say up to 8 or 10 feet all); it is shorter in more exposed and nutrient starved locations and taller elsewhere.

S. sempervirens var. mexicana growing at Delaware Seashore State Park

There are two subspecies. S. sempervirens var. sempervirens, which has showier flowers and grows south to Connecticut, and var. mexicana, which is smaller and grows from Massachusetts south to Texas. It also hybridizes regularly with rough-stemmed goldenrod (S. rugosa).

It is quite salt tolerant and has spread inland in some areas, where it is confined to heavily salted roadsides. It occurs naturally not only from Newfoundland down the east coast of the United States, but also down the St. Lawrence River valley to the Great Lakes. It has spread further into to the Great Lakes region, becoming established in saline areas where few other plants are present to compete with it. It is not regarded as invasive, as it does not spread out of these marginal areas.

Because it is adapted to dune dwelling, seaside goldenrod is one of the species is that is replanted in areas where beach and dune restoration is underway. Beach grass is the primary species to be planted in these projects, but S. sempervirens, beach pea (Lathyrus japonica), beach plum (Prunus maritima), bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) and bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) are all planted as well.

Replanting at Bend in the Road Beach, Martha’s Vineyard

I haven’t seen any references to a restoration of South Beach on Martha’s Vineyard and the beach grass/goldenrod community in the dunes there is likely natural. But Joseph A. Sylvia State Beach, a barrier beach between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, on the northeast side of the island, sees more heavy use and it has been restored using dredged materials 12 times since 1997. In 2008 the Friends of Sengekontacket commissioned the Woods Hole Group to do a study of the state beach and it produced a plan that serves as a guide to managing the beach in the face of heavy use and rising sea level. In November 2012 Hurricane Sandy badly damaged the barrier beach and the sand replenishment and revegetation effort after that event was the most restoration.

In addition to growing on beaches and sand dunes in coastal areas, seaside goldenrod grows in high parts and along the edges of fresh, brackish and salt marshes. It is found in parts of the marsh that are irregularly flooded by tides. It can play an important role in providing nesting habitat for shorebirds like willets, killdeer, and black skimmers.

An Actual Norwegian

A lot of people love Norway spruces (Picea abies). It has whole websites devoted to extolling its virtues as a landscape tree, as a source of lumber, and as a windbreak and a good species to plant on reclaimed land. I have great memories of climbing them as a kid. One in particular was right outside my window when I was between the ages of 10 and 18 years old.

Mature Norway spruce

When my mother and stepfather took us to look at what would become our home on Spy Hill in Beacon, the first thing my brother and I did was look for trees to climb. The house was at that time over 80 years old and some of the trees on the property may have been that old too. There was a Norway spruce planted in front of the south-facing porch and it was probably over 80 feet tall. It had branches right down to the ground because it had been grown in the open. It was especially wide because one of the lateral branches had decided to grow upward and had become a sort of mizzen mast to the main trunk.

The lower branches become angled downward in old trees; they descend from the trunk and rest on the ground all around the tree. The needles are attached to small, pendulous branches that hang straight down from the lateral branches that extend outward from the trunk in whorls. The overall effect is to give Norway spruces the appearance of being covered with needled drapery that sweep outward in a broad skirt near the ground.

Pendulous branches and cones

My brother Ray and I both climbed the tree, but either he started up it before I did, or he was just more excited to be up there. In any case, he did not come down when my mother called for us. Instead he went all the way up to the top of the tree and stood amid the little branches there crowing, “Look at me. I made it to the top!” and waving his arm around while making the crown of the spruce sway wildly back and forth. Mrs. Grady, the elderly woman who was about to sell us her house, just about had a heart attack.

We moved into that house when I was 10 years old and just starting to get interested in natural history. (My first Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds (third edition) was in a pile of debris the Gradys left on the front lawn.) I identified the huge conifer as a Norway spruce and have seen them pretty much everywhere for the rest of my life. Native to central and northern Europe, they grow at all altitudes from Norway to the Ural Mountains and south to southern Poland and also in the Alps and the mountainous regions of Germany and the Balkans.

It is not particularly widespread in Norway, growing in the central portion and along the border with Sweden in the south, but it is at least more aptly named than the Austrian pine, which barely grows in Austria at all.

Rockefeller Center Christmas tree

In the U.S. I have frequently encountered it growing in the woods where it has survived after being planted as a landscape tree and then abandoned. It grows quickly—two to three feet per year—during the first 25 years of its life and can be planted in shade or in the sun. It can be planted in the middle of a grassy pasture and it will outgrow the grass. It is used in Pennsylvania and Indiana to replant strip mined areas.

Because it grows quickly and requires little maintenance, it is often planted as a Christmas tree. The enormous tree required by Rockefeller Center each year is frequently a Norway spruce.

A New Yard

I haven’t had a yard since 2012. For about a year I lived in an apartment on the second floor of house on East Main Street in Trumansburg. In the spring of 2012 I attempted to plant a garden in the back yard (chronicled earlier in another blog), but I didn’t get much out of it because the neighborhood deer mowed down the seedlings and the soil was, in a word, terrible.

The new back yard

The site was apparently the site of an outbuilding of some sort, that had been subsequently torn down and the main body of its material removed, but the soil was littered with old pieces of glass, metal, and ceramics. All of these were likely remnants of the contents of this extinct building. Who knows what sort of chemicals had been stored there and had polluted the soil. Looking back on it, it is perhaps lucky that the garden didn’t produce much more than a bunch of cherry tomatoes and some tiny bell peppers. It wouldn’t have been all that good an idea to eat much that came out of that soil.

I have encountered this sort of soil in many places that I have lived because I have nearly always lived in a place that has been settled for a long time and seen a lot of different uses. When I have turned over soil to make a garden or dug a ditch for drainage or to lay cable out to a light fixture, I have encountered all manner of detritus below the surface. At these times I have wondered why I am not more interested in either archaeology or metal detection. (Actually I went through a phase as a young teenager of being fascinated by metal detection, but I was in the end stopped by the cost of the detector. I took a couple of archaeology courses in college, but in the end ended up a paleontologist instead and let others doing the “digging” for me by doing deep-sea research.)

The bean barn

On April 1 I moved into a new apartment. After living on the second floor of an apartment building in downtown Ithaca for two years, I have moved back to Trumansburg and taken up residence in the old “bean barn.” For many years this was the place that local farmers brought their beans to be cleaned, sorted, packaged and shipped out to market. When I told local organic farmer Tony Potenza that I was living here he recalled storing his earliest crops of organic carrots in the basement of the building. Tony is 69 and started farming in the early 1970s. I’m not sure how long the building stood idle before it was sold and converted into five apartments.

Our apartment has a porch that looks out on a small side yard populated by a large black walnut and three understory trees that I haven’t identified as yet (I’ll wait for leaf out). The property boundary is defined by a row of Norway spruces (which were full of white-throated sparrows this morning). The lawn stretches back to a stockade fence and that part of it is officially the demesne of some other apartment resident, but none of the other apartments face that way, so I think we might claim it.

Future fire pit site

Our plans at this writing include installing an outdoor raised fire pit. I saw one yesterday where the owner had thoughtfully buried cinderblocks to make a platform flush to the ground. This would obviously prevent fire and baking of the ground beneath it, a good idea that I intend to mimic. We might need some yard furniture to go with this.

But the horticultural plan is put in some herbs. I have to check to see whether or not various herbs will tolerate the allelopathic nature of the black walnut. If not, then that will necessitate planting in large tubs in order to protect the plants and perhaps us from the allelopathic chemicals in the soil.

The surface of the land has been disturbed here; it is very uneven, so when I dig to set stone under the fire pit, I intend to have archaeological visions again.

Valued in Its Entirety

As we are apparently about to lose our American ashes to the emerald ash borer of Southeast Asia, which literally eats them from the top down, it seems appropriate to reflect on other trees that we have lost to invasive species of one sort or another. While the ash borer is an insect and the chestnut blight is a fungus, the “Dutch elm” disease is a fungus spread by an insect, namely the elm bark beetle (there is more than one species).

The “vase” shape

The disease arrived in the United States in 1928 with some European lumber destined to be used as veneer. It spread west and south from New England. When I was a child in the 1960s there were still a few elms along the streets of some New England towns and when I arrived at St. Lawrence University in 1978 in the North Country of New York State there was still two double rows of elms along the half mile drive that passed for a grand entrance to the campus. Some of them were already dead, but the majority were still alive. (Now it is not even mentioned on the school’s website.)

It was just this kind of monocultural planting that made the American elm (Ulmus americana) succumb so quickly to the disease. Once the fungus is in an individual tree it pervades all the living tissue, including the roots. The specimens that lined both sides of every Elm Street in the United States had intergrown root systems.

While the chestnut was predominantly a forest-grown species, the American elm is best known as a street tree. It has a “vase” habit, which is to say that its trunk divides into several large boles a good 20 feet above the ground and each of these then veers off at a high angle successively producing more minor branches with the same geometry. The finest branches then succumb to the pull of gravity, arc over and begin to plunge, eventually hanging straight downward or nearly so, creating a vast vail foliage that is at its most beautiful in the early spring when the unfurling leaves are a bright yellow-green.

Elm archways

In other words this is a tree whose very shape made it perfect for streetscaping. In addition to a welcome habit, the tree also grew relatively rapidly and to great size (100 feet) within decades, and tolerated the increasingly bad air in urban settings and the root binding caused by underground urban infrastructure. The result was iconic avenues lined with trees the branches of which formed great arches that were blocks long. What American village, town, or city in the eastern two-thirds of the country is without an Elm Street?

Somewhat ironically it now survives best in its native habitat, which was most commonly riverbanks and bottomlands, although it is found in upland areas. It is not that uncommon to be driving along a country road in upstate New York and suddenly see the characteristic vase shape beside the road. As long as the tree is isolated from others of its kind, it stands a change of reaching a good size and old age.

American elm seeds

Even in areas where Dutch elm diseases exists new elms often grow. Unlike the chestnut, the elm seeds are samaras and dispersed great distances by the wind. Once the seed germinates, elms grow much more quickly than chestnuts and tolerate a much broader range of physical environments. So, although they will not reach impressive size, they will reproduce several times before dying.

Unlike chestnut wood, which was good for almost anything, elm wood was good for very little. Entire houses could be built of chestnut, but even splitting elm for firewood was difficult and annoying. It was first and foremost a piece of living sculpture and people miss it in its living state, not for the usefulness of its parts.