March 2011 Archives

This is not a race, but still, I'm rooting for my tree to stay in the lead!

So here's how the buds looked yesterday after many cold and windy days:



And here's how the same bud cluster looked three days ago:

My kids and I stopped by the Olmsted site yesterday to see the Olmsted Elm one last time before they took it down. (See my post from yesterday for more information on the tree.) We were instructed to stay at least 20 feet away from the trunk for our safety.

Recent articles in the Boston Globe and our local Brookline Tab have reported that a historic elm tree will soon be cut down on the grounds of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic site.



The tree is estimated to be 200 years old, but has been struggling with Dutch Elm disease for a long time. In the past few months, it has become clear that the tree is in decline and could be a danger to the house or visitors. So it will be cut down on Wednesday. The National Park Service website says that a clone of the tree will be grown and planted in its place when it is large enough. The Olmsted Elm has its own Facebook page. And there's an info page on the tree's history and significance to the site. (For example, in County Essex in England, where the Olmsted family originated, the name "Olmsted" is a variation of "Elmsted," meaning "place of the elms," therefore the elm was a special tree for Olmsted.)

Frederick Law Olmsted is considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, designing New York City's Central Park along with the Emerald Necklace here in Boston. His home was here in Brookline and is a popular destination for school field trips. In fact, my twin boys went on a series of field trips in 3rd grade during a unit on Boston history which included Fenway park, the Freedom Trail, a local beach and the Olmsted site. And guess which one was their favorite. You just can't top nature at its finest!

Back at the branch...

There's not much change to report. Here's how the buds looked on Saturday.



And here's how the same bud cluster looked this morning.



Hmmmm. It's been mighty cold 'round here, so I guess these buds are waiting until spring returns to send out any more purple stuff.

Elsewhere... I walked by some trees that I'd snapped some pictures of a couple of weeks ago. Back then, I took a tiny twig I'd found from a baby tree and was examining its structure.



Well, this morning, it's fellow twiggies still on the tree look like this.

It's story time once again. Today we're celebrating upcoming Natonal Poetry Month by reading The Tree That Time Built, a collection of poetry about nature (and trees) collected by US Children's Poet Laureate, Mary Ann Hoberman.



The book is divided into multiple chapters, each with a theme like animals, the sea, and trees.



There are classic poems.



And new ones (many of which you can listen to on the accompanying CD).



There are poems that speak about the magic of trees.



And poems that speak to kids about their role in the natural world.



My favorite tells how a simple tree can inspire poetry.



Take some time to read some poetry in April. Or study a tree. It's the same thing.

If you'd like to bring some more poetry into your classroom or into your children's lives, check out Mary Ann Hoberman reading from her favorite poetry collections or follower her on twitter, and check out poetry.org's tips for teachers.

My tree has antlers! A few weeks after I started watching my tree, I noticed that there are two young twigs growing out of the main trunk about 7 feet up and 5 feet below the main branches. They look just like antlers!



Now that I know how to look at a twig to see how old it is, I thought I'd see exactly how old these silly tree antlers are.



(Click to see a bigger version.) From counting the rings that mark the terminal bud scars, I'm estimating that this twig antler has been growing for about eight years. Which means that these antlers started to grow around the same year we moved in!

So is anything growing on these antlers?



Yes siree. They have the same buds as the twigs above, only they're a little smaller and a little darker. It looks like that one in the center is just on the brink of opening up though.

Another twiglet off of one of the antlers has even smaller buds, but one of them has definitely opened. I see those purple dots in there!



It'll be interesting to watch these twigs that are so much closer to the ground. How is life different for them down here? 

Fun fact: Did you know that you can tell the age of a goat by counting the rings on its horns? A deer's antlers, however, are actually very different from horns and fall off and regrow every year!

So just how far did the little purple things grow in two (rather chilly, rather cloudy) days? Here are some pictures I got on Tuesday.

Today I looked for terminal bud scars on my twig. (See my last post for some info on these.)

Here's a little tree I walk past every day as I walk my boys to school.



It was planted last year after the tree that used to be here was finally removed (it hadn't been growing new leaves for a couple of years). The tree is just so darn cute! And it's short enough that I can reach up and grab hold of a twig to get closer look. So I did just that. After about 5 minutes of observing and taking the following pictures, the owner of the house next to the tree called out the window: "Hey, Alison, what'cha doin' out there?" Oops, busted.



It was so worth it though. Just look at those fabulous oval peachy red buds! Beneath each of the buds is a little scar from where the leaf from the last season fell off. And that's where the new bud grows. Talk about healing! If you look at the bottom of that tiny stem the three little buds are on, you can see some gray ridges. My teacher tells me that that's where the growth from the previous season ended. It's a scar made from the new bud pushing out of the tip there. (I noticed a bud on my tree the other day that had me asking this very question!) If we look down the length of the twig to find the next set of gray rings, we can see how far this twig grew last year.



I think this gray bump above this sentence might be it. Wow. I don't even know what kind of tree this is, but it seems to me that that's pretty good growth for such a little tree.

Now let's look at an amazing twig I found on the ground at the kids' school. This twig was so long and so green, I had to take some pictures of it. And it had the coolest buds! They're sort of fuzzy. I'm a sucker for fuzzy buds!



And, lookie, it has those growth scars as well.



One more twig to investigate before we return home. This one caught my eye because the very tips of the buds looked like they might be green. Leaves, maybe???



I've got a lot of questions about these types of buds. Is that a leaf? And if it is, is the whole leaf in there all folded and wrapped up already? And how does that brown part of the bud get wrapped around it like a screw? I love that there is something so perfectly wrapped and shaped like that in nature.

Anyhoo, the twig...

And right on time, the swollen buds from three days ago have started to open!!

It's Saturday and you know what that means on the tree blog: story time.

Today we're reading Planting the Trees of Kenya by Claire Nivola. This is the story of Wangari Maathai, environmental and political activist, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 (the first African woman to ever win the prize).



The story begins with the beautiful picture on the cover: "As Wangari Matthaai tells it, when she was growing up on a farm in the hills of central Kenya, the earth was clothed in its dress of green."



"The fig tree was sacred then."

She went to study Biology in America. (She came to America through the same program that helped President Barack Obama's father come to America.)



But when she returned, things had changed. "Wangari found the fig tree cut down....Where once there had been little farms growing what each family needed...now almost all the farms were growing crops to sell....She saw that where once there had been richly wooded hills with grazing cows and goats, now the land was almost treeless....Without trees there were no roots to hold the soil in place....Rain washed the loose earth into the once-clear streams....'We have no clean drinking water,' the women of the countryside complained."



"Wangari was not one to complain. She wanted to do something....'When we see we are a part of the problem,' she said, 'we can become part of the solution.'" She taught the women how to find tree seeds and plant them, "growing seedlings, as if they were babies."



They planted trees. Millions of them. "Wangari gave seedlings to the schools....She gave seedlings to inmates of prisons and even to soldiers. 'You hold your gun,' she told the soldiers, 'but what are you protecting?'"



"'When the soil is exposed,' Wangari tells us, 'it is crying out for help, it is naked and needs to be clothed in its dress....It needs its cloth of green.'"

Wangari's message is: "Remember what millions of hands can do." And millions of trees.

You can learn more about Wangari Maathai and find the text and video of her Nobel Prize lecture at nobelprize.org. Another excellent resource is a series of podcasts from Public Radio International's "Living on Earth," which aired in 2005 and profiled Maathai and the Green Belt Movement: part 1, part 2, part 3.  

It's warm today (45 degrees F) and it's sunny. I think to myself, what is my tree waiting for? More light. Check. Higher temperatures. Check. So, let's go take a look.

How often do you really look at the bark on a tree? I mean, it's the part of a tree that's right down by us, but  we don't really ever look at it. For example, I'm sure that that horrible decaying scar has been on Bud for a while, but I just noticed it the other day when I was searching for sprouts in the soil. So let's take a closer look at the bark on my tree.



It's kinda grayish brown and is really cracked looking, with deep ridges and furrows. It looks like it's shedding or molting or something. It looks like all that is just going to fall off any minute, but it doesn't. Why is some bark all scaly and flaky and cracky? And check this out: the other side is green!



Wow. Why is all this mossy green growth only on this side? And, um, why is this stuff here in the first place? It's on the limbs too.

And here's the driveway tree that has the amazingly long above-ground roots.



Look at how the fence is bent and broken there. Either the fence had to be built in parts like that to get around that tree or it was built next to the tree and then, as the tree expanded, it bent the fence. The tree next to it has clearly grown into the fence. It even has the crisscross marks from the fence in its bark.



How can this tree be on both sides of the fence? What came first: the tree or the fence? I can't see any remnants of fence in the ridges of the bottom marks, but the top markings definitely have fence wire in them. Is it seriously growing bark around those wires?! 

Hey, how does bark grow anyway? I mean, the trunk adds a ring every year right? And the newer ones are on the outside? So it's not just growing more on the inside and pushing the old bark farther out. Well, maybe it adds the new ring just under the bark. So does that mean that the bark on the outside is the same bark just aging and cracking more and more? Or do trees really shed some of their bark and grow new bark?

Ever optimistic, I ran to my tree to see if there were some sprouts or grass shoots or anything even the remotest bit green around the base of my tree.



Nope. But looking down, I started thinking about the roots. After a tinsy bit of research, I discovered that a tree's roots will extend out far wider than the crown above. To think that all that is down under the sidewalk!



So that's why you sometimes see tree roots coming up above the ground. They're not that deep anyway! I checked the sidewalk cutout around our poor, unfortunate tree on the other side of the house, Bud. No sprouts, but there are some visible roots.



And after parking in our driveway the other day, I noticed these incredibly long visible roots.

After reading Someday a Tree yesterday, I started thinking about poor little Bud, the tree in front of our house with the horrible scar from an old dead branch that broke off. Looking at this picture again, it looks like that dead branch was causing some sort of decay in the main trunk.

Story time, boys and girls. Today, we're reading Someday a Tree by Eve Bunting.



This is a beautiful and sad and sweet story about a little girl and her beloved oak tree.

After watching S's little bean sprout over the last weeks, I've started wondering how my tree buds will sprout. I've been thinking of them as spots where new leaves will just pop out. But is that what happens at the buds? If that's so then when do the branches ever grow longer? Is it possible that new branches will shoot out from the buds, with new leaves off of them? Perhaps the new shoots would even push the bud out along the end, like S's bean sprout keeps part of the bean up at the top.

My tree isn't telling me, so I went searching around the neighborhood for some signs of new growth on other trees and I found some interesting things.



The narrow little branch coming off after the cluster of buds is a lighter, redder color than the rest of the twig. Did that just grow in the last few weeks? It looks really new and young. It's so colorful and smooth. Are those little buds that are all clustered together also growing farther and farther away from that older looking part of the twig?

Apparently, a watched tree never sprouts. Despite my hyper-vigilance, I can detect no sprouting currently going on in my tree. (Frowny face) But there is some sprouting going on in the house! My son, S, is doing a little science experiment. He helped out in my science class (the one I'm writing this blog for) and got to plant a seed and bring it home. He said his seed looks just like "a Mexican jumping bean" and he couldn't wait to see if it would grow. After a week, we spotted this.

Time to check the buds on my tree.

Story time! This week on the tree blog I asked a lot of questions and made some amazing discoveries about the mysterious sticky burrs on my tree, so I thought it'd be appropriate to read a story about a sticky burr. This week's book is a comic book that my two 9 year-old boys love: Sticky Burr: Adventures in Burrwood Forest by John Lechner (which has a sequel Sticky Burr #2: The Prickly Peril).

 

The first book opens with the definition of sticky burr. Finally! I keep using that word because that's what the flower galls in my tree looked like to me, but I couldn't quite say exactly what a sticky burr was.



The story is about one sticky burr in particular, the aptly named Sticky Burr.


Here he is to tell us some more about sticky burrs.



Turns out sticky burrs are prickly in more than one way. They also argue and some of them like to be mean and snag on things to annoy other animals. Sticky Burr, however, is a good burr.

After my declaration on Monday that my tree is an ash tree, I started looking around on the internet for pictures of ash trees and ash tree twigs just to make sure. When I found this photo on the blog of a naturalist photographer, I was sure I had the right thing:



It's the sticky burrs! She called them ash flower galls and said that now that she knew what they were, she was seeing them everywhere. OMG, she knows what they are! Here it was, the mystery of the sticky burrs, almost revealed. Okay, are you ready?!

While examining my tree closely looking for any signs of sticky burrs or new leaves or anything really, I noticed that several of the branches have no buds at all. The tips of all these branches are so barren looking. They look almost broken off at the end.  Are these dead? I wonder if there is any chance that their buds will grow later.



It seems so sad that these dead branches are still hanging on the tree while that broken-off top branch I found in the snow was all covered with buds. I wonder if these have stayed on because they were protected from the wind and storms down here. But did that also mean that they didn't get enough light? Why did they die? And is it bad for the tree to have dead branches hanging on it?

I walked around the tree to get a different look at the dead branches and suddenly noticed two spots on the trunk where it looks like largish limbs must have been cut off of my tree.





And this reminded me of my little half-tree Bud on the other side of the house. So I paid him a visit to get a picture of the part that was dead for so long and then removed last year.



Ugh. That is just plain old wrong looking. It looks like a tree growing out of a tree or almost like the original tree was impaled by this other part. Yikes. Despite having this rather gruesome scar, Bud actually looks fine when he's got all his leaves. He's a sweet little tree.

I wanted to get a picture of the good side of Bud, so I went up on to the balcony and tried to get a photo of the crown.



You can still see the section that was cut off down there, but up here you can also see the pinky/red fleshy sort of buds that are growing on the tips and ends of Bud's twigs. There are a lot fewer buds on Bud than on my tree. Different growths for different folks, I guess. There are also lots of ridges on the twigs around the buds. Hmmm...I wonder what kind of tree Bud is???

During school vacation last week, the kids and I went to the Boston Museum of Science (like everyone else in the Boston area). The kids had a great time learning about nanotechnology and models and Mars rovers. I looked for trees.

Downstairs, right behind the crazy mechanical ball contraption, there is an exhibit about scientific classification. I get to tour this area regularly because the boys need a full half hour to fully appreciate the awesomeness that is the mechanical ball machine. I remembered that there were some tree artifacts in the exhibit, so I started my tree hunt in there.



I was interested in this tree because I already suspected that my tree was an ash tree. (It wasn't until yesterday that I was confident enough to say that my tree is definitely an ash.) This tree lived in Concord and was 165 years old when they had to remove it in 2000. The tree was most likely planted by a farmer back in 1835 because ash trees are particularly good for providing shade and wood.   Because of pollution and soil compaction caused by the expansion of nearby roads, it had begun to weaken and die. It was determined to be a danger to the cars below and was removed. I really liked how they told the tree's story. It makes me think of my ash tree and its life the city. I wonder how it is affected by its environment - a tiny three or four foot square cut out in the sidewalk. I wonder how many times it's had to be pruned and cut back for safety reasons. I wonder how long it will live before it has to be removed (like the trees on the street next to me).

Also in this area was a little theater with the story of an old oak tree. This tree's story was cleverly presented as an "urban mystery." How long has the tree been here? My little girl didn't want to go in to listen to the movie, so I only got a shot of the sign outside, but I'm sure I'll get a chance to hear it another day.