May 2011 Archives

There's some pretty cool stuff under all those gorgeous green leaves! Because that one little leaf broke off in the rain, I can actually get a good look at the stem below.

Yesterday, I showed you a picture of the cluster of leaves growing at the very tip of the twig closest to my living room window.



This cluster seems to be growing really strong. It doesn't have any other leaves blocking its sunlight and it doesn't seem to mind a few aphids having an occasional snack. Since I noticed last week that the leaves I'd been measuring seemed to stop growing, I decided to start measuring these leaves instead. I chose to watch the development of the newest and smallest pair. My first measurement was done on May 23rd, when the littlest leaf measured 1 1/2".



After some impressive rain storms that night, I awoke the next morning to find that only one half of the leaf pair was still there! Oh no.

Last week when I peeked out my window to check on the progress of the leaves on my twig, I noticed that several of them were curled and twisted.

It's the most wonderful time of the (school) year... field trip time!

My daughter and I have visited the Chihuly exhibit at the MFA Boston three times already, but I still can't wait to go back and see it again. It is amazing what he and his fellow artists can do with glass! Many of the forms Chihuly creates are evocative of organic forms in nature such as trees and flowers. So, I thought today, we'd take a field trip to the MFA to see some of these incredible artworks.

The first of Chihuly's works that you see is in the new atrium. It's an awe-inspiring 42 foot high Lime Green Icicle Tower, which looks like the most beautiful cactus you've ever seen. Except it's made of glass!

Okay, so you know the leaves I've been watching? They've stopped growing. Oh, all the other leaves are growing, just not the two I'm measuring. What up with that?!

Here we go. Middle leaf, May 18th: 2 1/8".

My tree may still look sparse from across the street, but the view from inside my window is filling up with green!

Here was my view of (and through) one section of the tree back on February 15th.

As we know, my ash tree is a boy. He's made his pollen-y flowers and I'm guessing he's all done with his part in the flower-fruit-seed process. Since he doesn't have much to tell me about the other half of the process, I thought I'd take a walk down the street and visit the girl ash tree to see what she's up to.

When I last took some pictures of her flowers (on May 3rd), they looked like little green tadpoles - round head, skinny tail - with curly tongues coming out of them - which I assume was some female flower part reaching out to catch pollen.

Back in February, I took a walk through the neighborhood to look at trees. I saw interesting bark and different types of buds and a lot of snow. This weekend, we had our first non-rainy day in about two weeks, so I popped the camera in my pocket and set off on a springtime neighborhood tree walk.

I spotted the kooky honey locusts, finally starting to green.



And discovered a group of birds flitting about in them. Apparently, they do not find the twisted, gnarled twigs as spooky looking as I do.



Speaking of birds, I spotted this in a tree by our parking space.



A nest!



I haven't seen any birds around it yet, but the car has been covered with their droppings in the last couple of weeks. I actually get kind of excited each time I come to the car and see new bird poop on it. I start searching up in the trees to see if the birds have returned to their nest!

The trees by our parking space are an interesting bunch. There's the Norway maple that I've been watching and the tree with the incredibly long roots. The root tree looks almost bare among its green neighbor trees.



But if you follow the branches up, they end in lovely orange-y leaves.



I have no idea what kind of tree it is. It seems to have compound leaves similar to my tree's, but they're so high that I can't distinguish any of the details.

Closer to the kids' school, there is another tree that has intrigued me for the last couple of weeks. I don't know what kind it is either, but it has heart-shaped leaves all along every branch.



I have to admit that I originally thought leaves would come out everywhere on a tree, but now that I've looked closer at trees, I can see that they are usually on the tips of the branches, leaving the bark bare. This tree, with its almost vine-like covering of leaves, reminds me of an extremely hirsute man with hair where it shouldn't be. Each of those leaves is directly attached to the branch with one stem. The tree seems to have no need for twigs at all!

Another tree that amazes me is this one, with enormous leaves the length and shape of my foot and huge clusters of flowers that hold themselves straight up on the twig.



The flowers have pretty little red and yellow dots in the center.



I think this might be a Horse chestnut tree. It is magnificent.

On my way back home, I was surprised by the full canopy on this ash tree just a block away from my house.

This week I went looking for a book to help me answer some of my questions about the keys on my maple tree. I found From Seed to Maple Tree by Laura Purdie Salas, which is one book in a series of books for kids on different life cycles, including From Seed to Apple Tree, From Seed to Pine Tree, From Caterpillar to Butterfly, and From Tadpole to Frog.

On May 3rd, I started watching a small leaf develop on the twig closest to my window. Back then, there were two pairs of leaves in the cluster (each only about 3/4" long!) and -- something I hadn't noticed before -- also a thin bundle of green in the center.



That little bundle in the center has now developed into a new pair of leaves in the cluster.



I wonder how many pairs of leaves are going to be in one cluster. How many leaves can there be in there?!

Let's start at the beginning. Twelve days ago I discovered a new leaf cluster just starting to open. On that day, there were two leaves (each about 1/4" long) and a pair of smaller microleaves. 



I think these little microleaves are the "wings" I'd noticed stretching out the buds when leaves first started to appear on my tree in April.



I don't think these have developed into leaves. Maybe they're like the strange leaves that I saw on my son's bean plant that came out first but didn't ever turn into true leaves.


bottom right: the lighter, poorly formed "leaves" that appeared first

The book A Seed is Sleepy also showed these strange first leaves on a bean plant at 4 weeks.



I think these are cotyledons, which are sort of embryonic leaves. So, these may be a kind of starter leaf for the plant.

Sure enough, twelve days later, those microleaves haven't developed at all, while the other leaves have almost tripled in length. 



But look! In the very center there is another little tiny green tongue starting to peek out! Will that be another bundle for another pair of leaves??

When I look at the largest leaf I've been watching, I can see that it is in a cluster with five pairs of leaves.



When I started watching it, it had three pairs and a small bundle in the center.



Looking really closely at the newest set of leaves, I noticed something else...



They look like little buds right at the spots where the leaf stems branch off of the main shoot.

There are no more maple flowers to be found on the Norway maples around our house. At the beginning of the month, I noticed that as the leaves were starting to grow, the flowers were dropping and turning into the little winged helicopter keys we associate with maples. Now, in the middle of May, there are only maple keys hiding under the large canopy of leaves.

This spring, I've been watching the slow awakening of deciduous trees, you know, the trees that lose their leaves in the fall and grow them back in the spring. But there are some trees that stay green all year round: conifers. Back in my second post, I mentioned that all I know about conifers I learned from They Might Be Giants. I knew that conifers didn't lose their needles in the fall, but I hadn't really thought about what happens to them in the spring. Until last week, when I walked by some bushes and noticed that they had developed bright little light green tips.

When we last checked in on our leaf, on May 8th, it measured 1 1/2" long. On the 10th, it was just shy of 1 3/4".



On May 12th, it measured just over 1 3/4".



And on May 14th, almost 2".

I wonder who has been munching on my tree's leaves?

This Saturday's storybook is Poetrees by Douglas Florian. I love Florian's many books of poems and drawings for children! They are usually themed around a type of animal (like his Insectlopedia and Dinothesaurus) and contain brief, witty and often insightful poems accompanied by colorful and evocative paintings. I wondered if Florian had ever done a book on trees, so I looked online and, sure enough, he did, just last year!

Large.



Small.



Boy.



Girl.



Up.



Down.



Closed.



Open.



Early.



Late.



Before.

Last week, I noticed that my tree has compound leaves, which means that each leaf is made up of several leaflets. In fact, I said that each leaf was made up of seven leaflets because the leaves that came out first all seemed to all have 7 (as seen in this picture from May 1st).



So I thought my tree was a 7-tree, making leaves with 7 leaflets. I don't think that anymore. As I've been measuring specific leaves on my tree, I've noticed something. Let's take a look at a picture from May 3rd, when I started measuring leaves.

As we saw yesterday, the leaves on my tree are growing longer, about 1/8" per day. While I was wondering about the growth of the leaves, I was also wondering about the shoots. Are they also getting taller? I mean, the branch is supposed to get longer each year, right? So, can I figure out how much taller it's growing? Let's see...

Since the flowers have fallen off my tree and the leaves have started growing, it just doesn't seem like anything very dramatic is going on out there anymore. It's a little greener; it's a little leafier. But how much greener is the tree each day? How much leafier?

In order to answer this question, I chose a leaf to measure regularly to see how fast it was growing. I looked back at the pictures I'd taken of other leaves and noticed that I'd actually caught a glimpse of this leaf as it started opening on April 29th.



I started measuring the leaf four days later. (Note that this requires a precarious balancing act of me hanging out the window dangling a camera and a measuring tape 15 feet above the sidewalk, so it's a little imprecise. But I think the growth is significant enough for me to get an idea of how fast things are happening.)

Good morning! It's a beautiful sunny day here in Brookline and every tree I can see from my window is covered in green leaves! It's a perfect day to celebrate trees with a story. Today we'll read about some famous trees in Celebritrees: Historic and Famous Trees of the World by Margi Preus.



Celebritrees is a cute book about famous trees from all over the world (and beyond!). It starts with a little introduction: "Trees are the oldest, biggest, and tallest living organisms on earth.... Here are fourteen Celebritrees, trees so beloved they have earned names for themselves.... Each tree has a story to tell."



The first tree is Methuselah, "the oldest known single living organism on earth." Preus tells us that at 4,800 years old, it has seen over 1.75 million sunrises and was already 2,000 years old when the work on the Great Wall of China began! That's old. In order to protect the tree, there are no pictures of it. It lives in a grove of many similar trees and is not identified.

Next up is "the biggest inhabitant of earth," the giant sequoia General Sherman. (Follow this link to see a picture that really gives you a sense of how enormous the tree is!) 

Although Brookline's town tree inventory says that only about 4% of the town's street trees are ash trees, there are about 10 of them in the two blocks around our house.


my tree with three more ashes across the street

A few weeks after I first started to watch my tree, I began to suspect that these other trees were the same kind of tree as mine. Once my tree started to produce its little purple flowers however, I became doubtful. Only about half of the trees I'd identified as also being ash trees had these flowers. The others seemed to be growing some other kind of leafy something, most likely a totally different kind of flower. But now that the true leaves have started to grow on all these trees, I can see that they are indeed all ash trees. So why the different flowers?

To explain, I have to return to the mystery of the sticky burrs (those crazy brown popcorn-looking balls that I had originally spotted on a few of the other ashes and then discovered on my tree). The sticky burrs turned out to be galls, which are growths caused by a tiny mite that lays its eggs in the male ash tree flowers. Some ash trees, like mine, produce only male flowers. The male flowers are the purple pollen-producing clusters that were all over my tree.



Down the street, there is an ash tree that has entirely different looking flowers. The bark on this tree is the same as mine. The leaves are the same. The structure of the twigs and the pattern of growth are all the same. The only difference is the flowers.



These have to be the female flowers! They are like long fingers reaching out to catch the pollen on tiny red tips.

 

Another sign that this is a female ash tree is the fact that there are no droppings under this tree like there are under the male ash trees. The male trees like mine have recently shaken off all of their pollen-laden flowers and covered the sidewalks beneath them with little brown tree poops.


male ash tree surrounded by droppings

But if there are no pollen-producing flowers on this female tree, where does she get pollen for fertilization? Well... from the tree in the very next sidewalk cutout: a big all-male ash tree. Awwww, they're a couple!



After I discovered this little couple, I decided to take a closer look at the ash trees right around mine (there are 5 directly across the street). You can spot the female right away from how clean the sidewalk is beneath her. She's the one without a ring of poopy-looking flowers underneath her.



But here's the really fascinating thing. Of the five ashes across the street, 2 are boys like mine, there's the 1 girl in the middle, and the other two trees are -- get this! -- both.



They have obvious male flower clusters still hanging on some of their twigs but they also have tons of the finger-like female flowers. How cool is that?! I've said this before, but it bears repeating: trees are weird.

(I found this website really helpful in identifying the different ash tree flowers.)

One week ago, Bud - the little maple tree in front of our house - was just starting to sprout leaves. I was surprised to see them come out of the same buds that had produced all the fabulous tiny green flowers.

Now that they are finally here, just what do my tree's leaves look like?

Since I've been watching the leaves open up on my tree, I've been feeling a little disappointed because I haven't really felt like there was that much change going on. The leaves aren't becoming exponentially larger each day or anything. But then I realized that the leaves were moving farther and farther away from the tips of the twigs.

When the buds began to open last week, they were coming right out of the terminal buds on the tips of the twigs. Look at how they were stretching the bud open!

This week, instead of Saturday story time, we have Sunday game day! We're playing Max, a cute little co-operative game for kids 4 and up.



My daughter got this game for her 4th birthday and the whole party ran off to play the game as soon as she'd unwrapped it.



Max is a cat, sleeping on his mat on the porch. At the tree stump a few steps away, three little critters -- a chipmunk, a mouse and birdie -- have just noticed Max. And Max has just noticed them. The goal of the game is for the kids to get all three critters to the safety of the big tree before Max gets them!



On your turn, you roll two dice. Each green dot lets you move one of the critters one space toward the tree and each black dot lets Max move one space closer to the critters. You can see the problem here: three critters to move, but just one Max. He sneaks up on them very quickly. 



When things get dicey for one of the critters, the kids can decide to put a yummy treat out on the porch for Max, which lures him back home so he has to start from the beginning again. But there are only four treats available to tempt Max back to the start. Once they're gone, there's no stopping Max.

The game is full of simple logical decisions for kids to make: which critter would be best to move now? how close can Max get before we have to send him back? Sometimes a critter has to be sacrificed to save the others, but more often than not, the kids get the satisfaction of seeing all the cute critters arrive safely in the tree. And there is much rejoicing.