June 2011 Archives

"Up in the sky, look! It's a plane. It's a bird. It's Ailanthus!"

The ailanthus tree by our parking space is clearly some sort of super tree.

"Faster than a speeding bullet!"

The new green shoot - that I estimated was 1 1/2 feet high on June 7th - has doubled in height in three weeks.



"More powerful than a locomotive!"

There are also two entire new plants that have somehow managed to grow right out of the concrete on the side of the house.


"Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!"

These new shoots are all the way on the other side of the two-car parking area from the tree by the way. The seeds must have been dropped there from the huge canopy above. The tree is dropping its flowers now in fact, covering the ground (and the cars) with pollen.



"Smellier that cat pee!"

You might recall that I learned from Wikipedia that the male pollen-producing ailanthus flowers smell like cat pee. Well now our whole parking area smells like that. And the car. I like to think that this is all for some higher purpose.

"And who, disguised as a mild mannered and stinky tree in a great metropolitan city, fights the never ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way."

I wonder what its Kryptonite is?

I've spent the last several days packing for our summer trip to Germany to visit the in-laws. We have suitcases everywhere! So it seemed appropriate today to read  A Fruit Is a Suitcase for Seeds for our Saturday story time.

I've been wondering about the oak trees. They were late to start developing leaves. Well, later than my ash tree and the maple trees. But I did notice when they got their flowers and leaves and began littering the ground with their pollen in May (a couple of weeks after my tree dropped all of its flowers). Unfortunately for me, however, the oak trees in the neighborhood are quite a bit higher than the other trees. I haven't been able to get a good look at their leaves or twigs or anything! Then on Monday, Mother Nature helped out once again by leaving a fallen oak twig right on my path to the boys' school. You know what happened next (anyone keeping count of how many of these things I've dragged home so far? I hope not.)

So let's take a closer look at an oak tree, shall we?

It's only the second day of summer and already the leaves on my tree are starting to look old.

The new buds on the green sections of the twigs are amazing.



They're really starting to look like the buds that were on the twigs back in February.



I wonder how much longer they'll continue to grow. One thing that seems to be happening is that they are becoming completely brown (like the buds above). Many of the terminal buds still actually look like this:

 

It was just a matter of time until I got around to this one... today's storybook is the save-the-trees classic from Dr. Suess, The Lorax.



Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that this is not my favorite Dr. Seuss book. I don't remember ever reading it as a kid and it seems a little overly preachy to me reading it now. But then again, my favorite Seuss book was The Sneetches, whose story about having "stars upon thars" is no less preachy than the Lorax, so I'm not going to quibble. Plus, I never could resist a good Seuss rhyme!

The Lorax has this long, strange, dark opening where a young boy discovers the home of the Once-ler at the far end of town and tries to get him to tell his story. The Once-ler's story is the history of this desolate place "where the wind smells slow-and-sour...and no birds ever sing except old crows." As the Once-ler begins his tale, the landscape is transformed into a place full of color and fantastical Seuss creations: "It all started way back... Way back in the days when the grass was still green.... And I first saw the trees! The Truffula Trees!"

School's almost out, which means we have just enough time to squeeze in one last field trip! Today we're off to the Arnold Arboretum, which is only about 10 minutes away from us. We'll be back in time for lunch!

The arboretum has some fun family activities including their Tree-of-the-Month program which we'll be focusing on today. Each month, they pick a tree species, put together a little handout about it, and hide a letterbox by one of those trees somewhere in the arboretum. The handout provides directions which lead you past other interesting sites and then to the letterbox tree. If you don't know what letterboxing is, don't worry; neither did I! It's sort of like geocaching. Someone hides a box in a public place like a park and lists its location in a directory. Inside the box, there is a rubber stamp and a notepad. If you have your own stamp, you stamp it in the notepad and add your name to the list of folks who have found the box. Then you can stamp the letterbox stamp in your own notepad to keep track of where you've been. The letterboxing makes the hunt for the tree of the month very exciting for kids. My own daughter couldn't wait to go looking for "the box tree"!

This month's tree is the Japanese stewartia.



The directions on the handout told us that to find the letterbox tree, we first had to walk down Linden Path.



Initially we found oak trees along the path, but then we came to the lindens. I know nothing about lindens so I only knew we'd found them by looking at the tags on the trees.



Every tree in the arboretum is labeled with a cool tag like this. It tells the species of the tree, how old the tree is (did you know there are over 700 trees in the arboretum that are 100 years old or more?!), and information about where it came from. This tag told me that this tree was a Bigleaf linden. It was, however, very little.



A few steps farther on the path led us to a Littleleaf linden that was very big.



Neat.

The Linden Path ended at the Shrub and Vine Garden where my daughter fell in love with the wisteria archways.



She kept calling them lilacs and they did look like lilacs with their clustered, purpley flowers.



But the cool tag told me they were wisteria. And a close-up look revealed that these flowers are quite different from the lilac flowers I've seen in the neighborhood. Instead of blooming on branches that grow up, these are in bundles that hang down. And instead of flowers that are open, these are funny little folded up tube-like flowers. So wisteria is not a lilac, but don't try to tell my daughter that.

After our trip through the Shrub and Vine Garden, we were back on the main path and were directed to a Japanese stewartia across from a bench.



We recognized it from the mottled looking bark that the handout told us to look out for. But we still checked for the tag. (Note: it's very helpful to have a small person to help you find the tree tags!)



Bingo! The directions told us to continue past this stewartia to the dogwood tree behind it. Well, that could only be this one:



Look at those amazing flowers! It's like it's covered in snow or something. Fabulous. But we must continue on to the letterbox tree, my daughter reminds me. Okay, the directions say 15 more steps and we'll find another stewartia with the box.

I'm amazed at how the branches on my tree continue to become fuller and fuller, filling out the empty space with more and more leaves. Here's how one branch obscured the view of houses across the street on May 23rd:



The foliage was a little thicker six days later on May 29th.



On June 7th, there was even more green, especially close to the camera, encroaching on my view of the branch.

I have ash tree fruit literally falling at my feet!



My daughter and I spotted this branch lying in the street right in front of our car. That side of the street is home to a large maple tree and a male ash tree (like mine), but I quickly noticed that this was a female ash tree with twigs full of developing fruit. The only female ash tree around is all the way across the main street. I don't know how this branch got over to me, except perhaps that it knew that I would be the only person in the neighborhood who would be thrilled to find it lying there!

My daughter helped hold it up so I could take a few pictures of it. (Can you find her in there? She was very helpful this time, but she is getting a little tired of my enthusiasm for trees. When we are out walking, I'll often stop and point out something interesting about a tree. She will look inquisitively and listen thoughtfully and then say worriedly, "Don't take a picture of the tree!" A few days ago, she was telling daddy that she was a very nice girl. Her proof: "I let mommy take pictures of trees." Passers-by were confused.)

 

So anyway, look at all that fruit!! We snapped off a small twig so we could bring it home and take a closer look at the fruit.  

I was away over the weekend, so we're having a special edition of Saturday story time on Monday. And on a special note: this is my 100th post here on the tree blog! We're only in mid-June and still have summer and fall to see, so I hope we'll have a hundred more posts before this blog has run its course. But now, on to the story...

This week's story, A Tree Is Nice by Janice May Udry and illustrated by Marc Simont, won the Caldecott Medal in 1957. It looks at trees from a child's perspective, explaining their appeal in a child's terms. Why do we like trees, the book asks. Well, trees are nice.

Remember the beautiful flowers of the horse chestnut tree down the street?



I walk by the tree when I bring my kids to school each morning and pick them up every afternoon. After having seen how quickly other trees had lost their flowers, I'd been watching the lovely blooms of this tree to see how long they'd last and what would happen next. Early this month, the tree began losing its flowers.



But, interestingly, just the red ones. While the flowers with red centers were shriveling up and falling off, forming piles under the tree, those with yellow centers were still on their stems. The white petals with their eyelash-like thingies were falling away, leaving only yellow-green balls with a single filament sticking out. Five days later, there were no more signs of the red flowers at all.



So, are these the female flowers? Is this the fruit developing? You know, I've seen pictures of chestnuts where the spiny outer casing is green, just like these little things.



Are these little flower centers the beginning of chestnuts? They sure look like it!

Well, after a couple of days, the twig I found on the ground and brought in the other day has started to look pretty sad. With the leaves drying out and curling up, I found myself noticing the twig itself more and remembered that I could tell how much a twig had grown each year by looking for the rings or knuckles (they're actually scars from the old terminal bud).



The current growth ends at the tip (the top circle) and goes down to where the green stem ends. That's the first ring on the twig. Going down to the second ring, we can see that last year's growth was just a bit more than the twig managed to grow this year before it was blown off of the tree. The two previous years both look to have been years with smaller growth. And then, four years ago, the growth was much bigger. I recall that when I looked for rings on my twig before, I noticed that the growth from four years ago - 2007 - was like three times a long as the other years. I remember looking up the weather for that year and seeing that it was one of the warmest years on record. Having noticed the same growth pattern on this twig, I thought I'd take a closer look at the temperature that spring. I looked up the high temperatures from April 18th, when I first spotted green tips sprouting from the terminal buds on my tree, through June 9th for 2007 (blue) and 2011 (red). I made a little graph so I could see exactly how much warmer 2007 was than this year.



You can see that there are barely any points where the 2011 graph is above that of 2007. And it looks like it was significantly warmer for a long period in early May of 2007. From watching the development of my tree, I'd guess that that is a key period for early leaf and shoot development. That might account for the difference. But still, 2011 doesn't look too bad actually. I wonder if 2011 could end up being a big growth year after all. Who says these stems are done growing?

I snapped a picture of the twig closest to my living room window so I could compare the new growth this year with the previous year's growth. 



This year's growth ends where the green ends and last year's growth ends at the ring at the bottom of the picture. Judging from the photo, I'd say it hasn't yet grown as much as it did last year. 

June started with a big storm. The tree was whipped up against the window over and over and the boys stayed up to watch the lightning. In the morning, we noticed that a broken branch was hanging off of the little sycamore tree down the street and found twigs from my tree littering the ground. I brought a couple of twigs from my tree inside to study more closely. (I've never taken anything off of my tree - I just couldn't bring myself to destroy even a tiny piece - so I was kind of excited about being "allowed" to take these inside to examine.)



This twig was so interesting because all of leaves its leaves are squashed together pointing in the same direction. They weren't open like the leaves I see from my window. I wonder if this branch might have actually been hanging upside down? Whether they were pointing up or down or were crowded on one side, the leaves have clearly grown this way. Looking at the stem, I can see that instead of having the leaf stems grow in truly opposite directions, each one curves over in the one direction.



This view of the twig also provides a great look at the current growth. The new growth is the green stem at the end of the twig. Look at all that that's shot out of the twig in the last month and a half! This twig also has a tiny twiglet branching off of it with proportionally smaller growth.

The new stems on the tree seem to be similar, with larger twigs having more growth. Here's another tiny twiglet:



 And some longer growth on a larger twig:


The longest growth I can see from my window is on a twig I can't reach. It looks to have grown about 4" so far this spring!



Impressive.

Well, it seems impressive until you walk by the Ailanthus. Wanna see how much it's grown this spring?
That's about a foot and a half so far! Dang.

PS - In the same four months, my boys have each grown 3/4".

Time to check in with our girl down the street to see how she's doing with our ash tree fruit. (You may recall that the tree I'm watching is a male tree, so I have to visit the female tree on the next block to watch this part of the process.) On May 21st, I was able to spot a few of the female flowers just beginning to grow long leaf-like fruit.

Story time is back! After last week's field trip to the art museum, I thought it would be nice to read Sky Tree: Seeing Science Through Art by Thomas Locker.



In the his introduction, Locker explains, "Through storytelling, art appreciation, and scientific exploration, Sky Tree attempts to reach both the heart and the mind." The following pages depict the same tree in the same location, but as the sky and the seasons change, the scene is transformed.

It all begins with a tree alone on a hill in the summertime.



Locker asks, "When you look at this painting...can you remember how you felt on a perfect summer day?" He poses one question on each page to help kids think about how the painting makes them feel about the tree or the sky or the seasons. He encourages kids to really look at and experience the paintings, rather than just say, hey there's the tree again. (And isn't that what we do when we see trees every day: we walk on past without really looking at them?)



"What makes this painting different?" asks Locker. How has the tree changed? How has the sky changed? How would it feel to stand under this tree now? What do you think is going to happen next?



"Is the tree dying?" he asks. No, it's just losing its leaves like so many trees do in the fall. "Why does this painting make you feel sad?" Locker wonders. It is sad to see the leaves falling from the tree leaving only bare twigs behind, but we know they'll be back just like we know that spring and summer will be back. In time.



"How does this painting capture the stillness of a snowy day?" I love the quiet after a snowstorm when there no cars on the road and footsteps are silent in the snow. Don't you? I also love it when icicles form around the branches turning sleeping trees into crystal sculptures. 



"How does this painting show that winter is ending?" Like the painting on the cover of the book, Locker really plays with the outline of the tree on the sky here. Although the tree is bare, the clouds behind it blocking the sun suggest the leaves that will soon be there to make shade for a picnic.



"Does this painting make you feel hopeful?" The sunrise here is beautiful. In the back of the book Locker briefly discusses each of the paintings. For this one he says, "This painting almost makes you squint." It's so true! It reminds me of studying my tree this spring. Looking up at the early leaves, I had to squint to see the new tiny bits of green in the bright sun. 



"Now the tree is full and round again." The tree has returned to the way it was on that first summer day. But is the picture exactly the same? Is the tree exactly the same from year to year? I wonder what has changed. How have you changed in the last year?

The final painting in the book is called the sunset tree. Locker uses it to talk about the connection between the tree and the sky, asking kids to think about why the book is called Sky Tree. The tree is painted entirely in shadow, so the focus shifts to the sky and its brilliant colors, full of light and power and magic.  



There's one more amazing image of trees and sky that you have to see! Check out Frans Lanting's photo of Camel Thorn trees from a recent issue of National Geographic. The surreal orange sky makes the photo look like a painting! This article talks about the photo and contains more stunning images from the same photographer. And there are even more photos of the beautifully strange landscapes in Namibia's Namib-Naukluft National Park here. (Thanks to Paul for the link!)

I think I have figured out the identity of the mystery tree with the enormous roots and reddish compound leaves that towers over the other trees by our parking space.



It turns out to be an Ailanthus tree (or Tree of Heaven). We looked at a twig from this type of tree in my science class (the class that got me started writing this blog). Our instructor described it as a "kindergarten tree," because all of its features are very large, making it easy to observe the typical characteristics of a twig. Look at those enormous leaf scars!



I had noticed this skinny Ailanthus twig growing near our parking spot between the tree with the nest in it and the one with the enormous roots. But it wasn't until I recognized that the leaves on that twig were the same as those on the tall tree with the enormous roots, that I realized that the larger tree must also be an Ailanthus tree. 



In fact, I think the smaller twigs may really just be suckers from the larger tree. Tree suckers are also called basal shoots (as if anyone would choose to use that term over sucker!) and are new shoots that develop from the base of a tree. And sure enough, that's just where these twigs are coming from.



These suckers can grow to become entire new trees, sometimes even competing with the original tree for nutrients and light (although often a tree will produce suckers when the main tree is damaged, sort of as a replacement).

Now, Ailanthus is kind of known as a weed tree. It likes to take over an area, both below (with large roots, as we've seen) and above (by growing taller than its surrounding trees and blocking their sunlight - hmmm, seen that too). Suckers are another way that this tree can take over. The wikipedia description reads like a observation of my tree: "suckers that can damage pavements" - check; "capable of forming thick blankets of roots" - check; "the male flowers have a strong odour [which] tends to resemble the smell of strong cat urine or the spray of a male cat" - oh my, is that what I smell in the car sometimes on particularly pollen-y days? That's from that tree?!

 So I'm convinced, but a check on my favorite site, What Tree is It?, confirms my identification.

The more the leaves on my tree grow, the more apparent it is how many of the branches are dead.



The branches on the top left of the picture are the ones I often take a photo of to follow how the tree fills out. But right below them are a whole bunch of dead branches. They've never had any buds. They've never changed. They're the lowest branches on the tree (about 8 feet up). Are they dangerous? Could they break off more easily? Should someone prune them? Could that actually help the tree?

What really surprised me, however, is how many of the branches in the crown are dead.



That just makes me sad.

I don't remember much from the time when I was in elementary school, but one thing I do remember is when we'd get a quiz that was right off the ditto machine. It was usually slightly damp,with that faded bluish type, and had that strong ditto smell. Dittos seemed so fresh and clean and homemade.


picture from Popthomology

This memory provides a stark contrast to my memory of tests in college, where we used computerized, paper-cut inducing, buy-your-own-and-bring-them-on-test-day scantron sheets.