Recently in girls vs. boys Category

Every time I walk or drive down the street, I am amazed at the sight of the three ash trees across from my house. I've started calling them the stoplight trees.


September 23rd

I've been following their progress for a couple of weeks now. The girl ash tree on the left is still way ahead of the other two. Her leaves are mostly orangey-brown and a ton of them have fallen off the tree. The middle tree, which we recall is both male and female, looks just like the girl tree looked two weeks ago. It's leaves are mostly yellow and the fallen leaves are starting to pile up below it.



And the male ash tree on the right has still barely begun.


September 26th

Tomorrow is the first official day of fall, but the maples and the ashes haven't been waiting for the calendar to change. The ashes have been particularly interesting to watch because the changes so far seem to be different for the boy and girl trees. Here's a picture of three ashes across the street.

Last week, I noticed that the girl ash tree across the street was starting to look a little different from the boy ash trees around her. Some of her leaves were lighter. Well, now they are positively yellow!

 
He's the tree I mentioned last time with both female parts (samaras) and male parts (galls). He's got a little color on top, but there's still a marked contrast to the girl next door.

I'm so excited for fall!

The question still remains, what I am going to do now that the men with the pointy sticks have cut down all the branches and twigs from the tree that I've been watching since February. I can't reach any of the twigs on the tree outside the window any more and I can't see anything up close. Fall is coming and I want to watch!

My first thought was to take a look at some of the other ash trees in the neighborhood to see if any of them had some low branches that I could actually reach and examine closely.

Most do not.

But the girl ash tree across the street does have a few branches I can get to.



Interestingly, some of the features on her twigs are quite different from those on the twigs of my boy tree. The first difference I noticed was that this year's growth (the lighter colored bark extending up from the tip of the twig down to the first "knuckle" or ring-like bud scar) is much longer. Like four times as long! I wonder why she managed so much more growth than my tree did. Does it have something to do with the side of the street? Does this side get more sun? Or is this tree maybe healthier? Or is it because it is a female ash tree?

Another thing I noticed was that the developing buds on her twigs are much smaller than they were on my tree's twigs. Just try to find the lateral buds on the female ash tree! The lateral buds should be developing right above the spot where the leaf stem joins to the twig. 



Um, where are they? My tree already had big, fat buds that I speculated were close to being done developing. Look, here's how they looked on July 21st, when we came back from vacation.



See! Is this a boy/girl thing too? I'm thinking it might be. Last week, I picked up a twig that was blown off of another boy ash tree down the street during Hurricane Irene and look at the buds on this guy!



Apparently while the girl ash trees are making like 5,000 samaras and seeds, the boys are developing these big fat buds.



Hmmm, maybe the boy buds and girl buds are just different. I mean the boy buds have to make those flowers and all that pollen, so if the girls don't have to do that, maybe they don't need to make giant buds like this.



Speaking of boy stuff, remember how I found those sticky burr things on my tree way back in February and figured out that they were galls created by tiny mites growing in and feeding on the male ash tree flowers? Well, I never saw any new ones develop on my tree, but during my examination of the other ashes in the neighborhood this week, I discovered that a couple of the other boy ashes developed some new galls this spring.



See how they're green instead of the brown that the galls were on my tree? They're this green color in the season when they first develop. Then they turn brown and stay on the tree for a year or two. It's kinda gross to think that this tree had (has??) tiny bugs in it that made these. Ewwww. I wonder why there were (are??) so many of them on these trees across the street but not on my tree.



One more fascinating thing about this discovery. The tree that I found these on is a boy and a girl tree. Some ashes are like that, producing both girl and boy flowers. So this tree has areas where there are lots of samaras and then also areas like this where there are galls (which develop only in male flowers). And, if you look real close, you can see that the twig that these galls are on has big lateral buds growing right where the leaf stems attach to the tree. Well, I'll be darned!

I've got boys in fifth grade, so I notice these things.

But I'm talking trees. Check this out! The ash trees around the neighborhood are once again revealing their gender. The boy ash trees, like the one on the left of this picture, are still deep green in color, but the girl ash trees, like the one on the right, are much lighter now.



Neat, right? If we look closer, we can see that some of the lighter color is coming from the large clusters of fruit that are hanging from the branches. They were always this paler green color. But that's not all that's causing this effect. A lot of the leaves on the female ash trees are turning yellow now. This is just not happening yet on the male trees.



So what's going on? Are the female trees really going to change sooner and maybe even lose those leaves sooner? Is the difference due to the fact that these trees are using up more nutrients to develop those samaras and seeds? Also, this might be a coincidence, but in my neighborhood all the female ash trees are smaller than the male ash trees. I wonder if the seed production might affect their growth.

Now that we've checked in on my ash tree and on the chestnut down the street, let's see what the kooky honey locusts have been up to. Last time, I was starting to get confused/frustrated that I had yet to see any fruit on the honey locusts. I was eager to see if they had started to develop fruit after our month-long vacation.

Finally, I managed to take a walk down the street with the camera to check in on the girl ash tree. She is looking quite different than my boy ash these days. My boy tree has no fruit of course, but she has lots of dangling clusters of samaras.

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.

Large.



Small.



Boy.



Girl.



Up.



Down.



Closed.



Open.



Early.



Late.



Before.

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.)