Recently in other trees Category

There are a lot of changes going on out there these days! Time to check in on the neighborhood trees.

The big, beautiful ash tree down the street has gone from this...


September 22nd

...to this...


chestnuts and chestnut leaves
October 16th

And the slowest of all, the kooky honey locusts, are finally getting in on the fall fun.


October 16th

Better late than never!

So on this first day of fall, we know what the ash trees are up to but what about the other trees? 

Well, the maples, which have revealed themselves to be among the first trees to respond to the changing seasons, are really progressing. One maple at the boys' school is almost entirely red!



Why is this tree so red? Does a small tree change faster? What gets a tree going earlier than other trees? Earlier even than other maple trees? And what causes a tree to turn red instead of yellow? Is it very individual, like hair color or eye color? Or is it more closely related to the tree species? Maybe this specific maple species turns really red. Hmm.....

The oak trees were among the last to get started growing leaves in the spring. And, no surprise, they are still as green as they have been all summer. I had to look hard to find these three dead leaves on an oak by the park.



So I'm sensing a pattern here. Early to rise, early to bed. The trees that grew leaves early in the spring are changing colors earlier in the fall. Am I right?

The kooky honey locusts are also still very green. (Hey, they were also very late getting their leaves!) But while their leaves are still green, the seedpods are turning dark yellow and look like they are drying out. They kind of remind me of snake skin after the snake is done molting.

We took a walk around the neighborhood on Sunday evening, just after the worst of the winds and rain from Hurricane Irene were done. From the looks of things, the trees seem to have taken the brunt of the storm.

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 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.

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 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.

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.)

More sun and more rain means more green! Our sad little tree in front of the house has started to change. The buds were reddish before last week, but now they're opening up to reveal a golden green.