Recently in twigs Category

The stoplight trees - that were red, yellow, and green back in September - are now all done! All the leaves are gone from all three trees.

Here's their transformation in the last couple of weeks....


October 16th

Two weeks ago, there were still leaves on all three trees. The left tree was full of fruit (brownish red samaras) and the tree on the right was still yellowing.

Let's look at leaf scars!

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!

You might want to sit down for this....

Are you ready?

So, when I woke up the other morning, my kids tell me that something happened outside. With the tree. Apparently a couple of men came. With a long pointy stick. And they cut off everything that I've been watching, measuring, and photographing for the last six months. I can't reach a single twig now.



It seems that the men with the long pointy stick came to cut off the dead branches that were hanging down precariously from the lowest limb (I've marked those spots with black circles in the picture above). When they were all done, the kids overheard them say something like, "it's up against the house, cut those too." And they cut off the two thriving branches marked by green circles above. The one on the left was actually five or six small branches that I'd photographed repeatedly to gauge the progress of leaf growth. And the one on the right was the one long branch that had all the twigs on it that I'd been watching.

They even cut off the antlers.



I'm trying to be okay with this. I mean, it probably is way better for the tree. Those dead branches really had to go. They could have come down on someone in a storm, anytime. And I understand why they want to keep things clear of the houses. But I'm still sad about all that beautiful green gone.



June 16th and today.



And I'm sad I won't get to watch my branches continue their change through fall and back to winter. How am I going to see what happens to the leaves when they change? How am I going to see what happens with the buds? How am I going to see what is left behind when a leaf falls off? I have got to come up with a plan B.

Hey, wait a minute, I think I know what happened to the new growth on the ailanthus tree.

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:

 

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.

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".

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.

Every day for two months I've woken up and checked on the tree.