Plainfield Trees

Paulownia tomentosa

2009-05-19T23:54:00.004-04:00

I missed the thousandth anniversary of the world's first novel in 2008. Better late than never, I am making amends by observing the thousand and first. The Tale of Genji, which depicts the cloistered world of the imperial Japanese aristocracy of a millennium ago, is thought to have been written in about 1008. An abiding presence in the novel is the empress tree, Paulownia tomentosa. The delicate lavender hue of the Paulownia flower is the color of romantic attachment throughout the tale. That color is murasaki, the first name of Genji's author, Murasaki Shikibu. Genji's adoptive daughter (and concubine!) is also called Murasaki. Genji's mother, who dies shortly after Genji's birth, is the Lady of the Paulownia Court. Genji carries on a romantic affair with his stepmother, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Lady of the Paulownia Court.

A tree with the aristocratic associations(1) and exquisitely beautiful blooms of Paulownia might be expected to keep only the best company. Sadly, the tree's star has fallen. In Plainfield Paulownias are most likely to be found in the neglected precincts of the railroad tracks, keeping company with disreputable black locusts (http://plainfieldtrees.blogspot.com/2007/05/black-locust-robinia-pseudoacacia.html). You can see the two species commingling in the wooded strip of land that borders the tracks along South Second Street. America doesn't share Japan's enthusiasm for Paulownia. Despite the beauty of its blooms, Paulownia is regarded as a weed in this country.

I'm glad to report that Plainfield has at least a few beautiful and well cared-for Paulownias. One is in the front yard of 1038 Central Avenue, pictured below. I despaired of finding a photogenic Paulownia in town until Hugh Goodspeed directed me to the Central Avenue tree. (If you visit to have a look, don't miss the white oak only yards away, one of the grandest white oaks in the area. It is pictured at the end of this posting.)

Pictured below is another large Paulownia on Leland Avenue in front of Stillman Gardens.

Jo-Ann Bandomer pointed out this tree to me last spring. She sent an email describing it as looking like a tree-form wisteria. A Paulownia in bloom could easily be mistaken for a wisteria. The huge flowers, which appear before the leaves, are of the same general shape and color as wisteria blooms. Once the leaves appear, the resemblance to wisteria is lost. The large, heart-shaped leaves of Paulownias closely resemble the leaves of catalpas (http://plainfieldtrees.blogspot.com/2007/06/catalpa.html).

Paulownia is not often planted in the United States except on tree farms. It's considered messy, prone to splitting, and invasive.(2) We grow the tree on farms to export its wood to Japan. The wood is highly prized in Japan for its light weight, easy workability, and resistance to rot. It is also said to be fire-resistant. Paulownia wood is a traditional material for the fabrication of chests in which to store kimonos. Several sources relate that it was once customary in Japan and China to plant a Paulownia on the birth of a daughter. The tree would grow fast enough to provide wood for a dowry chest at her marriage. The wood is also used for traditional musical instruments and clogs.

The Japanese still value Paulownias for their beauty, not just as sources of wood. The Paulownia tree is honored by depiction of its flower on the seal of the Japanese prime minister. It would be hard to imagine a flower as the symbol of any American government office. What might Dick Cheney's flower have been?

Schooled by samurai movies, Americans think of the Japanese masculine ideal as silent, loyal, duty-bound, fearless, and skilled at swordplay. The Tale of Genji reflects a different pole of Japanese culture. Genji's era preceded the one depicted in samurai films, and the milieu is the court, not the battlefield. The masculine ideal in Genji's world bears little resemblance to the hero of the samurai film. Not hesitant to shed a tear in contemplation of a beautiful view, he seeks to impress the ladies by the skill with which he mixes the colors of his robes and by the cleverness of his poetry. He prides himself on his ability to blend scents for his own personal perfume. He knows nothing of the world outside the hothouse environment of Kyoto and is afraid to leave central Kyoto at night for fear of highwaymen.(3)

I'm on the lookout for another tree to celebrate an anniversary. This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. Does anyone know of a photogenic Scotch pine?

White oak 1038 Central Avenue

(1) Not only Japanese royalty, Russian as well. The tree was given its Latin name Paulownia to honor Russian Princess Anna Pavlovna.

(2) Paulownia has earned a place on the Plant Conservation Alliance's Alien Plant Working Group Least Wanted List. http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/pato1.htm

(3) The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris, Kodansha International 1994, p. 145.

New American Chestnuts

2009-04-09T23:40:00.001-04:00

Plainfield mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs will honor the American chestnut at 946 Madison Avenue at the City's Arbor Day celebration Friday April 24.

The tree was planted by Bill Santoriello in 1992 and is now about 10 inches in diameter at breast height. The tree is currently owned by Vicki Blasucci. Lacking a nearby chestnut to pollinate it, the Madison Avenue chestnut has been sterile. But things are looking up for the tree. It will soon have neighbors. The American Chestnut Foundation provided germinated nuts for planting new trees nearby. Bill Santoriello, Vicki Blasucci, and Robin Gates planted four of the nuts this past weekend, two on Vicki's property and two on Bill's, which backs on Vicki's. The nuts are the progeny of a 19" diameter chestnut in Middletown (which was pictured in Plainfield Trees November 21, 2008.) One of the tree's nuts, with newly formed rootlet, is shown below.

The plantings were done with concern for chestnut blight at the forefront. The Madison Avenue chestnut is quite unusual in being absolutely untouched by blight. The last thing anyone wanted was to introduce blight to Madison Avenue with the planting of infected new trees.

Extraordinary measures were taken. First, nuts were planted instead of seedling trees. Why? Unlike seedlings, nuts are extremely unlikely to harbor blight. Second, plant protectors, needed to shelter the tender new trees from predatory deer, were virgin. Sterilizing previously used ones wasn't good enough for us worrywarts. Tony Rosati, a Chestnut Foundation volunteer from Monmouth County, drove out to Hightstown to acquire new ones for use in Plainfield. Third, the nuts were planted only in very close proximity to the Madison Avenue tree. Why? Blight fungi spread on the wind from tree to tree and can also be carried by birds and insects. Spreading chestnut trees around Plainfield could create blight "waystations" that would allow spread of the disease to the Madison Avenue tree.

With luck the new trees might begin flowering in five or six years and cross-pollinate the existing tree so that they can all produce chestnuts. Let's wish them luck.

Chestnut esoterica:
Crown gall, a disease that affects numerous plant species, is caused by Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The name of the bacterium is as ugly as the disease itself, which is pictured below.

I encountered this disease last fall when I bought some hollies to plant on Martha's Vineyard. When I took the hollies out of their pots and "roughed up" their roots for planting, I saw warty, tumor-like growths at the tree bases.

I sent a photograph to American Holly Society trustee Charles Wiley, owner of Vineyard Gardens(1) in West Tisbury MA, who diagnosed crown gall. The disease-causing bacteria enter the plant through a wound near the base of the trunk. The bacteria then engage in genetic engineering. They insert genes into the plant cells that cause the cells to grow rapidly, producing an ugly, tumor-like gall at the tree base. The cells of the gall generate unusual amino acids that are useless to the plant but nourish the bacteria.

What does all of this have to do with chestnut blight? The thuggish bacterial genetic engineers can be co-opted and turned into model citizens. Adopting a technique called Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, researchers at SUNY Syracuse modify the gall bacteria to make them helpful to chestnuts. The scientists replace the genes that direct gall production with genes that are known to be associated with fungus-resistance in some plant species. The modified gall bacteria are then mixed with chestnut embryos. When the modified bacteria inject the chestnut cells, the embryos acquire new genetic material that might help combat chestnut blight. A exciting line of research. See http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/tissue%20culture.htm for more details. (2)

(1) For the record, Vineyard Gardens, a top-notch plant nursery on Martha's Vineyard owned by Charles and Chris Wiley, was not the seller of the infected plants. Having plants infected with crown gall in one's garden is to be avoided. The bacteria persist in the soil and can spread to other plants.

(2) Many thanks to Sara Fitzsimmons of The American Chestnut Foundation and Pennsylvania State University for educating me about Agrobacterium-mediated transformation research on chestnut blight.

Copyright Gregory Palermo

White Ash

2009-01-17T16:26:00.007-05:00

White ash Evergreen Cemetery

Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. Baseball bats gotta be made out of white ash, right?(1) Maybe not. The baseball bat tree is dying off. The very existence of all of our native ash species is in question, threatened by an imported pest called emerald ash borer. The losses to the ash population could be on the scale of the destruction caused by chestnut blight or Dutch elm disease.(2) The insect culprit, first identified near Detroit in 2002, has already killed tens of millions of ash trees in the midwest. Emerald ash borers, metallic green bugs about a half inch long, are headed this way, and they have already been found in western Pennsylvania.

White ash and green ash are both widely used as street trees because they grow fast and are very tolerant of difficult conditions. Plainfield doesn't have a great abundance of ashes, but white ashes, Fraxinus americana, are among our oldest and grandest trees. The two massive white ashes in Evergreen Cemetery on Plainfield Avenue are thought to be more than 150 years old. The one pictured at the top of the page was photographed from Plainfield Avenue. The same tree is pictured below photographed from within the cemetery.

The other ancient ash in Evergreen Cemetery is not visible from the street. It is pictured below.

The Friends of Plainfield Evergreen Cemetery, a volunteer group organized in 2008 by Donald Leichter, plans to rehabilitate the historic graveyard, which has grave markers that date back to the early 18th century. The group hopes not only to restore grave markers and undo the damage caused by vandalism, but also to care for the magnificent trees. We can hope that the volunteers do not find themselves forced to cope with emerald ash borers, but there are weapons available for the fight. Systemic insecticides applied to the soil or injected into the tree annually can control emerald ash borers. These treatments are expensive and are probably suited only to specimen trees. Options available for the large majority of ashes that aren't prized specimens aren't as sure a bet. Researchers are experimenting with parasitic wasps that prey on ash borer eggs and larvae. There are bans on transporting firewood out of quarantined areas to slow down the insect's spread.

Some towns in the midwest have resorted to cutting down healthy ash trees over time before ash borers arrive in order to avoid suddenly finding themselves obliged to remove huge numbers of hazardous ash trees all at once after the borers have killed them. Does this sound extreme? For municipalities weighing their options, Purdue University even offers an online calculator to help determine the comparative costs of tree removal, tree removal + replacement, and antibiotic treatment over a 25 year time frame.(3) A grim calculus.

Adult emerald ash borers live only about three weeks. The females lay their eggs in crevices in ash bark during the summer. The larvae burrow through the bark and spend the next year or two excavating serpentine tunnels through the tree's vascular system, which is just beneath the bark. Destruction of the vascular system prevents the tree from transporting water and nutrients up and down the trunk. Death of the tree typically occurs within five years.

White ash 825 West Front Street

(1) The wood of northern white ash is prized for its combination of strength and light weight. It's perfect for making baseball bats and hand tools. At a time in my life when I thought that a baseball bat was part of the basic required equipment for living, I owned a Louisville Slugger. My friends and I knew that Louisville Sluggers were made of white ash, but we wouldn't have been able to tell a white ash tree from a white spruce. I don't know what ever happened to my Louisville Slugger, but these days I get plenty of use out of ash in the form of garden spade handles. It must be admitted that it's hard to work up the same enthusiasm for a spade that a bat can inspire. Recently maple bats have become popular. Many professional baseball players switched to maple bats when it became known that maple was the choice of Barry Bonds (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/us/11ashbat.html).

(2) http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/emerald_ash_b/background.shtml

(3) http://extension.entm.purdue.edu/treecomputer/index.php

American chestnut

2008-11-21T22:51:00.005-05:00

Needed: a photograph of an American chestnut to be enlarged to a height of two stories for a museum exhibit about chestnut trees and the Appalachian mountains. Where do you suppose the paragon of chestnuthood worthy of such photographic extravagance was found? Why, suburban New Jersey, of course. The photogenic chestnut is shown below with its discoverer, Tony Rosati, and his border collie, Jessie. The tree is 19" in diameter at chest height and is next to a path through the woods behind the Middletown Public Library. Mr. Rosati discovered the tree a few years ago while he was strolling in the woods with Jessie, just killing time while waiting for a canine agility training course.

The black discolorations on the tree's bark are the result of chestnut blight. More detail of chestnut blight injury can be seen in the photographs in Note 4.

Tony Rosati was in Plainfield a few weeks ago to visit our own American chestnut, a 10" diameter tree at 946 Madison Avenue. The tree was planted in 1992 by Bill Santoriello and is now owned by Vicki Blasucci. Robin Gates wrote to report on the existence of this tree as a correction to my September 2007 blog posting on chestnuts ( http://plainfieldtrees.blogspot.com/2007/09/chestnuts.html ). My posting had made the (seemingly safe, but erroneous) assertion that one probably had to leave Plainfield to see an American chestnut.

The Madison Avenue chestnut has become a star. Someone posted forty photographs of the tree on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/njheart2heart/sets/72157609014062777/ . Members of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation are interested in the tree because it has reached a considerable size(1) in good health and with a graceful shape. Past president of the chapter Bob Summersgill recently visited the Madison Avenue chestnut. He concluded from a quick inspection that there were no other chestnuts in the vicinity. How did he know that? He had two important clues. First, the tree had no injury from chestnut blight, which it almost surely would have had if there had been a nearby chestnut to transmit the infection. Second, the tree was producing only sterile burs, lacking a nearby chestnut to serve as a pollinator. Mr. Summersgill showed me the papery "non-nuts" inside the unfertilized burs (pictured below).

Unfertilized chestnut bur with papery, brown "non-nuts" in the center. Even the squirrels have no use for them.

Rosati and Summersgill have great hopes for the Madison Avenue chestnut. They would like to provide pollen for the tree so that it can reproduce. The flowers could be hand-pollinated with pollen from another chestnut. Alternatively, blight-free chestnut seedlings could be planted nearby, and the wind could do the work of pollination.

Rosati and Summersgill's work was featured in the October 9 edition of the Star-Ledger.(2) The article focused on American chestnuts in the Monmouth County parks, some of the best surviving examples of the species in the eastern United States. Volunteer workers hand-pollinate the chestnut flowers in the spring, bag the flowers to keep out other pollen, and harvest the resultant bagged chestnuts in the fall. This is not work for the faint of heart. Chestnuts only produce flowers on branches that are exposed to the sun. For a tree in the woods, that means the top branches only. The volunteers go up as high as 75 feet in a cherry-picker to accomplish their mission.

But this is New Jersey; there must be another twist to this story. What do the chestnut harvesters do with the chestnuts that they collect? They plant some of them in the garden of Vito Genovese, (now Deep Cut Gardens, part of the Monmouth County parks system, the garden was created by Vito Genovese). Yes, that Vito Genovese. Reputed to be the convener of the ill-fated 1957 mob conference in Apalachin New York, Vito Genovese is also said to be the man who ordered the barbershop assassination of Murder, Incorporated's Albert Anastasia.(3) When Mr. Rosati took me to visit the little chestnut nursery at beautiful and peaceful Deep Cut Gardens, I could sense the spirit of Vito Genovese watching over the tender saplings and frightening off predatory deer.(4)

(1) A considerable size by the standards of today. American chestnuts used to mature at trunk diameters many times the size of the Madison Avenue tree's.

(2) http://www.acf.org/pdfs/news/2008/LastStandForTheOldChestnut.pdf
The Monmouth County chestnut work cited in the article is a collaborative effort involving the Monmouth County Park System, The Monmouth County Shade Tree Commission, the Middletown Parks and Recreation Department, and the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation.

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Genovese

(4) American chestnuts are sometimes able to survive chestnut blight until they're old enough to produce nuts. In addition, the stumps of fallen chestnuts send up new shoots that mature to bear nuts. All other things being equal, the species might presumably limp along that way until it develops resistance to chestnut blight through genetic mutation. The explosion of the deer population has placed another obstacle in the way of hopes that the species will escape extinction, however. Deer are very willing to eat chestnut shoots.

While I can't claim to keep up with the research, I know of several avenues along which workers hope to develop blight-resistant American chestnuts. 1. Breeding the Chinese chestnut's resistance into American chestnuts. The American Chestnut Foundation has a program that crosses Chinese chestnuts with Americans to confer resistance and then "backcrosses" the progeny with Americans over several generations to dilute out the Chinese characteristics while maintaining the blight resistance. 2. Other researchers are using molecular techniques to decipher and/or modify chestnut DNA. 3. Hypovirulence: weakening of the chestnut blight fungus with an antifungal virus. 4. Natural resistance. It's not clear why Monmouth County's parks have American chestnuts that survive better than American chestnuts elsewhere. Perhaps they have evolved some measure of blight resistance. It's just possible that Tony Rosati and coworkers will produce a highly blight-resistant strain in their little chestnut nursery in Deep Cut Gardens. If they do, I will lobby hard to persuade them to name it Castanea dentata 'Vito Genovese'.

The blackened areas on the trunk pictured above are the sequelae of chestnut blight.

Damage from chestnut blight at the tree base.

Damage from chestnut blight

Red oaks

2008-09-29T23:30:00.011-04:00

It's not a matter of black and white! The two young oaks pictured above are a white oak and a black oak growing in the woods in Edgartown Massachusetts. To label them black and white seems like quite an exaggeration, but the trees are so called because of their bark color. (The lightest flecks on both trees are lichens, not bark.)

The complex oak genus has hundreds of species. Many of the species complicate life for classifiers by cross-breeding with each other. Botanists divide the oaks into two groups: the white oak group and the red/black oak group.

The majestic northern red oak, one of the two headliners of the red/black oak group, is New Jersey's state tree. Plainfield is blessed to have many beautiful examples. Red oaks are the fastest growing of the native oaks. We shouldn't be surprised that red oaks are some of the largest trees in Plainfield.

There is a very fine red oak at 916 West Eighth Street, pictured above. How to recognize it as a red oak, Quercus rubra? First, you can put it in the red/black oak group by observing that the lobes of the leaves end in points, (bristle tips). The leaf lobes of the white oak group, by contrast, are rounded. The photograph below shows a red oak leaf on the left and a white oak leaf on the right. The bark color also helps in assigning a group.(1)

That's a start, but how do we know that it's a red oak, and not another member of the red/black group? How do we distinguish it from a pin, scarlet, or black oak? Like red oaks, all those other three species have lobed leaves with bristle tips, and all can be found in the Plainfield area. Red oak leaves are easily distinguished from pin (Quercus palustris) or scarlet (Quercus coccinea) oak leaves because the red oak leaves are much larger. Their lobes are also much less deeply cut. The large acorn and the leaf on the right in the photograph below are from a red oak. The leaf on the left is from a pin oak.

Black oaks (Quercus velutina) can be more difficult to distinguish from red oaks. Black oaks have large leaves, but the leaves are more leathery and lustrous than red oak leaves. Unfortunately, they interbreed quite readily with red oaks, so it's hard to know sometimes whether or not you're really looking at a black oak. (2) Other features of the trees can help with speciation. Red oaks have much larger acorns than black oaks. Red oak acorns have a distinctive look, with a very shallow, saucer-like cap. Mature red oak bark is described as resembling interweaving ski tracks.

Another very handsome, mature red oak is at Stelle Avenue near Central. This magnificent street tree was the subject of some concern two or three years ago when the owner of the adjacent Coriell mansion proposed to restore the semicircular driveway that had once opened onto Stelle Avenue. The driveway was to encircle the red oak. Because the house was being converted to a B & B, the fire department wanted the driveway to be wide enough to accommodate fire trucks. The Historic Preservation Commission intervened to have the driveway narrowed so as to limit damage to the tree's roots.

The handsome red oak at the corner of 1300 Prospect Avenue at the corner of Hillside has a vase-like shape reminiscent of that of an American elm.

The massive red oak at 947 Fernwood pictured below was given special recognition as a specimen tree by Mayor Robinson-Briggs at this past April's Arbor Day celebration.

Another very fine red oak is at 912 Central Avenue. I measured its circumference today at 17 feet at breast height.

(1) Bark color is not necessarily a reliable indicator. Chestnut oak (Quercus prinus or Quercus montana), a member of the white oak group, has bark that is quite dark gray, an exception to the general rule that trees of the white oak group have light-colored bark. The chestnut oak pictured below is on Park Avenue near Randolph Road, across the street from Muhlenberg Hospital. See the January 13, 2008 posting of Plainfield Trees for additional differences between oaks of the white and red/black groups.

(2) The Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Charles Fergus, Stackpole Books 2002, p. 113.

From Tree Hugger to Bug Hugger

2008-08-22T00:08:00.005-04:00

Is your sleep disturbed by worries about disappearing spotted owls and snail darters? Maybe the objects of your concern are too grand. What you should really be worrying about is bugs: native bugs and the native plants that sustain them. That is the argument advanced by professor of entomology Douglas Tallamy in his recent book, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens.(1) He says that we are starving our insects by replacing the native plants that they eat with exotic plants that they can't even recognize as food.

Native sweetbay magnolia. Native insect? Click to enlarge.

Starving the bugs sounds like a great idea, right? Maybe not. Tallamy presents insects as unloved heroes that transform the stored energy in plants into food (themselves) for the next level up in the food chain. In order to transform themselves into bird food, for example, insects must have food of their own to eat. But we are depriving them of food by replacing the native landscape with foreign plants. The vast majority of our insects are dietary specialists; the only foods they are capable of eating are members of the native plant community with which they have co-evolved over millions of years. Those are the foods to which their anatomy and physiology are adapted. They have as much success eating foreign plants as we would have if we tried to adopt the koala bear's diet of eucalyptus leaves. Without native plants, the insects have nothing they can eat, and they perish. With the insects gone, all of the food chain above insects will collapse.

American elm 1267 Park Avenue

The differences between the numbers of insects that can eat native versus foreign plants can be startling. Native oaks can provide food for over 500 different native insect species. Eucalyptus, an exotic, is eaten by only one native insect species. Native plants in Pennsylvania were found to support 35 times more caterpillar biomass, the preferred source of protein for most bird nestlings, than alien plants supported.

Native northern red oak, New Jersey state tree, West 8th St

How big a problem can this insect starvation be? Biodiversity depends on space. The more space, the larger the number of species that can be supported. The relationship is linear.(2) Only 3-5% of the lower 48 states remains undisturbed habitat for plants and animals. The rest has been paved, farmed, taken over by noxious foreign weeds like kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle, or transformed into suburban gardens dominated by exotic shrubs and vast lawns of non-native grasses. Tallamy points out that suburban lawns cover about 62,000 square miles of this country, an area more than eight times the size of New Jersey that is devoted to alien grasses.(3) Worse, 43,000 square miles of blacktop has been spread over the landscape, equal to five and a half New Jerseys. If we have eliminated much of the native vegetation from 95-97% of the American landscape, we can expect to lose 95-97% per cent of our native flora and fauna over time, as extinction adjusts the number of species to the land area that remains. Tallamy cites the toll of habitat destruction on Delaware, where he teaches. As of 2002, Delaware had lost 78% of its freshwater mussel species, 34% of its dragonflies, 20% of its fish species, and 31% of its reptiles and amphibians. Forty per cent of all native plant species in Delaware are threatened or already lost.

American holly East 9th Street

At this dismal point in his book Tallamy offers a ray of hope: suburban gardeners to the rescue! If suburbanites, who control a large swath of the landscape, were to plant native plants on their properties, the countryside could still support a diverse flora and fauna. Mix some American elms in with all those Zelkovas. Make your lawn smaller, and plant a meadow. Tear out some of your English ivy and Japanese pachysandra and plant mayapples. I repent ever having written that foreign, kousa dogwoods have the advantage of not being attacked by the borers that plague native flowering dogwoods (a good example of just what Tallamy is talking about). How petty of me ever to have planted exotic hollies instead of American hollies because of the Americans' problems with leaf miners! I'm going to be beating myself up for years over this. But as part of my rehabilitation program, I will spread the word about Tallamy's book, essential reading for anyone who plants.

Native black walnut leaf nibbled by, no doubt, native insects

(1) Tallamy, DW. Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens. Timber Press, 2007.

(2) Tallamy cites the work of Michael Rosenzweig at the University of Arizona to support his claim that species diversity decreases in proportion to the loss of available space. His very cursory discussion of this important underpinning for his argument is, for me, the weakest part of his book. I would like to have seen Rosenzweig's data and analysis described in detail.

(3) If you would object that Kentucky bluegrass is a native, you would be mistaken. Its seeds were imported by European settlers in the digestive tracts and droppings of cattle.

Black walnut

2008-07-24T11:50:00.001-04:00

What do walnuts, Wales, Walloon, Welsh, Walsh, Wallace, and Cornwall have in common? The words all indicate foreignness.

Walnuts are foreign nuts, and the "wal-" in their name indicates that fact. Foreign to whom? To the English. The American Heritage Dictionary explains the history nicely: "Although Celtic-speaking peoples were living in Britain before the arrival of the invaders...whose languages would eventually develop into English, it was the Celts and not the invaders who came to be called 'strangers' in English. Our words for one of the descendants of the Celtish peoples, Welsh, and for their homeland, Wales, come from the Old English word wealh, meaning 'stranger'.... Old English...walhhnutu [exists] in a document from around 1050.... This eventually became walnut in English...literally the 'foreign nut.' The nut was 'foreign' because it was native to Roman Gaul and Italy."(1)

Black walnut (Juglans nigra) is an American native closely related to the Persian walnut (Juglans regia) of Europe and Asia. It grows wild in the eastern United States except for parts of New York and New England.(2) The tree is highly valued for its wood and for its nuts. The wood is so valuable that black walnuts are at risk of being felled and stolen by "walnut rustlers." For that reason, I won't specify the locations of the pictured Plainfield trees. Walnuts have been prized since ancient times. The Romans esteemed them highly enough to call them Jupiter's nut (Jovis glans) from which the scientific name Juglans derives.(3)

Walnuts have pinnately compound leaves (with leaflets arranged like a feather), each leaf a foot or two in length and made up of as many as 23 leaflets. The leaflets are serrated, and the leaflet at the tip of the leaf is often undersized or missing, a useful feature in identification. The leaves emit a spicy odor when crushed. They turn yellow in the autumn and are among the earliest leaves to fall.

The bark is dark gray-brown and deeply furrowed, forming diamond shapes.

The nuts fall around the same time as the leaves and are covered by a fleshy green hull that will stain your hands black if you try to remove it. Breeders have produced over 500 varieties of black walnut, trying to create nuts with a thinner shell and a less convoluted inner structure so that the kernel is easier to extract.

Almost as well-known as its delicious nuts and its beautiful wood is walnut's toxic effect on neighboring plants. This effect has been known for millennia. Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century AD that, "the shadow of walnut trees is poison to all plants within its compass." Juglone, the toxin that the tree produces to keep the rest of the natural world at bay, is present in leaves, branches, bark, roots, and nuts. The chemical is toxic to a variety of other plants. Don't, for example, plant tomatoes near a walnut tree. The toxin's victims are not limited to plants. Bruised walnut leaves and branches have been put into water by fishermen to stun fishes.

(1) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin Company 2000. See the entry for Wales.

(2) Edward Goodell, Walnuts for the Northeast, Arnoldia 44: 1-19, 1984.

(3) The Romans' walnut was Juglans regia, Persian walnut. It is also called English walnut. But, as discussed above, there really is no such thing as an English walnut.

Sweetbay magnolia

2008-07-03T00:15:00.001-04:00

I have fragrant roses in my garden, but I can never detect their scent unless I put my nose right down into a bloom. The difficulty isn't an insensitive sense of smell. It is, rather, that I have a sweetbay magnolia in bloom at the same time. The fragrance of the magnolia is so potent that it overwhelms the scent of the roses.

Sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) blooms over about six weeks from May into early July. Its flowers are small and never make a big visual impact. They bloom a few at a time, each flower lasting only a few days. Their fragrance is huge. To my nose their scent is rose-like, but much more intense.

There is a very handsome sweetbay magnolia in front of 500 Stelle Avenue.

The flowers are followed by shiny, bright red, clustered fruits(1) that ripen in August and September. The fruit is a favorite food of catbirds and mockingbirds. The photograph below shows unripe fruits on July 1.

Sweetbay magnolias are closely enough related to southern magnolias to have been hybridized with them. Unlike southern magnolias, sweetbays are mostly deciduous in this climate. Sweetbay flowers are much smaller and much more fragrant than southern magnolia flowers. Sweetbay leaves are duller and have a silvery gray underside that displays itself very attractively in a breeze.

Another feature that helps with identification is the rather smooth, light gray bark.

Sweetbays grow into large trees in the southern United States. In New Jersey a height of 25 to 30 feet is typical.

I have grown one of the hybrids of sweetbay and southern magnolias, 'Timeless Beauty'. The flowers of the hybrid resembled southern magnolia flowers. The foliage was less attractive than that of either southern or sweetbay magnolia. Worse, the hybrid's foliage suffered winter burn in winters that left pure southern magnolias unscathed. All in all, a disappointing plant.

Sweetbay magnolias are underutilized. Any garden can benefit from having their fragrance for six weeks in late spring and early summer. Very adaptable plants, they are tolerant of both wet soil and shade. A peculiarity of sweetbay magnolias is that they make a dense network of roots just beneath the soil surface. Mulch your beds heavily and the roots will grow right into the mulch. When the mulch dwindles with time, you are left with "aerial" roots. A drawback to this beautiful New Jersey native is that deer eat the leaves and stems.

Sweetbays were the first magnolias imported into Europe from the Americas. The genus was named by Linnaeus after Pierre Magnol, pioneering botanist and physician to the court of Louis XIV.

(1) The fruits are aggregates of follicles.

Fringetrees

2008-06-19T22:57:00.001-04:00

Native American fringetrees are little-known and neglected beauties. They're hard to find. Fringetrees are so few and far between in Plainfield that the poor, solitary things can't even reproduce. Female fringetrees produce a crop of beautiful blue berries in the fall, but to do that they need a male close enough to provide pollen. I have never seen a single berry on a Plainfield fringetree.

The trees produce a magnificent floral display, which has just finished in Plainfield. The fringetree pictured below is between 1745 and 1751 Watchung Avenue.

The native fringetree below, which was also pictured in my June 2 posting, is at 653 Ravine Road.

The Ravine Road fringetree used to be the focus of an annual spring celebration complete with poetry recitations until it broke off at the ground about ten years ago. Its owners, Jean Mattson and the late Norman (Moose) Mattson, brought it back from a hollow stump by cutting away all but a few of the hundreds of sprouts that grew up from the wreckage over the space of a few years. The sprouts that were allowed to grow reconstituted an attractive multistemmed tree. I wish it a long (second) life.

How do I know that these two fringetrees are the native species, Chionanthus virginicus, rather than the beautiful Chinese import, Chionanthus retusus? I happened to be at the Polly Hill Arboretum on Martha's Vineyard for a lecture last weekend when both species of fringetree were in bloom there. I was able to take photographs permitting a comparison. The most easily recognizable difference is in the bark. The Chinese tree's bark, pictured below, is deeply furrowed, while the American's is relatively smooth.

The flowers have easily recognizable differences too. The Chinese species' blooms, shown below, are not as thread-like as the American's, shown at the top of the page.

I have not seen any Chinese fringetrees in Plainfield. Clearly there is a niche available here for both of these species of Chionanthus.

(1) The rarity of fringetrees can inspire deviant behavior in susceptible subjects. Plainfield tree lady Barbara Sandford took me trespassing into the backyard of a house on Sleepy Hollow Lane to see one in bloom a few weeks back. (I place the blame for this transgression entirely on her.)

Flowering dogwoods

2008-06-02T23:58:00.001-04:00

Can there be a more beautiful tree? I don't think so, but I have never been tempted to plant one. Flowering dogwoods, Cornus florida, are so beset with pests and diseases that I have refrained from planting any for fear of losing the fruits of my labor. I prefer to enjoy other people's dogwoods. A very handsome example is across the street from the Plainfield Public Library at the corner of Park and Crescent Avenues.

Flowering dogwood is a tree of four-season beauty. Its spectacular spring floral display is followed by handsome red berries and rich maroon fall foliage. The tree's persimmon-like bark provides visual interest even in winter. A dogwood in fall foliage at 1340 Watchung Avenue is pictured below.

Dogwoods are prey to borers and a number of diseases. The most serious threat to dogwoods is dogwood anthracnose. This fungal disease was first recognized in the United States in the 1970s. By the 1980s, garden writers were lamenting the rapid disappearance of flowering dogwoods, which are native to the eastern United States.

An anthracnose-resistant substitute for the native Cornus florida is an Asian dogwood, Cornus kousa. Kousa dogwoods are in bloom now. Unlike native dogwoods, which bloom on naked stems, kousa dogwoods bloom after their leaves have formed. A native dogwood in flower often gives the impression that an artist has arranged the placement of each flowering branch for maximum charm. With kousa dogwoods the impression is rather of robust and dense bushiness.

There are outstanding kousa dogwoods at 960 Glenwood Avenue, one of which is pictured below.

Another handsome kousa dogwood is at the rear of 975 Hillside Avenue, pictured below.

There is a fine kousa dogwood between 980 and 996 Hillside Avenue, pictured below.

The flowers(1) of some kousa varieties last for much of the summer.

Professor Elwin Orton of Rutgers hybridized native dogwoods with kousa dogwoods in an attempt to blend the look of the natives with the borer-resistance of the kousas. His family of hybrids, called the Stellar series, is also resistant to anthracnose. I have seen them for sale locally, but I don't know of any planted in Plainfield. I would be grateful to hear of any Stellar hybrids that can be seen from the street.

Other trees in flower in Plainfield now include fringetree, Chionanthus virginicus. The tree pictured below is at 653 Ravine Road.

Also flowering now (but I know of none visible from the street) are Japanese styrax, Styrax japonica, pictured below, and

American yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea, pictured below.

(1) Not really flowers, but bracts. Dogwood bracts are the bud scales that enlarge and take on color after they open. The actual flowers are tiny and are clustered together in the center of what we think of as the bloom.

Horse chestnuts

2008-05-18T21:17:00.029-04:00

Don't eat them. They're poisonous. Horses should abstain as well. But horse chestnuts do have their uses. The British government paid schoolchildren to collect them during World War I. Horse chestnuts even had a role to play in the creation of the state of Israel. See below.

Horse chestnuts, Aesculus hippocastanum, make a spectacular display of huge, white flowers at this time of year. The large horse chestnut pictured in flower above is on the front lawn at 1127 Watchung Avenue. Another handsome example is at 621 Berkeley Avenue, shown below.

The attractive leaves are palmately compound, their leaflets arranged like a seven-fingered hand.

Beautiful as these trees are, they have an Achilles' heel: drought and fungal leaf blotch reliably disfigure the foliage by midsummer. I daily pass by a row of horse chestnuts used as street trees at the corner of Hillside and Evergreen Avenues. In July I look for early signs of damage. By August I avert my eyes; the sight is painful. The photographs below were taken in September of 2007.

The hybrid red horse chestnut, Aesculus x carnea, is less troubled by leaf problems. Red horse chestnuts are uncommon in Plainfield. Two were planted in front of City Hall two or three years ago. There is a wonderful red horse chestnut that can be glimpsed from the street in the rear garden at 429 Stelle Avenue. This beautiful tree was recognized by the City of Plainfield as a specimen tree of special note at the Arbor Day observance in 2006. Its age is estimated at 120 years.

Uses of horse chestnuts:

Nutritional: Although horses shouldn't eat horse chestnuts, the nuts do provide nourishment to public enemies number 1 and number 2: deer and squirrels.

Medicinal: Horse chestnut extracts are used as herbal medicines.

Recreational: Horse chestnuts are the "conkers" used in the game of conkers played in the British Isles.

Military?: Indeed. Back to the creation of Israel: Chaim Weizmann, Zionist and first president of Israel, began his career as a chemist. Professor Weizmann of Manchester University refined a method of producing acetone by bacterial fermentation of starches in various foodstuffs just before World War I. Acetone was crucial to production of cordite, smokeless gunpowder. The Weizmann process was used to make acetone for the war effort. When war made corn and other starches scarce in Britain, Weizmann adapted his fermentation process to use horse chestnuts in place of corn. Schoolchildren were enlisted in the war effort to gather horse chestnuts to produce munitions. Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George, who had worked with Weizmann, became prime minister. Lloyd George's gratitude for Professor Weizmann's war contributions was such that it led to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which stated Britain's support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.(1)

(1) For more detail on the role horse chestnuts played in the creation of Israel, see

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A6958812

and

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1530046&displaytype=printable&lastnode_id=0

Street cherries

2008-04-27T23:45:00.016-04:00

One thinks of Japanese cherries as delicate beings whose ethereal beauty is to be contemplated in the setting of a quiet garden. But at least one species of Japanese cherry can be used on the streets. Prunus serrulata, most commonly known in its variety 'Kwanzan', has a vase-like shape that permits it to fit nicely between street and sidewalk. A group of Kwanzan cherries was planted just last week on West Third Street at Muhlenberg Place as part of Plainfield's Arbor Day observance.(1) Kwanzan cherries also line both sides of Randolph Road near Muhlenberg Hospital. A young Kwanzan cherry in front of the early 18th Century FitzRandolph farmhouse at 1366 Randolph Road is pictured below.

Neither the longest-lived nor the most trouble-free of street trees, Kwanzan cherries are nonetheless outstandingly beautiful in flower. The tree pictured below is at 1115 Prospect Avenue.

Plainfield residents look forward to the annual display of Kwanzan cherry blossoms at the public library, one of the glories of spring in central New Jersey.

Another small tree with showy flowers that has recently been used as a street tree in Plainfield is the eastern redbud, Cercis canadensis. Several were planted on East Ninth Street two years ago. The tree pictured below is at 127 East Ninth Street.

A redbud at 1441 Evergreen Avenue shows how magnificent these trees can be at maturity.

Redbud varieties are available in various shades of pink and magenta. There are even white redbuds for seekers after novelty. The most unusual redbuds I have seen are on Grove Avenue in Edison at the corner of Adams Street. The residents there are apparently redbud fanatics; they have 8 redbuds on their small suburban lot. Two of the 8 are weeping redbuds, pictured below. I have read about weeping redbuds, but those two in Edison are the only weeping redbuds I have ever seen in the flesh.

(1) Planting design by April Stefel, CLA. Quite handsome and worth a visit.

Japanese flowering cherries

2008-04-10T23:15:00.000-04:00

"It does not matter how young or how strong you may be, the hour of death comes sooner than you expect. It is an extraordinary miracle that you should have escaped to this day; do you suppose you have even the briefest respite in which to relax?"(1)

What accounts for the Japanese passion for cherry blossoms? It's the flowers' brief and uncertain lives. That answer comes with the authority of Columbia professor Donald Keene, grand old man of American commentators on Japanese culture. The Japanese find cherry blossoms so heartbreakingly beautiful because of their evanescence. The blooms last only a few days, less time than those of most trees.(2) Perishability is one of four features identified by Keene as central to the Japanese idea of beauty in his essay, Japanese Aesthetics.(3) The Japanese savor evanescent beauty for its reminder of the pathos of transient human life. Keene supports his argument with the words of the fourteenth century writer Kenkō, whose Essays in Idleness are a Japanese cultural touchstone: "If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in this world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty." This view of the world through the eyes of the doomed imbues every falling petal with a sense of tragedy. An aesthetic preference for perishability seems peculiarly Japanese. An appreciation for the short-lived does not necessarily come easily to those of other cultures. Keene recounts the story of a Japanese novelist visiting Europe who was stunned when his invitations to European friends to go snow-viewing were met with laughter.

If we go to Washington D.C. or to Newark's Branch Brook Park to see the cherry blossoms, we take care, of course, to time our trip so as to see them at their peak. Fourteenth century Kenkō might have regarded such an approach as insensitive: "Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom?...Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration....In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting. Does the love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other's arms? The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone...such a man truly knows what love means."(4)

Cherry blossoms were painted on the airplanes of kamikaze bomber pilots, the most startling link between those flowers and the tragic brevity of human life. Some believed that the souls of the pilots would be reincarnated as cherry blossoms. A thousand cherry trees are planted at Yasukuni Shrine, the Tokyo war memorial.

The next time you find yourself elated by suburban New Jersey's display of cherry blossoms, you might enhance your enjoyment by reflecting with Kenkō that "the hour of death comes sooner than you expect." On the other hand, you might instead prefer to take comfort in the sturdy blooms of Cornus officinalis, reassuringly long-lived.(5)

(1) Essays in Idleness, The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō, trans. Donald Keene, Columbia University Press 1967, p. 120.

(2) By contrast, the Japanese Cornus officinalis that began blooming in Cedar Brook Park on March 6 are still at it. See Plainfield Trees March 23 posting on Cornelian cherry dogwoods. To be fair, the bloom period of Cornus officinalis is unusually long. Typically the flowers last five or six weeks in Plainfield.

(3) Donald Keene, Japanese Aesthetics, in The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, Columbia University Press 1988, pp. 3-22. The essay began life as a lecture for a nonspecialist audience and is quite readable.

(4) Essays in Idleness, cited above, pp. 115-118.

(5) See note 2.

Cornelian cherry dogwood

2008-03-23T23:47:00.033-04:00

Spring arrives in Plainfield before the vernal equinox. Its coming is announced by the bloom of the mysterious yellow-flowered trees lining both sides of the Park Avenue entrance to Cedarbrook Park. Blooming with the earliest crocuses, these trees announce that winter is over and brook no argument. The best time to view them is in the morning, when the sunlight comes streaming over the rooftops to illuminate the yellow flowers and make them glow. It's a sight that enlivens many a morning commute. Surely these trees are one of the best features of Cedarbrook Park, which was designed by the Olmsted firm.

I have heard the trees identified as witch hazel (They're not.) Or spice bush. (Not that either.) Nonagenarian Barbara Sandford tells me that, when her children were very young, she taught them that the Cedarbrook Park trees were called Cornus mas (a.k.a. Cornelian cherry dogwood. Barbara has known that the trees were dogwoods for quite a while.) After I planted some Cornus mas in my own garden, I noticed that the Cedarbrook Park trees invariably flowered two weeks before my trees or anyone else's Cornelian cherry dogwoods. So my bet is that the Cedarbrook Park trees are not Cornus mas, but rather Cornus officinalis, a very rare bird and a close Japanese cousin to the European Cornus mas. Cornus officinalis is supposed to flower earlier than Cornus mas and berry later. Whereas Cornus mas berries in July, Cornus officinalis is supposed to berry in September. I have never gotten myself well enough organized to check for berries in September, though. This season I'll do it without fail.

A Cornus mas at 1785 Sleepy Hollow Lane was just beginning to bloom when I photographed it today, more than two weeks after the Cedarbrook Park trees opened their buds.

Both Cornus mas and Cornus officinalis berries look like bright red olives. They also resemble the fruits of Japanese Aucuba, which is in berry now.

Do your Aucubas make berries like these? If not, perhaps your plants are sex-starved.

This female Aucuba, lost in the depths of a shrub border in my garden, is right next to a male. Clearly, she is not lacking for pollen, as evidenced by this generous berry crop. Other female Aucubas not far away produce many fewer berries. With Aucubas, proximity helps pollination. Familiarity breeds berries. Perhaps the insects that pollinate Aucubas are not as wide-ranging as the honey bees that pollinate many of our flowers.

Unfortunately the only male Aucubas I have ever found for sale have leaves that are variegated. Having searched for years for plain green males without success, I gave up, bought variegated males, and hid them in out-of-the-way corners. Fortunately, Aucubas are among the most shade-tolerant plants, capable of growing almost in the dark, so the variegated males are quite easy to hide.(1)

The best-looking Aucubas I know in Plainfield flank the entrance at 972 Kensington Avenue.

Aucubas are at the northern limit of their hardiness in central New Jersey and can be killed back to their roots by an unusually harsh winter. I have seen most of Plainfield's Aucubas killed to the ground once in the last twenty years. They looked as though they had been struck by lightning and burnt to a crisp, reduced to small black cinders. Nothing looks quite so dead as a winter-injured Aucuba.

More on hollies

I wrote in my February 24 posting on hollies that I had heard complaints that the red holly hybrids, including 'Oak Leaf', were susceptible to winter injury in the Plainfield area. Peter Simone writes that there are two 'Oak Leaf' hollies just behind the low privet hedge and flanking the walk at his house at 1414 Watchung Avenue. Peter says that his hollies have not been injured by cold weather, but that deer have eaten a fair amount of one of them. Red hollies have softer leaves than many hollies, and when we think "soft", deer must think "tender".

There is an English holly at 937 Woodland Avenue. A smaller American holly is growing into it, making comparison between the two species easy.

There is an attractive blue holly hedge on Pine Street, alongside 1402 Watchung Avenue

(1) Perhaps my preference for plain green Aucubas is idiosyncratic. To be fair, I have to admit that variegated forms of Aucuba were introduced into cultivation in the United States three quarters of a century before green forms, so someone thought they were attractive (Michael A. Dirr, Manual of Woody Landscape Plants. Stipes Publishing Company 1998, p. 115.) In some places, variegated Aucubas are so much more popular than green varieties that plain green ones are hard to find. Around Lakes Como and Maggiore in northern Italy, where they grow 15 feet tall, Aucubas are used for hedging as commonly as we use privets here. I looked for and failed to find a plain green Aucuba hedge there several years ago. The lacustrine Italians want them variegated.

Southern magnolia

2008-03-09T23:00:00.003-04:00

Do you have doubts about climate change? New Jersey gardeners don't. As warming winters have threatened to make New Jersey into a southern state, its gardeners have started planting southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) everywhere. In the 1980s, the only southern magnolias I knew of in Plainfield were at the former Memorial Funeral Home on East Seventh Street. Now East Seventh Street has seven southern magnolias within a length of just 300 feet. 1330 East Seventh Street at the corner of Coolidge Street is southern magnolia central.

Many varieties of southern magnolia are cold-hardy in New Jersey. The best known is 'Edith Bogue', named for Miss Edith Bogue of Montclair, NJ, in whose garden it first attracted notice. My experience with 'Edith Bogue' is that it is a rapidly growing, beautiful plant that has stayed green in winters that have browned my Nellie R. Stevens hollies and blackened my aucubas.

Some southern magnolia varieties that can be purchased at area nurseries aren't as cold-hardy. A particularly beautiful and tempting one is 'Little Gem'. It is a small tree with smaller leaves than those of most southern magnolias. Unfortunately, even rather mild winters can cause serious leaf burn. An example at 828 Arlington Avenue is pictured below after the winter of 2006-2007, not a very hard winter.

The tree is in much better condition this winter, which has been very mild so far, but this 'Little Gem' would probably be happier in Virginia.

Some of the varieties of southern magnolia that thrive in New Jersey have leaves with brownish, felt-like undersides.(1) A very handsome example is at 911 Woodland Avenue.

The Woodland Avenue tree shows a feature that is common in southern magnolias, the tendency to grow in a Christmas tree shape. European gardeners often take advantage of that tendency by treating southern magnolias as topiary specimens. Most southern magnolias that I have seen in European gardens have been formally pruned to form perfect cones. An exotic look that is well suited to an exotic plant; in Europe, southern magnolias are imports. I rarely see formally pruned southern magnolias in the United States, where the species is native. That sort of formal pruning is extremely high-maintenance gardening, by the way. It's very different from pruning a yew into a cone. Yews, with tiny leaves, can be shaped with shears. One can't prune southern magnolias with shears because their leaves are too large; the leaf fragments would be grotesque. Each stem must be cut individually with hand clippers.

Southern magnolias are capable of reaching great size in our climate. The grandest southern magnolia I have seen in the vicinity is at 221 East Westfield Avenue in Roselle Park. Twenty-five years ago, before the lower branches were removed, the house behind the tree was essentially invisible.

Magnolias are primitive trees. How primitive? Magnolias evolved more than 50 million years ago, before pollinators like bees and butterflies existed. Beetles are their pollinators.(2) The huge, white, lemon-scented blooms of southern magnolias might be the epitome of romance, but their intended audience is beetles, not you.

A close relative of southern magnolia, but even more fragrant, is sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana). I have some sweetbay magnolias in my garden, but I would be grateful to hear of any examples of this species that can be seen from the street.

(1) There is apparently some correlation between brown leaf undersides and cold-hardiness (Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, Michael Dirr. Stipes Publishing Company 1998, p. 598). That correlation doesn't work for 'Little Gem', however.

(2) Magnolias, J.M. Gardiner. Globe Pequot Press 1989, p. 14.

English holly

2008-02-24T23:55:00.001-05:00

Location, location, and location! The beautiful, glossy-leaved English hollies (Ilex aquifolium) that we so highly prize (and rarely see) here are regarded as invasive pests on the west coast. English holly is a rarity in Plainfield. The only examples I know that can be seen from the street are two plants at 1332 Prospect Avenue.

English hollies have never been very commonly planted in the northeastern United States because they are considered insufficiently cold-hardy. They used to be seen occasionally in nurseries in this area. Now I almost never see English hollies for sale at all. They have been pushed aside by crosses between English holly and other holly species. One of those hybrids, Nellie R. Stevens, is by far the most abundant tree-form holly at the nurseries. There are two attractive Nellie R. Stevens hollies in front of the First Unitarian Society on Park Avenue near Seventh Street.

Nellie R. Stevens is thought to be a hybrid of English (Ilex aquifolium) and Chinese (Ilex cornuta) hollies. The original was found in the garden of Nellie R. Stevens of Oxford, Maryland. Nellie R. Stevens' big advantage is that it grows fast. It has a distinctive, glossy, blue-green leaf that is quite attractive. Its red berries are tainted by orange, but it makes up for that weakness by producing berries even in the absence of a male plant to fertilize it. Such berries are sterile.(1) Nellie R. Stevens' real failing is that it is even less cold-hardy than English holly. In three of the last twenty years most of this area's Nellie R. Stevens hollies have had their foliage completely killed by winter cold and wind. Most of the leaves fell off, and those that hung on were brown. The plants weren't presentable again until July, if then. I have planted dozens of Nellie R. Stevens over time, but I gave up on them completely after seeing most of them defoliate two winters in a row a few years back. This is a problem that global warming will solve, and the forward-looking local nurseries promote Nellie R. Stevens tirelessly. Pictured below is minor leaf injury from the 2006-2007 winter, a relatively mild one.

Ilex cornuta, the other parent of Nellie R. Stevens, is rare in Plainfield (because of cold-hardiness concerns). I know of only one, at 1215 West Fifth Street.

I haven't observed the West Fifth Street holly after a hard winter. Its very handsome foliage, with most leaves single-spined, is pictured below.

'San Jose' holly is the most commonly available among the crosses between English and Perny hollies (Ilex x aquipernyi). The leaves are dark blue-green, glossy, thick, and stiff. It's hard to imagine a deer wanting to eat any of them. 'San Jose' hollies are resistant to winter as well as to deer. I have never seen winter injury on a 'San Jose' holly in the Plainfield area. The berries are large and pure red. 'San Jose' hollies grow slowly. Their branches tend to get droopy if the plants are shaded. There is a 'San Jose' holly (or other closely related Ilex x aquipernyi hybrid) at 950 Hillside Avenue.

Blue hollies (Ilex x meserveae) were bred on Long Island by Kathleen Meserve specifically to produce glossy-leaved hollies that could tolerate cold winters.(2) They perform that function quite well. But they want to be shrubs, not trees. You can buy them pruned to a tall and narrow shape, and I imagine that it's possible to maintain that form if you're diligent. These plants are most often seen sheared into mounds. Their beautiful blue-green leaves are softer and flatter than many holly leaves, and deer are more willing to eat them.(3)

What about the so-called red holly hybrids that have been available for the past several years? The foliage is glossy and beautiful, but I hear reports that they are subject to winter burn in our area unless planted in a sheltered spot.(4)

All of the hollies mentioned above have their advantages, but if I had to choose just one of them for this locale, it would be straight English holly. I have grown several varieties of English holly in my garden for more than 20 years and have never had problems with winter damage. No holly has more beautiful foliage than English holly. It is a shame that it has largely disappeared from the local market. The English holly variety 'Angustifolia' is pictured below.

(1) Unlike Komodo dragons (Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don't Need To, Neil Shubin, New York Times, Feb 24, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24shubin.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ), Nellie R. Stevens hollies are incapable of virgin birth. The berries that Nellie R. Stevens hollies produce in the absence of a male pollinator are seedless and incapable of generating new plants.

(2) Kathleen Meserve also bred 'China Girl' and 'China Boy', shrubby hollies that share some parentage with blue hollies. They are more tolerant of the heat than the blues are. To my eye, their foliage is much less attractive than blue holly foliage, and I wouldn't find much use for them in the Plainfield area. (To judge from the numbers of them that I see at local nurseries, my opinion is not widely shared.)
.

(3) Landscape Plants Rated by Deer Resistance, Pedro Perdomo. Peter Nitzsche, and David Drake. Rutgers Cooperative Research and Extension, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 2004. http://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/publication.asp?pid=e271
.

(4) 'Festive', 'Cardinal', 'Oak Leaf', 'Little Red', 'Robin', and others. Called red hollies for the reddish color of their new growth, they are widely available in local nurseries. I don't know of any that are visible from the street. Cory Storch is growing a 'Cardinal' in a sheltered spot in his garden; he reports that it is doing quite well. Claudia Heffner, a Master Gardener and landscape designer from Scotch Plains, reports that 'Oak Leaf' hollies planted in her garden have suffered significant leaf burn in winter. An 'Oak Leaf' that she planted in a sheltered spot in another garden is doing fine.

American holly

2008-02-10T23:45:00.000-05:00

Are you tempted to dig out that holly seedling that sprung up in your garden and transplant it to a prominent location? Not a good idea. It's unlikely to turn into a good plant. If you want a holly, buy one. American holly varieties are selected to meet stringent criteria.(1) Many are culled, but few are chosen. Professor Elwin Orton of Rutgers, one of the best-known holly experts in the United States, laid out his criteria for selection in a lecture to a group of amateurs that I heard several years ago. In addition to the regular, Christmas-tree shape and dense foliage we all expect, Orton wanted lustrous, dark green leaves. In female plants he insisted on abundant, large berries that color bright red early in the season without a hint of orange. Quite a demanding set of criteria to meet. Rather than conforming to the Ortonic Idea of a holly, your dug-up seedlings are likely to turn into spindly plants with dull grey-green foliage and lackluster berries.

Who could complain about the berries on the American holly in the tree lawn in front of 201-203 East 9th Street near Third Place? They're beautifully red and phenomenally abundant. The plant is one of three American hollies used as street trees at that corner.

Berries from the East Ninth Street tree, pictured at the top of the page, make you think it's Christmas in February. People have been using holly as a seasonal decoration as far back as the time of the ancient Romans. Christianity borrowed the use of holly from the Romans, who used it in their December Saturnalia celebration.

Hollies aren't very commonly used as street trees in this area. Savannah is famous for its American hollies and Foster hollies (an American holly hybrid) planted along the streets, but I can't recall seeing them used in any numbers in New Jersey towns. Three more American hollies are used as street trees on Park Avenue near Seventh Street.

Two large and handsome American hollies are at 825 West Front Street. I would be curious to know what sort of equipment the owner uses to formally prune such large plants.

Another beautiful American holly is at 1122 Hillside Avenue. This tree's foliage is dense, even though it hasn't been sheared, because it gets plenty of light. Hollies in the wild are typically less dense than this. They're an understory species, and in low-light conditions hollies have fewer leaves.

Foster hollies (Ilex x attenuata), naturally occurring hybrids of American holly (Ilex opaca) and another holly species, can be found in nurseries in this area if you look; they're certainly not common. They're not as cold-hardy as American hollies. The most common version seen here is Foster #2, which does fine in our climate. The only examples I know in Plainfield are in my own garden. Unfortunately, they're not visible from the street. If anyone knows of a Foster holly visible from the street, I would be glad to hear about it. (I'm also on the lookout for photogenic examples of English holly, Nellie R. Stevens holly, San Jose holly or close relative, longstalk holly, blue holly, or any unusual holly.) Foster hollies are recognizable by their narrow, delicate leaves, pictured below.

(1) Holly fanciers have selected probably thousands of named American holly varieties (clones). Hollies, The Genus Ilex, by Fred C. Galle (Timber Press 1997) provides individual descriptions of hundreds of those varieties. I counted 27 descriptions of varieties with names beginning with "A" alone. A more easily usable guide to the hollies is Hollies, A Gardener's Guide, published by the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in 1993.

Beech

2008-01-27T23:56:00.000-05:00

Or shall I rather the sad verse repeat

Which on the beech's bark I lately writ?
--- Virgil(1)

Did you think that carving words in beech bark was the invention of modern vandals? Not so. The smooth bark of beech trees has been used as a writing surface for millennia. Our word book comes from Old English boc (writing tablet), which derives from Old English beece (beech).(2) The most famous beech inscription

D. Boone

Cilled a Bar
On Tree
In Year 1760.

is preserved in a museum in Louisville.(3) The tree on which it was carved fell in 1916 at about 365 years of age. But, please, let the time-honored tradition of beech-carving die. Once the beech's thin bark is breached, the tree can be invaded by fungi that cause bark disease and heart rot. (4)

Plainfield has numerous beautiful beeches of two species, American (Fagus grandifolia) and European (Fagus sylvatica). There is a fine American beech at 975 Glenwood Avenue.

As this tree shows, beeches can be as beautiful in winter, when their smooth bark is most evident, as they are in summer. Another handsome American beech is at 1515 Charlotte Road.

Beeches hang on to their withered leaves long after most deciduous trees are bare, as shown by the Charlotte Road beech, which was photographed November 25. American beeches typically don't get the attention that their close relatives, European beeches, receive. European beech exists in dozens (hundreds?) of varieties (clones) selected for leaf color and shape. Copper beeches are European varieties. So are the much rarer cutleaf beeches. American beeches have toothed leaves. Teeth are lacking from the Europeans.

The massive European beech pictured at the top of the page is at 996 Central Avenue at the corner of Randolph Road.

Another handsome European beech is at 1077 Hillside Avenue.

1424 Prospect Avenue also has a very fine European beech.

Why aren't beeches used as street trees? They don't grow well when their root systems are restricted or where the soil is compacted by foot or vehicular traffic.(5) Beeches cast dense shade in which it is almost impossible to grow grass. They're at their best used as specimen trees in a large space.

Dan, a blogger from Spain who does a tree blog in English, wrote to point out that he had photographs of pine nuts on his blog. The photographs are great.
http://tree-species.blogspot.com/search?q=pine+nuts
He also gives a step-by-step pictorial rundown of what he had to do to collect the cones, extract the nuts, and remove various protective layers. Read his posting and you will know exactly what to do should you encounter a pine cone from a stone pine, the source of most of the world's commercial pine nut crop. (You will also understand why you pay so much for the nuts at the grocery store.)

(1) cited in A Natural History of North American Trees, Donald Culross Peattie, Houghton Mifflin Company 2007, p. 163.

(2) Dictionary of Etymology, Robert K. Barnhart, ed., The H.W. Wilson Company 1988, p.106.

(3) Native Trees for North American Landscapes, Guy Sternberg with Jim Wilson, Timber Press 2004, p. 181.

(4) Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Charles Fergus, Stackpole Books 2002, p. 103. Fergus catalogues a large number of wild animal species that use beech nuts as food. Donald Culross Peattie, cited above, quotes Audubon at length on beeches and the now-extinct passenger pigeon.

(5) The Trees of Union County College, Thomas M. Ombrello, Union County College 1997, number 10.

White oak

2008-01-13T23:56:00.000-05:00

Is this the tree that launched a thousand ships? It is indeed. White oak, an American native, reached the pinnacle of its maritime glory during the War of 1812. The white oak planks of the U.S.S. Constitution repelled British cannonballs so well that the ship became known as "Old Ironsides". After a few encounters with the Constitution and its sister ship, the British admiralty forbade its frigates from engaging the American 44-gun frigates in single combat.

William Bryant Logan relates the story of the U.S.S. Constitution in his 2005 book Oak: The Frame of Civilization.(1) Mr. Logan claims a central role for oak (not just white oak) in human development. He reviews evidence that early man was dependent on acorns as a staple food and presents a map showing the distribution of oak trees to be conterminous with the locations of settled civilizations in the northern hemisphere. You already knew, no doubt, that oak made durable furniture, sturdy ships, and watertight barrels. Did you also know that oak galls made ink and that oak tannins tanned leather? Did you know that oak was used in shipbuilding even before it helped Jason and the Argonauts find the golden fleece? Mr. Logan lays out all these details of mankind's reliance on oak in his informative book.

Oak is a complicated genus. There are as few as 250 or as many as 600 species of oak, depending on whose classification you accept. To complicate life, many oak species interbreed with one another. Oaks are conventionally divided into two groups: the white oak group with white oak as its most typical species, and the red oak group with red oak as its exemplar. The white oak group has leaves and leaf lobes that are rounded. The red oak group has leaves and lobes that end in points with bristle tips.

Acorns of the white oak group mature in one growing season; the reds require two seasons. White oak group acorns have a lower tannin content than the reds. The tannin content difference represents divergent survival "strategies". Tannins protect acorns by imparting a bitter taste and by interfering with animals' protein digestion. Squirrels are quite tuned into differences in tannin content. They eat white oak acorns immediately and bury reds. With less tannin protection, acorns of the white oak group are obliged to begin to grow shortly after contacting the ground in the fall. If the squirrels don't eat the white oak acorns immediately, it's too late. The squirrels can permit the very tannic and slower-to-sprout acorns of the red oak group to marinate underground during the winter.(2) People can eat acorns any time they care to do so by leeching out the tannins with water. Recipes abound on the Internet.

The grand white oak at 1310 Central Avenue pictured in leaf at the top of the page and leafless below is 5 or 6 feet in diameter. Surely well over a century old. Sadly, one sees limbs lopped at the property line on the left side. (There ought to be a law.) The tree illustrates the characteristic white oak habit and the vast spread of a mature white oak's limbs. The spread limits the species' use as a curbside planting.

Another fine white oak is at 705 Ravine Road.

Most white oaks are easily recognizable in the winter by their blotchy bark. The blotchiness is caused by an apparently harmless fungal infestation.

Xavier Canela sends word from Spain that he has a blog about the trees of Barcelona: http://arbresdebarcelona.blogspot.com/ The blog is in Catalan. If you can read one of the Romance languages, you can understand it without much difficulty. One of his posts regards Pinus pinea, the source of most of the pine nuts on the market and probably best known as the pines of Rome. (The pines of Rome, it turns out, are natives of Iberia.)

(1) Oak: The Frame of Civilization, William Bryant Logan, W.W. Norton and Company 2005, pp. 230-249.

(2) A Field Guide to Eastern Forests, John Kricher and Gordon Morrison, Houghton Mifflin 1998, p. 84.

Tulip Trees

2007-12-29T13:37:00.000-05:00

Tulip trees reserve their charms for those who seek them out. Demure in all seasons, tulip trees are now discreetly displaying their unusual fruits.

The fruits hang on into the winter even after dispersing their winged seeds into the wind. Spring brings the "tulips", pale yellow blooms tinged with orange and green. Their unassertive colors can blend into the foliage and fail to catch your eye. But when you spot the flowers unexpectedly you are rewarded with the feeling of having discovered a secret.

Once you have seen a tulip tree leaf, you will never mistake it for that of another species. The distinctive shape has been described as that of a maple leaf with its tip cut off. The leaves turn a handsome yellow in the fall.

There is a massive and beautiful tulip tree at 443 Stelle Avenue near the corner of Field.

A tulip tree at 1001 Central Avenue illustrates two of the species' most typical features: a long, straight, slightly tapered trunk with no branches near the ground and a rather narrow crown. The form is distinctive enough that tulip trees can be recognized from a distance even when they are leafless.

970 Hillside Avenue provides another example of a mature tulip tree.

Tulip trees are also called tulip poplars or yellow poplars. In fact, they're neither true poplars nor closely related to the poplars (genus Populus). In the lumberyard, however, tulip tree wood is called poplar and is commonly sold for use as interior trim. The wood is among the lightest in weight of the hardwoods and is not particularly strong.

Tulip trees grow fast and become huge. In a favorable environment they can grow to 200 feet tall with ten foot diameter trunks.(1) Their massive size and weak wood make them susceptible to damage by high winds. For that reason tulip trees are not often used as street trees.

Light and easily worked wood can have advantages, however. Tulip tree trunks were hollowed out by several native American tribes to make canoes. It is said that Daniel Boone took his family and belongings down the Ohio River in a sixty-foot tulip tree canoe, abandoning Kentucky for the Spanish Territory in the late 1700s. (2)

(1) Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Charles Fergus. Stackpole Books 2002, p. 148.

(2) A Natural History of North American Trees, Donald Culross Peattie. Houghton Mifflin 2007, p. 260.

Elm envy

2007-12-16T12:15:00.000-05:00

The devastation wrought by Dutch elm disease in the middle of the last century left Americans largely bereft of our favorite street tree. We lost no time in trying to find substitutes that could reproduce the look of American elm and resist Dutch elm disease. Japanese Zelkova, Zelkova serrata, was seized upon as a tree that could replace American elms along roadways.

Zelkova was little known until a few decades ago. It is rare to encounter a mature one. In the last few decades the tree has become a very popular elm substitute. The tree shares the American elm's vase-like habit, but Zelkova's vase is typically squatter. The habit is also stiffer. American elm limbs undulate as they ascend. Not so the limbs of Zelkova, which lacks the elm's sinuous grace.

The tree has a handsome and distinctive bark. The young bark has very prominent lenticels(1), horizontal striations, that are reminiscent of the bark of some cherry trees. Older bark is rough and peeling.

The unusual bark and vase-like habit make this species easily recognizable even when it is leafless.

One peculiarity of Zelkova that has the potential to cause trouble as the tree matures is the density of its branching pattern. An entire forest of limbs emerges from the trunk a short distance above ground level. The Central Avenue tree pictured above illustrates the tremendous branching density. The Putnam Avenue Zelkova pictured below shows how numerous limbs typically originate in a bunch.

One wonders what is going to happen to all those limbs when they get large. You would have to bet that some will be crowded out and will drop to the street. Professor Edward. F. Gilman of the University of Florida (formerly of Rutgers) has drawn attention to this problem. In a presentation at the New Jersey Shade Tree Federation meeting in 2006, Professor Gilman spoke of Zelkova as a special case among shade trees in that it needs careful pruning for the first two or three decades of its life in order to develop a healthy form. Is he being overly pessimistic? Hard to know. There just aren't that many mature Zelkovas around on which to base a judgment. If he is right, the enormous vogue that Zelkova now enjoys is going to lead to large maintenance expenses for the municipalities planting them in great numbers. The only mature Zelkova I know is at 9 Remington Avenue in Edison (off Park Avenue). That tree has a diameter at breast height of about three feet and is quite a beautiful specimen. Pruning history? I haven't a clue.

Another American elm substitute that is growing in popularity, but still a rarity, is lacebark elm, Ulmus parvifolia. Like Zelkova, lacebark elm is resistant to Dutch elm disease. Kathryn Uhrich and Jeff Holmes recently planted two lacebark elms in the curbside strip in front of their house at 1441 Evergreen Avenue. They are the only lacebark elms I know in Plainfield. The peeling bark of this species is exceptionally beautiful. These two elms are an exciting addition to Plainfield's urban forest.

Siberian elm, Ulmus pumila, is yet another elm with resistance to Dutch elm disease. There is an example of this species near the Muhlenberg Hospital Park Avenue parking lot. The first tree on your right as you turn off of Park Avenue onto Laramie is a mature Siberian elm.

Michael Dirr's Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, the Bible for many gardeners, calls this species "one of...the world's worst trees" because of its susceptibility to damage by wind and insects.(2) I think Dirr is exaggerating. I have seen many attractive Siberian elms (not in Plainfield, where it is uncommon), and I find the coarse, chaotic bark quite attractive.

Finally, some people are still planting American elms. Dutch elm disease-resistant varieties include 'Princeton', 'Liberty', and others.

.
(1) Lenticels are loosely bundled groups of cells that permit gas exchange, allowing the tree to "breathe" through its bark.

(2) Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, fifth edition, Michael A. Dirr, Stipes Publishing 1998, p. 1048.

Norway maple

2007-12-02T22:19:00.000-05:00

"Norway maples should be banned from the United States." Bill Nierstedt, Plainfield tree guru and head of the City's Planning Division, made this xenophobic comment three years ago. I have waited in vain since then for him to be invited to repeat this hate speech for a national audience on Lou Dobbs' television program. Despairing after three years of ever seeing Bill on television, I decided to reprint his words here.

Bill is too late. The genie is out of the bottle. The horse is out of the barn. Norway maples are here. Norway maples are among the most common street trees in Plainfield. These European imports are perhaps the most numerous street trees in the eastern United States.

It has to be admitted that their bright yellow autumn foliage is quite attractive.

Some varieties have maroon foliage all season.

They're handsome trees. Arthur Plotnik's The Urban Tree Book describes their regular, lollipop form as looking like a tree drawn by a child.(1)

So what's the problem? Norway maples cast an inky shade in which very little can grow. They make a dense network of subsurface roots that quickly suck every bit of moisture from the soil and that lift sidewalks. Any gardener knows that to dig a hole near a Norway maple is to dig a hole in wood. Tight-angle crotches make the trees more susceptible than most to storm damage. Drive around Plainfield after a storm and take note of what kinds of limbs you see blocking the road. Mostly maples, many Norways.

But Norway maples' most egregious offense is that they breed faster than the natives (and I'm sure that it's this fact that most distresses Mr. Nierstedt). Norway maples are the most sucessful reproducers that I know. They put dandelions to shame. In a hospitable habitat like Plainfield, each tree manages to produce thousands of seedlings each year. The seedlings carpet the ground and are difficult to uproot. Those that grow in a lawn eventually succumb to repeated mowing, but what about the rest? They're extremely shade-tolerant and so have no trouble at all growing up in the middle of a mature hedge. They also have no trouble growing up in the middle of a mature forest. They leaf out earlier than most plants and hold their leaves later into the fall, giving them a longer growing season.(2) Norway maples are crowding native species out of our parks and forests.(3)

They're taking over the urban landscape as well. How many hedges have you seen that started out as privet and ended up as maple? Homeowners tire of struggling to uproot the very tenacious maple invaders and instead just shear the maples along with their hedging plants.

What happens if the maple seedlings are left to their own devices for a few years? They make a Norway maple jungle. Such jungles are easily found in Plainfield. The maple jungle pictured below is on Belvidere Avenue near Berkeley.

Don't mix up Norway maples with sugar maples. Although the leaves of the two species are quite similar, the trees are easily distinguished by their bark. Norway maple bark is brownish grey with shallow furrows.

Sugar maple bark is silvery grey and shaggy.

Found: a big, beautiful ginkgo.

955 Woodland Avenue has a mature ginkgo as beautiful as the hacked Netherwood Station ginkgo used to be.(4) It's worth a visit.

Dan Damon sent photographs of a handsome ginkgo in the 900 block of Central Avenue. His photographs are below. Dan made the ultimate ginkgo sacrifice. He got up close and personal with the stinking ginkgo fruits and tracked some of them into his car. For his efforts he got great photographs of fruits that are adapted to fend off even dinosaurs with their odor.

(1) The Urban Tree Book, Arthur Plotnik, Three Rivers Press 2000, p. 95.

(2) http://www.earthworksboston.org/articles/UWnorway.htm

(3) To make the threat quite local, Professor Thomas Ombrello of Union County College observes that "There are numerous parks in our area where Norway Maples are displacing the native tree species." The Trees of Union County College, 2nd edition, Thomas M. Ombrello, Union County College 1997, p. 43.

An Overview of Nonindigenous Plant Species in New Jersey, (www.state.nj.us/dep/parksandforests/natural/InvasiveReport.pdf) published by the state Department of Environmental Protection in 2004, cites Norway maple among 29 "invasive nonindigenous plant species documented to aggressively invade...natural plant communities in New Jersey."

The Invasive Plant Council of New York State includes Norway maple on its list of the "Top 20 Invasive Plants in NYS" (http://counties.cce.cornell.edu/chenango/hortnr/other/weeds.htm#regular).

The Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources lists Norway maple among "serious threats to our native ecosystems" (http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/forestry/wildplant/invasivelist.aspx).

(4) See April 19 Plainfield Trees post on Ginkgo biloba. http://plainfieldtrees.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html

Sugar maples

2007-11-18T23:30:00.000-05:00

Sad to say, they're in decline. Everyone's favorite tree at this season, sugar maples are declining where we most would like them to be at their best: lining suburban streets. The trees seem most suited to a rural environment. The stresses of suburban living get them down.

What's the problem? Sugar maples are happiest in loose, moist soil. The dry, compacted soils of curbside planting strips disagree with them. More serious problems for sugar maples are urban pollution, road salt, and acid rain. The bottom line: their numbers are falling in this area.

Many writers have commented on the decline of the sugar maple in the suburban northeast. The most poignant account I have seen is in Brian Donahue's book, Reclaiming the Commons. It is Mr. Donahue's peculiar utopian goal that every town should have a community farm. In his book he recounts his experience establishing and running such a farm in a bedroom suburb of Boston. Part of his crop was maple syrup harvested from trees on the suburban streets. As years went by, his maple syrup production dried up because the community's trees were dying off, killed by road salts and automotive pollution:

"During the 1980s sugar maples all over town began disappearing, like the elms half a century before them. By the end of the decade it was as if the maples had never existed --- only a handful remained.... The maples were a casualty of the automotive suburb, and their passing demonstrates...how the quest to commute from urban blight to rural sanctuary is self-defeating.... To believe that we can routinely drive great distances to reach an unspoiled landscape full of natural amenities at the end of our journey is a fatal delusion. If we want to live in towns with healthy sugar maples, we simply have to live in them more and drive in and out of them less. We cannot out-commute suburban sprawl."(1)

More problems for sugar maples in our area? Climate change: sugar maples like it cold. The species is often used as the poster-child example of plants that are migrating northward with global warming, as it was in AOL's November 17 report on the latest warming forecast of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.(2)

How about some good news? Plainfield still has some very fine sugar maples. A particularly nice one is at the Van Wyck Brooks house at 563 West 8th Street.

Other good examples are on Watchung Avenue near Colonial Circle, pictured at the top of the page. Sugar maples near 1326 Prospect Avenue, photographed this afternoon, were still making a very attractive display.

A younger tree, photographed three weeks ago, illustrates the fiery brilliance of sugar maple foliage in bright sun.

Maple syrup anyone? European settlers learned about it from Native Americans, for whom it was the primary sweetener. They concentrated sugar maple sap by freezing it and removing the ice or by placing heated stones in it to cause evaporation of water.(3) It takes about 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup.

The quintessential maple leaf is the sugar maple leaf. It is the leaf represented on the Canadian flag. It closely resembles the leaf of Norway maple. The two species can be distinguished at a glance by their bark. Sugar maple bark forms shaggy, platelike scales. Norway maple bark is shallowly furrowed.

This year's sugar maple foliage season is near its end on Plainfield's streets. Have a look if you haven't already and enjoy the show.

(1) Reclaiming the Commons, Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town, Brian Donahue, Yale University Press 1999, pp. 166-171.

(2) http://news.aol.com/story/_a/un-panel-offers-dire-warming-forecast/20071117124909990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

(3) A Natural History of North American Trees, Donald Culross Peattie, Houghton Mifflin 2007, p. 356.

Red: the color of health. Sourwoods, dogwoods, and sweetgums.

2007-11-04T23:55:00.000-05:00

Inspired by the "French paradox" of long lifespans in a population with a high-fat diet, some of us hope to stay healthy by drinking plenty of red wine. Many plants adopt a similar strategy by producing red leaf pigments in the fall. The spectacular reds and maroons that light up the autumn landscape are the colors of anthocyanins, a family of antioxidant compounds. These antioxidants protect plants (and us) against chemical injury caused by oxygen, a highly reactive and dangerous molecule.(1)

Some of the best red foliage is visible in Plainfield now. Red maples, sugar maples, and Japanese maples are famous for their red foliage. One of my favorite small trees is sourwood, Oxydendrum arboreum, a native of the southeastern United States that is scattered around Plainfield in small numbers. A fine example is at Watchung Avenue near the corner of Kensington.

The tree highlights its maroon leaves with cream-colored seeds.

One of the many charms of our native dogwood is its beautiful maroon fall foliage.

Sweetgums, maligned for their production of difficult-to-rake gumballs, more than make up for whatever maintenance problems they cause with a panoply of red fall colors.

Some sweetgums have autumn foliage in yellow tones.

Deciduous plants don't just passively lose their leaves in the fall. They make elaborate preparations for winter. Red antioxidant coloration is part of that preparation. Green leaves are colored by chlorophyll, the molecule that allows plants to capture the energy of sunlight. When the leaves are shed, plants don't allow the chlorophyll to go to waste. They break it down and move the breakdown products to the roots, where they are stored over the winter. With their energy-generating machinery moving into storage, plants are in a vulnerable state. As they lose their chlorophyll, the leaves of some plants gain protective anthocyanins and reddish colors. The latest scientific thinking about why the leaves of those plants turn red in the fall is that additional antioxidative protection in dying leaves permits orderly breakdown and withdrawal of the chlorophyll before the leaves fall. This subject is nicely summarized by Colin Tudge in his recent book, The Tree.(2)

Some autumn leaves develop yellowish tints. Where do those colors come from? Yellow autumn leaf pigments are generally chemicals that have been present all during the growing season and that are unmasked by the absence of chlorophyll. Yellow and orange carotenoids play a role in photosynthesis. They are also antioxidants.(3)

(1) Blueberries are touted as good sources of anthocyanins. A widely cited study found that elderly rats had an improved sense of balance after being fed large quantities of blueberries for weeks.

(2) Colin Tudge, The Tree, A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Crown Publishers, 2006, pp. 357-359. The author points out that new spring leaves and shoots, also particularly vulnerable to injury, have a red tinge in many plants.

(3) Beta-carotene has been a widely used dietary supplement. I suspect that its popularity fell off after scientific studies seemed to indicate that taking it did not offer the hoped-for cardiovascular benefits. Better, it seems, to get your antioxidants by eating plants, not pills.

Poised to inherit the earth: red maples

2007-10-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

Red maples are poised to inherit the earth. The sad facts of this change in the fortunes of red maples were laid out by William K. Stevens in a beautifully written article in the New York Times in 1999.(1) As Mr. Stevens tells the story, red maples, aided and abetted by humans, are taking over the forests of the eastern Unites States, displacing oaks as the dominant species.

Plainfield has numerous red maples (Acer rubrum) as street trees. They're most easily spotted in the spring when their early-blooming bright red flowers catch your eye as you pass.

Red maples are also noticeable in the fall, as their foliage turns red or orange before dropping. The trees can be distinguished easily from the other maples likely to be seen in the area. Unlike sugar or Norway maples, red maple leaves usually have only three lobes, not five. Another clue is their red color: red maple leafstalks, buds, samaras (winged seed cases), and flowers all have some red color. Colorful spring flowers and autumn leaves make for an attractive tree. Red maples' biggest problem is a tendency to split in strong winds, a drawback that it shares with several other maple species.

They are also susceptible to heart rot, leading to wind-snapped trunks.(2)

How are people helping red maples usurp the dominant role in eastern forests? In a multitude of ways. European settlers started the process by cutting down all but about two percent of the eastern forests' trees to make farms. Farming moved westward, and eastern farms were largely left to revert to forest by the early twentieth century. Red maples, although usually inhabitants of wet soils, were very adaptable opportunists.(3) They quickly inserted themselves into the newly open spaces.

Oaks and hickories have thick bark that protects them against forest fires. Thin-skinned red maples are much more likely to be killed to the ground by fires. Modern humans almost completely suppressed forest fires, stripping oaks and hickories of their natural advantage over red maples. Fire suppression had a second effect on the tree balance. Fires created open spaces ideal for light-loving oak seedlings. Maple seedlings are much more shade-tolerant than oaks and thrive in the darker environment created by fire suppression.

We did another favor for red maples by making the landscape very friendly to deer. Vastly expanded deer populations suppress oak numbers by eating huge quantities of acorns.

Yet another boon to red maples was our importation of gypsy moths, prodigious eaters of oak leaves. We also introduced Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight, dealing a knockout blow to other red maple competitors. Finally, there is evidence that red maples are more tolerant of acid rain than most tree species. Man's best friend? Dog. Red maple's best friend? Man.

More on chestnuts: Plainfield has a native American!

Robin Gates wrote that we have an American chestnut in Plainfield. You don't have to trek to Monmouth County to see one. Bill Santoriello planted one at 946 Madison Avenue when he owned that property in 1992. The tree was obtained from The American Chestnut Foundation and is now eight or nine inches in diameter at breast height.

Although the tree will eventually succumb to chestnut blight, it might live a long time. A stand of 200 native chestnut trees about 80 years of age was recently discovered in Georgia (4)

The Plainfield tree recently produced a large crop of chestnuts.

Click on photograph to enlarge.

(1) William K. Stevens, Eastern Forests Change Color as Red Maples Proliferate, New York Times, October 22, 1999.

(2) Charles Fergus, Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Stackpole Books 2002, p. 199.

(3) "Red maple can probably thrive on a wider range of soil types, textures, moisture, pH, and elevation than any other forest species in North America." Russell S. Walters and Harry S. Yawney, Red Maple, in Silvics of North America, U.S. Forest Service, http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/acer/rubrum.htm

(4) The American Chestnut Foundation

Wish-list trees: tupelo and goldenrain tree

2007-10-07T17:42:00.000-04:00

I drive by two of my favorite trees each day on the way to my office. But not in Plainfield. The trees are in Edison. I keep hoping I'll see some in Plainfield. No luck yet.

Tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica, is an American native. The species is clearly native to Edison, to judge from the numbers of them there.

The tree's best season is now, when its glossy green leaves turn crimson before falling. Tupelo is capable of growing to over 100 feet in height but is typically seen as a much smaller tree. Tupelos favor moist ground. The name tupelo comes from the native American Creek language, meaning swamp tree. Its Latin name means water nymph of the woods. The tree is also known as black gum, sour gum, and pepperidge. Pepperidge farm cookies and breads are named for an ancient tupelo growing on the Fairfield Connecticut farm where they were first baked.

The wood of the tupelo has interbraided and cross-woven fibers that make it basically impossible to split(1). Useless for most purposes, the wood is good for the handles of tools that get heavy use. The island of Martha's Vineyard has its own local name for the tree that derives from the wood's use in tools and the island's maritime trade history. Islanders call it "beetlebung tree". Why beetlebung? The wood was so resistant to abuse that it could be used not only for the bungs that plugged barrels, but also for the beetles (mallets) that were used to pound the bungs into place.(2)

Tupelo's foliage is beautiful spring, summer, and fall. The small, oval leaves are glossy and thick; they look as though they should be evergreen. The berries have a very high fat content, making them attractive to a large variety of birds.(3) Why don't we have tupelos in Plainfield? Their only disadvantage is a tap root that makes them a bit difficult to transplant. A minor flaw, I think.

Golden rain tree, Koelreuteria paniculata, is a small Oriental tree that makes a spectacular show of yellow flowers in summer.

Its flowers are followed by papery lantern-like seed capsules, which have an appeal of their own.

Goldenrain trees are the perfect size to fit under overhead utility wires. We should have some of these beautiful little trees in Plainfield.

(1) Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of North American Trees, Houghton Mifflin 2007, p. 383.

(2) "Beetle" is related etymologically to "beat" and "abut".

(3) Charles Fergus, Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Stackpole Books 2002, p.220.

Chestnuts

2007-09-23T23:36:00.000-04:00

Has even one American in 50 seen an American chestnut? We know the tree as wood, not as a tree. American chestnuts supplied countless Plainfield and other American houses of the early twentieth century with beautifully grained lumber for decorative woodwork. The trees are a distant memory. They were the most common tree in eastern American forests until they were largely wiped out by chestnut blight.

When I thought I saw an American chestnut at 1479 West Fourth Street last weekend, I brought my car to a screeching halt and leaped out to get a closer look. Wrong! A Chinese chestnut, the American chestnut's closest mimic. Any species of true chestnut is a rare bird around here. The West Fourth Street Chinese chestnut is the only chestnut I've seen in Plainfield. It's a beautiful tree, and it's quite easy to spot in this season because of its numerous large nuts and its bright green sawtoothed leaves.

Chinese chestnuts are apparently the culprits that introduced chestnut blight when they were imported into this country. The Chinese species, Castanea mollissima, is little bothered by the fungal blight that is so devastating to the American chestnut, Castanea dentata.

The American Chestnut Foundation is trying to breed the disease-resistance of Chinese chestnuts into the American species to bring back American chestnuts from the brink of extinction. Their breeding program has hybridized the two species to select for blight resistance in the offspring. Resistant progeny are being "backcrossed" with American chestnuts over several generations to progressively reduce the Chinese genetic element. The goal is an American chestnut that has Chinese genes for blight resistance. Plainfield attorney Victor King, an American Chestnut Foundation member, has three of the hybrid chestnuts growing on his property in New Hampshire and tells me that they are doing well.

If you want to see an American chestnut, you probably have to leave town. Stump sprouts, seedlings, and saplings are mostly what is left of American chestnuts. I went to see some in Monmouth County's Hartshorne Woods yesterday. Traipsing around in the rain, I found several young trees. American chestnuts have large, sawtoothed leaves that are thin and papery. Chinese chestnut leaves are thick and waxy. American chestnuts have hairless red-brown twigs with sharp buds that project out from the stem at a 45 degree angle. Chinese chestnut twigs are hairy and tan to pea-green. Their buds are rounded and hug the twig.(1)

The trees with sawtoothed leaves on East Second Street between Park and Watchung Avenues are not chestnuts. The leaves are chestnut-like, but the trees are oaks.

At a quick glance there is very little about these trees to make you think oak. Except acorns! In this season the trees have littered the ground with large numbers of big, heavily fringed acorns. Sawtooth oaks provide the most extreme example of oak leaves with bristle tips, one of the defining features of the red oak group. But that subject is for another time.

Note sawtooth oak's extravagantly fringed acorn caps. Click on the photograph to enlarge.

(1) The American Chestnut Foundation's excellent pictorial guide to speciating chestnuts: http://www.mindspring.com/~psisco/www/overview.html

White pine

2007-09-09T23:58:00.000-04:00

The people of New Hampshire and Maine think we fought the American Revolutionary War over pine trees. Not tea. Not taxation without representation. Pine trees. There is some merit to their opinion. The Pine Tree Riot of 1772 was one of the first acts of rebellion leading to the American Revolution.

Why would anyone riot over white pines, the suburban misfit tree that is always ready to drop a heavy limb, sticky with resin, every time the wind gusts? The trees had enormous monetary value in the 18th century. They were the prize trees of the New England forests.

Forest-grown white pines, unlike their suburban counterparts, have a tall, straight trunk that is largely free of branches until it reaches the canopy. They were the tallest trees in the eastern forests.(1) They were also perfect for making ships' masts: long, straight, light, and strong. England, largely deforested since the 16th century, was desperate for mast wood. The English began using white pine, an American native, almost as soon as that species was discovered.(2) The Crown claimed ownership of all white pines over 12 inches in diameter, including those on private property. Attempts at enforcement of that claim ran counter to a large and important colonial industry and led to the Pine Tree Riot in Weare, New Hampshire in 1772, a year before the Boston Tea Party.

Freed of the Crown's constraints after the Revolution, Americans could harvest white pines freely. By about 1900 the once vast stands of white pines had been levelled, the resource depleted. Ironically, reforestation efforts required importing seedling trees from Europe, which had grown its own white pines from American seeds.(3) The seedlings came with a stowaway, white pine blister rust, a serious pest. White pine blister rust remains an important threat to white pines today.

The most serious threat to white pines in Plainfield's suburban landscape is the wind. White pines are quite susceptible to storm damage and drop limbs in all seasons. Many of Plainfield's white pines are battle-scarred. The Cushing Road pine pictured above has a raggedly torn limb remnant that appears to be about 18 inches in diameter. How to cope with this breakage problem if you are blessed with the presence of a large white pine on your property?(4) You don't have to cut the tree down. The longest branches can be tipped back by an arborist every two to three years. The shortened limbs absorb less wind energy and are much less likely to break. If this sort of pruning is skillfully done, the tree looks quite natural.

(1) A white pine on the site of Dartmouth College was reported to be 240 feet tall. Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of North American Trees, Houghton Mifflin 2007, p. 28.

(2) Before they had white pine, the English had had to piece masts together out of Scotch pine. White pine masts could be "single stick" masts. The first English lumber mill in America was built in Maine in 1623. White pine had many uses beyond shipbuilding, and white pine lumbering developed into a large and very profitable industry in New England. White pine lumber paid for sugar, rum, and slaves. For more details see Sam Cox, White Pine Blister Rust, The Story of White Pine, American Revolution, Lumberjacks, and Grizzly Bears, http://landscapeimagery.com/wphistory.html

(3) Sam Cox, cited above.

(4) A clue to distinguishing white pines from other pines likely to be found in this area is the fact that white pine needles are bundled in groups of five.

Copyright Gregory Palermo

Ailanthus altissima, the Tree that Grows in Brooklyn

2007-08-26T20:30:00.000-04:00

Like the Dodgers, ailanthus trees will always be linked to Brooklyn, no matter where else we find them. The trees are scrappers; they grow just about anywhere they want to grow. But was it possible that I was seeing one on the sacred ground of Leiden's 16th century Hortus Botanicus, the oldest botanical garden in northern Europe? In the garden of Clusius, who introduced tulips to Holland? In the tiny Leiden botanical garden, with room for only the choicest specimens? There it was. And not a bad-looking tree at all! The surprise of seeing an ailanthus in the Leiden botanical garden made me look for attractive examples in Plainfield. And I found some.

The ailanthus at 605 Richmond Avenue is nicely shaped and has a trunk diameter of more than two feet.

At 434 E. Second Street on the Richmond side there is another ailanthus with a larger crop of seeds. Ailanthus seeds come in yellow-green or yellow-orange and are quite attractive. The foliage is also handsome.

Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven) is a Chinese import. Of all the trees imported from China, ailanthus is the most widely naturalized in America.(1) It is a phenomenally successful weed. We associate it with Brooklyn because of its role in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ailanthus is the tree of the novel's title, an apt symbol of poor but tough strivers making their way in a harsh environment. What makes ailanthus such a success? It tolerates heat, cold, and urban pollution. It has no trouble at all growing out of cracks in sidewalks, "the only tree that grew out of cement" in the words of the novel. It produces prodigious numbers of seeds. One mature tree can produce 350,000 of them.(2) Ailanthus is a fierce competitor. Its leaves produce a toxin that inhibits the growth of many other plants. Finally, Ailanthus owes part of its success to the fact that it is so hard to get rid of. If you have ever cut one down, you know that the reward for your efforts is several new plants in different spots, each a shoot from the roots of the felled tree.(3) Dan Damon's Plainfield Today recently cited a plausible but fanciful quotation from The Reagan Diaries that had Reagan referring to George W. Bush as a "ne'er-do-well son".(4) Had Reagan been Chinese, he might have called George W a ch'un-ts'ai, a "good-for-nothing ailanthus stump sprout", a common reproach for ne'er-do-well Chinese youths or underachieving students.(5)

Ailanthus has at times enjoyed a better reputation than the one it has now. The tree was used by Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park (whose firm later designed Plainfield's Cedarbrook Park).(6) Charles Sargent, founder of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, wrote in 1888, "for hardiness and rapidity of growth, for the power to adapt to the dirt and smoke, the dust and drought of cities, for the ability to thrive in the poorest soil, for beauty and for usefulness, this tree is one of the most useful which can be grown in this climate...."(7) Ailanthus trees are all around town. The females are easy to spot these days because they are laden with seeds.(8) Note 8 below provides clues that will allow you to identify them in any season.

(1) Shiu Ying Hu, Ailanthus, Arnoldia 39: 29-50, 1979.

(2) Arthur Plotnik, The Urban Tree Book, Three Rivers Press, 2000.

(3) Whoever concocted the myth of Antaeus, the giant whose strength redoubled each time that Hercules threw him to the ground, must have known a weed like Ailanthus altissima.

(4) "Myths are stories that are so true they can never happen." Charles Van Doren, quoted in Columbia College Today, September 1999 issue.

(5) Shih Ying Hu, cited above. As ailanthus stump sprout is used as a metaphor for a spoiled youth, mature ailanthus tree is used as a metaphor for a father.

(6) Arthur Plotnik, cited above.

(7) Shih Ying Hu, cited above.

(8) Male and female flowers are borne on separate trees. The female trees bear seeds, visible now. The leaves are compound, made up of multiple leaflets, each about 5 inches in length. When crushed the leaves have an odor that many people find unattractive. Two features allow you to distinguish ailanthuses from similar plants such as walnuts or sumacs. 1) Each ailanthus leaflet has two to four blunt teeth near its base. 2) Although paired, many of the leaflets are not exactly opposite each other. In the winter the large and distinctive leaf scar helps with identification. Click on photos to enlarge.

Plane trees

2007-08-12T22:30:00.000-04:00

Handel's famous "Largo", best known as ecclesiastical music, began life as a love song --- to a plane tree. The title character of Handel's opera Xerxes makes a fool of himself in the opening act, pouring out his love to a plane tree in the aria "Ombra mai fu", (Never sweeter was the shade of any dear and lovable plant.) Not the first time or the last that the Persians would get bad press in the West or that someone would fall in love with a tree.(1)

Xerxes' beloved plane tree was an Oriental plane tree, one of the parents of the London plane tree that is common on the streets of Plainfield. The other parent is the American sycamore. The two parent species diverged at least 50 million years ago. They evolved separately thousands of miles apart, but were brought together in 17th Century European botanical gardens, where they produced hybrid offspring: the London plane tree.(2) Plane trees get special notice in botany textbooks under the heading, "What is a species?" As a rule, members of a species produce fertile offspring by breeding only with each other, not with members of other species. London plane is an exception to that rule. Like mules, London planes have parents of two different species. Unlike mules, London planes are fertile.

Why "London" plane? During the sooty days of the industrial revolution, the trees were planted in large numbers in London because of their great pollution tolerance. The trees' peeling bark helps them shed damaging pollutants.(3) Sixty percent of London's street trees are said to be London plane trees.(4)

City Councilman Rashid Burney drew my attention to the plane trees of Cedarbrook Avenue. I haven't heard him singing, but I have heard him wax quite lyrical on the subject. Cedarbrook Avenue's street trees are almost all mature plane trees. Their branches merge to form a cathedral-like vault of foliage for almost the entire length of the street. Even when the trees are leafless, they sustain visual interest with their multicolored, peeling bark and the regular rhythm of their placement as one progresses along the street.

The hybrid London plane tree is used in preference to the American sycamore for street tree planting because it is slightly smaller and more disease-resistant. Most of Plainfield's plane trees are London planes, not sycamores. It can be difficult to tell the two species apart.(5) I would identify the two young plane trees on Hillside Avenue between 1108 Hillside and Thornton Avenue as sycamores. Note 5 below provides criteria for speciation.

American sycamores become hollow after about 100 years of age.(6) In centuries past, their hollow trunks provided ready-made barrels; larger trees served as temporary housing.(6) The trees continue to grow for centuries after becoming hollow, producing the largest-diameter trunks of any American hardwood.(7) George Washington measured a sycamore in Ohio at about 13 feet in diameter.(8) The most dramatic account of the huge size of a sycamore was left by John James Audubon. I quote him at length, his words as lyrical as either Xerxes' or Burney's. He describes the early morning exit of a great flock of chimney swallows (chimney swifts) from the hollow trunk of a gigantic sycamore in which they had spent the night:

"Next morning I rose early enough to reach the place long before the least appearance of daylight, and placed my head against the tree. All was silent within. I remained in that posture probably twenty minutes, when suddenly I thought the great tree was giving way, and coming down upon me. Instinctively I sprung from it, but when I looked up to it again, what was my astonishment to see it standing as firm as ever. The Swallows were now pouring out in a black continued stream. I ran back to my post, and listened in amazement to the noise within, which I could compare to nothing else than the sound of a large wheel revolving under a powerful stream. It was yet dusky, so that I could hardly see the hour on my watch, but I estimated the time which they took in getting out at more than thirty minutes. After their departure, no noise was heard within, and they dispersed in every direction with the quickness of thought."(9)

(1) Herodotus' original telling has Xerxes adorning the tree with gold and setting a guardian over it in perpetuity.

(2) Peter H. Raven, Ray F. Evert, and Susan E. Eichhorn, Biology of Plants, W.H. Freeman and Company Worth Publishers, Sixth edition, 1999, p. 248. The "x" in the scientific name, Platanus x acerifolia, indicates a hybrid species. The oriental plane tree, Platanus orientalis, is native to southern Europe and Anatolia. The American sycamore, Platanus occidentalis, is native to eastern North America.

(3) Colin Tudge, The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Crown Publishing, 2006, p. 157. Another feature that makes London plane suitable for street tree use is its ability to withstand extensive and even brutal pruning. Pollarding (maintaining the major limbs as short stubs by severe yearly pruning) is unusual in the U.S., but Europeans don't hesitate to pollard plane trees to restrain their size. Rows of pollarded plane trees are a very common sight in European cities.

(4) Arthur Plotnik, The Urban Tree Book, Three Rivers Press, 2000, p. 63.

(5) The most reliable criterion for speciation is the fruits, which occur singly on sycamores and in pairs on London planes. In addition, the leaves of sycamores are less deeply lobed, and their bark is said to be whiter. Although smaller than American sycamores, London planes are not small. The two tallest hardwood trees in Britain are London planes according to Thomas Parkenham (in Meetings with Remarkable Trees, Random House, 1997, p. 78).

(6) Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of North American Trees, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, p. 373.

(7) Peattie, cited above, p. 372.

(8) Peattie, cited above, p. 373. The same tree was also measured twenty years later by the great French botanist and explorer Andre Michaux. Peattie cites the largest sycamore on record as having been measured in 1802 at 47 feet in circumference, about 15 feet in diameter at breast height.

(9) John James Audubon, "The Chimney Swallow", excerpt from The Birds of America, quoted at greater length in Ohio-Birds: http://www.ohiobirds.org/news.php?News_ID=108

Japanese Pagoda Tree

2007-07-29T23:00:00.000-04:00

Dr. David Hosack is best known to history for the death of a famous patient. He ministered to Alexander Hamilton after Hamilton's duel with Aaron Burr. But Hosack had more success as high-profile botanist than high-profile physician. This Columbia College professor established the country's first botanical garden in 1801. His garden, now the site of Rockefeller Center, contained the first Japanese pagoda tree recorded in the U.S.(1) The original tree no longer exists, but Japanese pagoda trees have had a successful career in this country as shade trees.

Plainfield has small numbers of pagoda trees scattered around town as street trees, and they are in bloom now. The largest example I know is on Central Avenue between Second and Front Streets against Cooper's Office Furniture store. This nicely shaped tree has a trunk diameter of more than two feet.

Another handsome example is in the curbside strip at 1325 Evergreen Avenue, just to the right of the front walk as you face the house.

In the 1100 block of Park Avenue, opposite 1106, is another attractive pagoda tree, photographed in bloom on July 25.

Pagoda trees have been cultivated in the Orient for thousands of years. They were often planted near Buddhist temples. A gracefully shaped tree with delicate, feathery foliage, the pagoda tree is largely pest-free and is tolerant of dry soil and pollution --- very well suited to be a street tree. It offers the great advantage of flowering in midsummer, when few other trees are in bloom. Its fruit also is ornamental, resembling a bright green string of shrink-wrapped peas.

The tree grows quite large. Martha's Vineyard claims to have the oldest and largest example in North America. The island's giant pagoda tree was transported from the Orient in a flower pot in 1837 by a sea captain. He planted it in front of his new house in the center of Edgartown, where it still stands. The tree now has a diameter of about 7 feet at breast height. The telephone pole in the photograph passing between two of the tree's limbs provides a sense of scale.

The Japanese pagoda tree has a confusing overabundance of names. The tree originates from China, not Japan, and is also known as Chinese scholar tree. To add to the confusion, the botanical name was changed several years ago from Sophora japonica to Styphnolobium japonicum.

More on Bradford pears:

John Louise, chief of the Plainfield Shade Tree Bureau, tells me that his men don't call Bradford pears by their name. They call them "overtime trees". Another one of them split recently in front of 1433 Evergreen Avenue, losing a large limb. The wound, depicted below, shows bark trapped in what was the tight angle between limb and trunk. That trapped bark prevented the wood of those two parts from knitting together to make a solidly constructed tree, leading to the splitting so typical of Bradford pears.

Ashes:

The New York Times recently ran a front-page article on the existential threat to the baseball bat tree posed by an insect pest, emerald ash borer. I plan a posting on Plainfield's ashes and would appreciate hearing about noteworthy specimens.

(1) Leslie Turek "Plants in Historic Landscapes", Radcliffe Seminars, 1995 (http://www.leslie-turek.com/LandscapePapers/PagodaTree.html)

Bradford pear, beautiful but breakable

2007-07-15T22:00:00.000-04:00

How do we love thee? Let me count the ways. For thy beautiful (if malodorous) white flowers in April! For thy symmetry, thy cone-shaped crown! For thy rapid growth!

Bradford pear (Pyrus calleryana 'Bradford') is surely one of the most popular trees for planting in the eastern United States. But our collective passion for this tree leads to broken hearts, not lasting relationships. Bradford pear is genetically programmed for a short life that often ends catastrophically.

The tree splits apart in storms because of the way it is constructed. The limbs extend out from the trunk at very narrow angles. This tight-angled branching pattern traps bark between trunk and limb. Instead of knitting together as they grow, the trunk and limb are separated by bark, with no bond holding them together. If they don't split, Bradford pears can be expected to live for about 30 years.(1) Many disappear because of splitting long before reaching that age.

The Bradford pear at 937 Hillside Avenue was planted 10-12 years ago. The photograph above shows its condition after loss of one of its three major limbs in the fall of 2006. Notice that the other two limbs have begun to split apart. The photograph below shows the tree from the other side. The crack follows the line of trapped bark.

Below: the same tree on June 7, 2007.

Below: The same tree three weeks later.

Its neighbor at 930 Hillside, planted at the same time and pictured below, has been reinforced by steel bolts to help to hold it together. It illustrates the good looks that make Bradford pears so popular. Notice the narrow-angle branching.

The tree at the top of the page, on West Fourth Street just west of Plainfield Avenue, is rather a long-term survivor. It was planted in about 1990 by a civic group in front of what was then the Plainfield Health Center building as part of a beautification project. City Councilman Elliott Simmons was one of the planners and planters of that project (but the blame for the choice of Bradford pear falls on me, not on Councilman Simmons).

Also still attractive is a row of Bradford pears on Leland Avenue at Cook School.

The Bradford pears on the Randolph Road side of Muhlenberg Hospital have not done quite as well. They look like a row of amputees. In fairness, it appears that not all of the amputations were spontaneous. I would guess that someone has pruned some of them to try to prevent splitting. That sort of pruning is not at all easy to do in an effective and attractive way because all of the major limbs typically spring from the trunk at roughly the same height above ground. Worse, as the tree gets larger, those closely spaced branch points intersect each other. The corrective pruning, to the extent that it can be done, tends to eliminate the symmetry of the crown that is one of the tree's attractions.

The name "Bradford pear" looks as American as apple pie, but this Bradford shares no bloodlines with the governor of the colony at Plymouth. The tree is a Chinese import. Although Bradford pear is sterile, attempts to breed less split-prone varieties of Pyrus calleryana have yielded trees that are capable of reproduction. They interbreed with Bradford pear and their brood has become an invasive pest.(2)

Lou Dobbs hasn't tuned into this Chinese threat yet, but the USDA Forest Service hasn't missed it, recently honoring the trees as "Weed of the Week".(3) Invasive.org, a joint program of the University of Georgia and the USDA, offers this(4): "Do not plant Bradford pear. Seedlings and shallow-rooted plants can be pulled when soil is moist. Small trees need to be dug up or pulled out...ensuring removal of the root system. Large trees should be cut down and stumps treated with an appropriate systemic herbicide...or ground up to prevent resprouting. If cutting is not possible, trees can be girdled...by cutting through the bark all around the trunk, about 6" above the ground." How do we kill thee? Let me count the ways.

1 http://www.invasive.org/eastern/midatlantic/pyca.html

2 http://www.invasive.org/eastern/midatlantic/pyca.html

3 http://www.na.fs.fed.us/fhp/invasive_plants/weeds/callery_pear.pdf

4 http://www.invasive.org/eastern/midatlantic/pyca.html

Cedars, gods, and Gilgamesh

2007-06-29T15:53:00.000-04:00

From far off they saw the Cedar Mountain,
sacred to Ishtar, where the gods dwell,
the slopes of it steep, and rich in cedars
with their sharp fragrance and pleasant shade.(1)

The most stately of trees, the cedars should be used only as specimen plants, according to tree guru Michael Dirr.(2) The handsome cedar at Evergreen School is used just that way. Standing alone on the lawn and set against the backround of the brick building, the tree catches our eye and invites our admiration. Still somewhat youthful, the cedar has not yet developed the broadening and horizontality of its crown that come with advancing age. Cedars live for many hundreds of years. Give it time.

The cedar's majestic beauty is complemented by rich biblical, historic, and literary associations. The Phoenicians built their ships of decay-resistant cedar of Lebanon and carried on an export trade in the wood. The Palermo Stone --- I couldn't resist --- provides the earliest written record of international timber trade. It documents the transport of 40 shiploads of cedar logs from Lebanon to Egypt in about 2600 B.C.(3) The First Book of Kings relates that Solomon's temple was built using cedar supplied by the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre. Cedar wood was quite valuable in the ancient world, as can be gleaned from the words of Humbaba, the monster charged with guarding the sacred cedar forest in The Epic of Gilgamesh:

Gilgamesh, have mercy.

Let me live here in the Cedar Forest.

If you spare my life I will be your slave.

I will give you as many cedars as you wish.

You are king of Uruk by the grace of Shamash,

honor him with a cedar temple

and a glorious cedar palace for yourself.

All this is yours, if only you spare me.(4)

Cedars of Lebanon have been under attack by man in their native range at least since the time of Gilgamesh, 4700 years ago. The only serious attempt to protect the trees from ruthless exploitation until very recent times was made by the Roman emperor Hadrian, who placed boundaries around the cedar forests and declared them his imperial domain. Lebanon, whose flag includes an image of a cedar, has only a few square miles of cedar forest left.(5)

None of the native American trees that we commonly refer to as red or white cedar is a true cedar (genus Cedrus). Our "cedars" are junipers, arborvitae, false cypresses and others. The true cedars are all imports: cedar of Lebanon and its subspecies Atlas cedar and deodar cedar.(6) Atlas cedars, from the mountains of northern Africa, are quite common in our area, represented mostly by varieties with blue-grey foliage called blue Atlas cedars. There is a blue Atlas cedar on the Evergreen Avenue side of 1040 Hillside Avenue.

In nearby Middlesex County the weeping form of blue Atlas cedar enjoys enormous popularity; it is frequently found ornamenting curbside mailboxes.

The most striking example of weeping blue Atlas cedar I have seen, on Park Avenue in South Plainfield, looms over the sidewalk like a giant praying mantis waiting to snatch up and devour an unsuspecting passerby.

Deodar cedar is native to the Himalayas and is the national tree of Pakistan. I would identify the Evergreen School cedar as a deodar because of its long, flexible needles. The name deodar is Hindi and comes from Sanskrit devadaru "divine wood", another link between cedars and the gods.(7) I have stood in the shade of a cedar with a trunk diameter of 10 feet and felt the divine connection myself. Do we dare to use these trees as mailbox adornments?

(1) Gilgamesh, A New English Version, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Free Press, 2004, page 118.

(2) Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, Michael Dirr, Stipes Publishing, 1998, page 197.

(3) Peter Ian Kuniholm, Wood, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, Eric Meyers, ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/wood.html

(4) Gilgamesh, page 125.

(5) Rania Masri, 1995, The Cedars of Lebanon: Significance, Awareness, and Management of the Cedrus Libani in Lebanon, http://almashriq.hiof.no/lebanon/300/360/363/363.7/transcript.html

The Epic of Gilgamesh poet as proto-environmentalist? Some commentators, including Rania Masri, make the case that Gilgamesh's cutting of the sacred cedars was intended to portray man's first great crime against the environment. They suggest that the gods forbade human entry to the Cedar Forest because they knew that humans would destroy the forest.

(6) I have taken the approach of the "lumpers", that there is one cedar species, cedar of Lebanon, and that Atlas and deodar cedars are geographic variants. Some botanists regard Atlas and deodar cedars as separate species, Cedrus atlantica and Cedrus deodara.

(7) For etymology aficionados: Hindi deodar from Sanskrit devadaru, "divine wood". The first half of the word is related to our words divine, deity, deus, and Zeus. The second half is related to durum, druid, tree, and true.

Dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)

2007-06-17T23:52:00.000-04:00

Those who think of New Jersey as home to such phenomena as the Sopranos, suburban sprawl, and pay-to-play politics should know this: the Garden State is also home to the best collection of dawn redwoods in the country. Matthew Belsky of Skidmore College, who keeps track of such things(1), finds six of the country's ten biggest, best, and oldest dawn redwoods within the borders of New Jersey. (You might not find one on the grounds of the Bada Bing! Club --- four of the best trees are in Princeton --- but dawn redwoods can be found if you look.) We have a few dawn redwoods in Plainfield. The most easily visible dawn redwood I know of in town is at 527 Belvidere Avenue between Seventh Street and South Avenue.

City Councilman Cory Storch made me aware of a dawn redwood that I had previously missed at 701 Belvidere Avenue. The tree is next to the driveway on Ravine Road.

A former owner of 1165 Hillside Avenue tells me that the dawn redwood in the backyard (visible over the roof of the house) was planted in the mid-1960s.

Dawn redwoods and bald cypresses both lose their needles in winter. The two species are distinguishable from one another by a few easily recognizable features. Dawn redwoods have "armpits" beneath their large branches, giving the trunk a heavily buttressed appearance. For the most part, dawn redwood twigs appear opposite each other roughly parallel to the ground; bald cypress twigs are arrayed in a spiral around the branch as seen in the end-on photograph below.

Also, dawn redwoods have larger leaves. The foliage is shown at about 1.3 times the actual size.

The photograph shows that the dawn redwood's leaves are opposite each other. If you hold a bald cypress twig almost up to your nose, you can see that its leaves are alternate, not opposite.

Bald cypresses are hard to find around here. Ambleside Gardens on Route 206 in Hillsborough has one that was planted in 1966 just inside the entrance to the nursery. There is another at 6 Calvert Avenue East in Edison, just off Grove Avenue.

Dawn redwood buttressing is well seen in a tree planted in 1949 at Princeton's Marquand Park. The size-reference dog in the photograph weighs 52 lbs.

As the photograph shows, the base of a mature dawn redwood spreads to become quite massive. This feature limits the usefulness of the species as a street tree. Maplewood, however, has used them as street trees since the 1950s and is rather well-known for its dawn redwoods. In my experience, young dawn redwoods are not at all tolerant of drought, another serious limitation for street tree use.

Dawn redwood was first discovered as a fossil in 1941 by a Japanese scientist working in occupied China during World War II. He assumed that the tree had been extinct for millions of years and created the first genus for an extinct plant, Metasequoia. In the same year, a Chinese scientist who had fled to China's remote interior to escape the Japanese invasion discovered a living example of an unfamiliar tree, identified five years later as the same species as the fossil dawn redwood. Seeds were sent to Harvard's Arnold Arboretum and distributed from there around the U.S. in 1948. The growth of dawn redwoods is legendarily fast. The tallest dawn redwood in this country is 140 feet tall, but the tree is not yet 70 years old.

(1) http://www.skidmore.edu/gis/research/metasequoia/TopTrees.htm

Catalpa

2007-06-03T17:48:00.000-04:00

Big, heart-shaped leaves that taper to a long point, showy white blooms, extravagantly long seed pods, and a bold winter silhouette --- everything about catalpas demands your attention. The exotic look shouldn't surprise; Catalpa speciosa is the nothernmost member of a family(1) of mostly tropical vines and trees that includes trumpet vines and Jacarandas.

The trees are in bloom now. A handsome example is at 806 Third Place near the corner of Crescent Avenue. The tree is just to the right of the driveway as you face the house.

Catalpa speciosa's native range is the midwest around Illinois, but farmers spread it around the country because the tree's wood makes good fence posts; it is very resistant to rot. Catalpas are also planted because their major pest, Catalpa sphinx caterpillar, makes excellent fishing bait. Professor Edward Gilman, formerly of Rutgers and a leading tree authority, reports that the caterpillar is juicy and has very tough skin, just what you want for catching catfish.(2) The caterpillars can be purchased online. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, Audubon Magazine reports that state extension services publish instructions on how to get your catalpa infested by sphinx caterpillars.(3)

One explanation for the tree's name is that it is an alteration of Catawba, the Indian tribe in whose territory the tree was first found. Indians used the leaves to make poultices to treat wounds. They are also said to have smoked the seed pods for their medicinal and hallucinogenic properties. Catalpa is known in England as "Indian bean tree".

Because they are messy, catalpas are not the most popular street trees. The trees drop some of their large leaves in summer. The seed pods are up to two feet in length and drop their seeds over a long season. The owner of the tree at 806 Third Place, a plant lover, relates that a former neighbor of hers once offered to cut down her beautiful catalpa at his expense because of the messiness.

(1) Bignoniaceae

(2) Edward F. Gilman and Dennis G. Watson, 1993 http://hort.ufl.edu/trees/CATSPPA.pdf

(3) http://audubonmagazine.org/earthalmanac/almanac0611.html

Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

2007-05-20T22:02:00.000-04:00

Black locusts get no respect. People have largely quit planting them. The trees plant themselves, soldiering on, spreading both by seed and by shoots from their roots. They’re often considered weeds. Capable of fixing nitrogen, black locusts don’t need fertile soil and can grow almost anywhere. (1) The reason we no longer plant them in any numbers is their terrible problem with borers, a very difficult to control insect pest that can cause them devastating damage.

The black locusts are in bloom now all over Plainfield. The beautiful, hanging creamy white panicles of these handsome American natives are quite eye-catching and resemble wisteria. They have the added bonus of fragrance. Aficionados of artisanal honeys might recognize the blooms as the source of acacia honey. The bark is also quite attractive. Deeply furrowed and distinctive, it makes the trees easy to spot even when they are bare of leaves.

Black locust wood used to be highly valued for fence posts. The very dense wood is resistant to rot in contact with the ground, a fact that led to the species' being spread around the country by humans from its native range in the vicinity of the southern Appalachian Mountains. The Jamestown colonists built hovels using black locust posts as their first habitations in 1607. The posts were noted by a visiting English naturalist to still be sound 100 years later. (2) The wood was also valued as fuel. A cord of black locust wood has the same energy content as a ton of anthracite coal. (3)

Drive or walk around and have a look. Most neighborhoods have some of these trees. An attractive example of black locust that is covered in blooms right now is in the front yard at 1400 Prospect Avenue.

Also in bloom now: tulip trees and horse chestnuts. Tulip tree blooms don't shout out their presence. You have to look for them because their pale yellow color blends in with the foliage. It's worth looking. The superb specimen at 443 Stelle Avenue merits a visit. Paulownias are also in bloom (if you can find one). There is a Paulownia (empress or princess tree, one of the symbols of the Japanese imperial throne) next to the garage at 1030 Sherman Avenue. Spectacular pale lavender blooms on a tree that, in this country at least, is not much valued.

(1) Nitrogen-fixing plants have a symbiotic relationship with certain soil bacteria that allows the plants to use atmospheric nitrogen. Unlike most plants, they don't require that their soil contain nitrogen compounds.
(2) Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of North American Trees, Houghton Mifflin 2007.
(3) Charles Fergus, Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Stackpole Books 2002.

American Elm

2007-05-07T22:47:00.000-04:00

Once the most common street tree in the northeastern United States, the American elm has become something of a rarity. This beloved native was almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease in the middle of the last century. One of the early victims of globalization, the elm was attacked by a foreign fungus: Dutch elm disease was carried to the U.S. by elm bark beetles in imported logs. The disease continues to destroy elms to this day. When you see a mature elm, it’s hard to know whether it has survived because it is disease-resistant or because it is lucky enough not to have been attacked.

An American elm is easily recognizable. Its doubly toothed leaves are unusual for being asymmetrical. The tree usually has a distinctive vase shape. The gentle undulation of its limbs as they reach for the sky gives the American elm a sinuous grace that is unmatched by any other tree. Those characteristics are exemplified by the elm at the Drake House Museum on West Front Street.

The American elm at the rear of 116 Watchung Avenue (visible from Parking Lot 6 on Second Street between Park and Watchung Avenues) was recently cited by the City as a specimen tree at the 2007 Arbor Day celebration. The tree measures 47 inches in diameter at breast height. I estimate its age at 100 years.

The two elms on Park Avenue near Muhlenberg Hospital (1267 and 1303 Park Avenue), have a more pronounced limb curvature than one thinks of as classic. When I drive by those elms in winter, their exaggerated curves against the sky always bring to mind dancing girls.

The best example of a local American elm that I know is in the 3800 block of Park Avenue in Edison. Its arching limbs reaching across the street are visible from a quarter mile in either direction. The elm is on the left side of the road when one is heading away from Plainfield.

Seeing this beautiful tree I understand very easily why people once planted elms to the point of overabundance. Sadly, the huge numbers of those elms and their close proximity to each other made it easy for Dutch elm disease to spread from one tree to the next. Michael Dirr, author of the plant bible known as the Manual of Woody Landscape Plants draws a lesson from the story of the elms: “The extensive use of one tree such as the American elm is an example of foolhardy landscaping. The tree is enormously ornamental and was overplanted. The diseases caught up with the tree and the results were disastrous. Unfortunately, people do not seem to learn by their mistakes and now Honeylocust, Bradford Pear, Green Ash, Red Maple, and Planetree are being used in wholesale fashion for cities, residences, and about everywhere. I strongly urge a diversified tree planting program encompassing many different species and cultivars.”

I have included photographs of every mature Plainfield elm that I know. I would be glad to hear about others. I am also on the lookout for dawn redwoods and for outstanding examples of white oaks and red maples (Acer rubrum).

Copyright Gregory Palermo

Ginkgo Biloba

2007-04-19T21:37:00.000-04:00

Ginkgo biloba is a survivor. The dinosaurs knew this tree, which has been on the planet for 150 million years, perhaps much longer. It is the oldest known tree species.
The common name, maidenhair tree, derives from the resemblance of the tree’s foliage to that of maidenhair fern. The delicate foliage turns a lovely, clear yellow in the fall.

The tree is much tougher than the common name suggests. Municipal tree departments love it because it is pollution tolerant, low-maintenance, and quite free of pests and diseases. Homeowners, dog walkers, and passersby are generally less enthusiastic. The reason: ginkgos typically have a ungainly habit (form) in youth. With age, however, they develop a craggy beauty. I have seen ginkgos in Japanese temple gardens that are 1000 years old, yards wide at the base, and majestic. The trees are said to survive for millennia.
Plainfield has numerous ginkgos, most quite young. There is a large female ginkgo at 810 Central Avenue just to the left of the driveway, about 50 feet back from the sidewalk. It is 38 inches in diameter at breast height (dbh) and is estimated to be more than 100 years old, a young adult.

There is also a smaller female in the curbside strip directly in front of the building. Both trees litter the ground with prodigious quantities of powerfully malodorous fruit each fall. In general, only male ginkgos are planted in the U.S. because of the unpleasant odor produced by the females' fruit. Mistakes happen, however, so female ginkgos are not hard to find. Some Eastern cultures use the ginkgo seeds in cooking. In my neighborhood people can be seen gathering the seeds each fall from the ground below the female ginkgos on Watchung Avenue near Hillside. They use only the kernel, leaving the stinking seed coat where it fell. Some theorize that the stench of the seed coat evolved as a defense against seed-eating dinosaurs, but the tactic doesn't work against humans.

The street trees surrounding the Plainfield Library illustrate the ungainly habit of young ginkgos quite well.

The old ginkgo in the parking lot on the westbound side of the tracks at the Netherwood train station used to be a majestic presence. Sadly, it was inexpertly pruned (brutally hacked) in about 2004, each of its branches having been cut back to a 5-6 inch diameter stump. The tree is 48 inches dbh and is estimated to be more than 150 years old.

One last tidbit intended to motivate you to plant a ginkgo in front of your own house: Ginkgo biloba is a nonconformist. Among its oddities is its unusual sex life, which features swimming sperm. Ginkgos are among the few living things to have survived in close proximity to the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast. The tree is different enough from other extant plants that scientists have assigned it its own phylum. Recalling high school biology, the hundreds of thousands of members of the plant kingdom are divided into 12 phyla. One of those phyla consists of just a single species: Ginkgo biloba. The tree is the last remnant of an almost vanished tribe that represents an entirely different way of being a plant. Ginkgo biloba is a survivor.

Coming: Dawn redwood. I know of only four dawn redwoods (Metasequoia) in Plainfield, and only one of those is easily visible from the street. If you are aware of any notable dawn redwoods in town, please let me know, and I will try to include them in an upcoming posting.