Trees (And Friends)

This past week one interesting / beautiful tree led to another, so there are a lot of trees in this post; and not always for their leaf color. I was happy to find a young larch tree recently. This is the only evergreen that I know of in this area to lose all its needles in winter. Before the needles fall they turn color just like autunn leaves, and they’re beautiful. It’s rare in my experience to find a larch in the wild.

This is what most of our maples look like now. Except for an occasional holdout they are free of leaves and the landscape is opening up. At this time of year you can really see the lay of the land; what I’ve always called the bones of the forest.

One day in late spring / early summer another man and I watched a Baltimore oriole fly in and out of this red maple. Sure it was building a nest we looked and looked until we convinced ourselves that no, this bird couldn’t have built a nest, otherwise we’d surely see it. But it was there, so well hidden behind leaves that we couldn’t see it. Once the leaves fell, there it was.

Note all the flower buds on this tree, ready for spring. Once the ground thaws enough so the roots can begin taking up water in April, the buds will swell and then open; some of the year’s first blossoms. So can you see spring in November? Yes, everywhere.

This maple for some reason split into two trees right at the stump, but that’s not what I want you to see.

These are kissing trees, also known as wedded or married trees. When two trees of the same species, or in this case two leaders of one tree, grow close enough together to rub when the wind blows, the rubbing can wear away the outer bark. When the outer bark is gone and the inner bark, known as the cambium layer, of both trees comes together they can grow together as one as these have. You can see the “kiss” in the middle of the photo where a branch shadow crosses both trees at an angle. These two trees, or more accurately two leaders of the same tree, are forever “wedded.”

Something I’ve never seen before is married white pine trees. These were big trees and you can see how the way they grew meant that, once they got big enough, they would surely rub together.

And here is the kiss. Something I’ve never seen white pines do.

Above where the trees emraced they once again became two trees. These trees, both maples and pines, have grafted themselves together naturally by way of a process called inosculation. Did man learn grafting from seeing things like this? I would guess yes, and today grafting is done on everything from roses to fruit trees. In nature the process isn’t as rare as we might think.

Far more common and much easier to see is this kind of tree marriage, when one branch from a tree somehow becomes grafted to another. If you’ve ever seen a tree grow around and engulf a steel cable or wire fence, I suspect the same thing has happened here. A branch rubbed against another tree and finally grafted itself to that tree. Over time the tree grew enough in diameter to absorb or engulf the branch from the first tree. I’ve seen this happen on other trees as well.

This maple limb had an itch and when it reached back to scratch itself it froze there for all time. Or maybe I just made that up. Watching for married trees is just another fun thing to do in nature, especially when children are involved. There is no point, no meaning;  just seeing all of the  things nature is capable of.

The wind blew an oak leaf into the road I was walking on. The leaf looked as if it had been sculpted and polished. And the color was amazing.

Beyond its beauty this leaf shows why it takes oak leaves so long to break down once they fall. They have a waxy coating that prevents water loss, but this coating also prevents moisture absorbtion. When water falls on an oak leaf it runs off, taking any dirt or air pollution particles with it, and that’s why this leaf looks so clean. The amazing shine also comes from that wax coating, and it gives a good hint of why oak leaves are so slippery. If you climb a hill in an oak forest you’d better have something to hang onto, because it can be like walking on ice. I’ve come across hillsides so slippery I’ve had to sit and slide down, digging in my heels so I didn’t get going too fast. A waterfall I often visit called Forty foot falls in Surry tumbles down a hillside that is very slippery.

Here is another look at oak leaf color. They have as wide a color range as red maples but of course change a month or so later so they extend the season.

This is probably the strangest oak leaf color that I see. I believe it belongs to a swamp white oak. My color finding software sees plum, steel blue, rosy brown, and thistle; all; colors I’ve never seen on a red maple.

I was wearing my color blindness correcting glasses when I saw this amazing view for the first time. When I lifted the glasses up though the colors were muted, almost as if I were seeing them through dirty glass. I’d lower the glasses and the colors would pop, raise them and the colors would lose their vibrance. I did this several times and thought about how for all of my life I thought what I was seeing was normal and now here was proof that it wasn’t.

When I got home and looked at the photo it looked muted, more like it did when I didn’t have the glasses on than when I did, so by small increments I lightened it to try and match what I saw with the glasses on. I think it’s fairly accurate but I’m talking about color, not quality. This was taken with my camera at the full extent of its zoom capabilities from miles away, and though I used a monopod it’s far from sharp. I’ll call it impressionistic.

This beech tree caught the only ray of sunlight in the forest and it was beautiful. Whenever I see sunlight highlighting something I always pay attention and walk over to whatever it is. It’s as if a spotlight was aimed at it so I would pay attention to it. All I saw this time was beauty, and I stood and admired it.

Beech leaves are starting to turn brown and they’ll stay that color all winter long, rattling and whispering in the winter winds. Once the buds begin to lengthen and swell in spring it’ll be time to make room for new leaves, so all of this year’s leaves will finally fall off. It is thought that beech trees, and a few oak trees as well, hang onto their leaves in winter to discourage foraging moose and deer from eating their buds.

For the first time I saw beech leaves with black spots on them. When I looked up its possible cause I was a bit stunned by what I was reading. According to the New York State Department of Conservation it is called beech leaf disease (BLD) and affects and kills both native and ornamental beech tree species. It is associated with a nematode, Litylenchus crenatae mccannii. This disease has only been discovered in recent years and much about it, including the full cause and how it spreads, is still unknown. The photo they showed of an infected tree looked much like what you see above. Here is a link to their web page: https://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/120589.html

You should look closely again at the previous photo of infected beech leaves and compare it to this photo of tar spot on maple leaves. Tar spot has a very different cause and does not affect the health of the tree. As far as I know beech leaves do not get tar spot.

I’m seeing plenty of catkins on the hazelnuts. They’ll lengthen and turn gold before shedding their pollen in spring when the tiny female flowers open.

Last spring’s female flowers produced quite a good crop of hazelnuts. I like the way the bracts always have so much movement in them, even though they’re as stiff as a starched collar at this time of year.

If you ever happen to notice a tree losing its bark, take a look at it once each week or so. Doing so will mean you can watch how a fascinating process progresses. White pines like the one in the photo shed their bark in quite large plates so it isn’t wise to stand too near the tree. White pine bark can be surprisingly heavy. Smaller trees often lose their bark in long strips that curl and puddle at the base of the tree like a nest of snakes. There are many reasons a living tree can lose its bark but when a tree looks like the one in the above photo it has died, and dead trees have no need of bark. The wood of a dead tree dries out and shrinks over time but the bark doesn’t shrink at the same rate, so it eventually becomes detached and gravity does the rest.

Of course once a tree falls and touches the soil fungi and other organisms go to work, breaking it down so its nutrients can be returned to the forest. The bracket fungi working on this birch limb are cinnabar polypores, which in my experience are rare in this area. They are often deep red but I think these were aging and had lost some of their red coloring.

The moss in this photo is native big red stem moss, which grows faster than any other moss I’ve seen. It has taken over this Norway spruce forest floor in the time I’ve been doing this blog, but it might as well do so because this forest floor is too dark for anything other than a few fungi. The moss will overrun other mosses and engulf any branches that fall. This spot is a great example of how the trees above can affect the forest floor below. According to the U.S. Forest Service, “Schreber’s big red stem moss typically occurs as a dominant or codominant ground cover in stands dominated by white spruce (Picea glauca) or black spruce (P. mariana).” Big redstem moss forms a monoculture of thick, cushion like growth that would probably be great to sleep on when camping. At one time it was collected and used to block chinks in the walls of log homes in Scandinavia, and is still used for chinking log homes in Russia. It was also used for lining fruit and vegetable storage bins.

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. ~Tecumseh, Shawnee

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving Day Thursday. Taking a walk in the woods is a great way to walk off all that food! Thanks for coming by.

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Drying Out

Here’s where all the rain we had went. The Ashuelot River roared mightily as it went rushing by on its way to the Atlantic, carrying countless tons of soil with it. In flood the river deposits fine silt it over all the land that is flooded and then, sometimes many years later, rains wash it back into the river. It’s all a circle.

One of the flowers that like growing in the soil deposited by the river is the monkey flower, and I’ve seen more of them this year than I ever have. I haven’t seen a monkey in one though.

It is said that whoever named the monkey flower saw a monkey’s face in it, but I don’t see a monkey any more than I see a turtle in a turtlehead flower. Maybe its just lack of imagination on my part, I don’t know.

Here is where I found a monkey; in the face of a blue dasher dragonfly.

Because they kept landing in the shade I had to try many times over several days to get a shot of what I think might be an emerald damselfly. It’s the only useable shot I’ve gotten of one. I like its big blue bug eyes and its green metallic shine. This one, if I’ve identified it correctly, is a male and its abdomen and tail are powder blue, though they look white in this shot. The “tree” it is hanging on to is really just a twig, smaller in diameter than a pencil. This long bodied damselfly reminded me of the old wives’ tales about it and others of its kind that I heard as a boy. They were called “sewing needles” or “devil’s darning needles,” and were supposed to be able to sew your eyes and lips closed if you weren’t careful. Why would anyone tell a child such foolishness? I can’t see that doing so would serve any useful purpose. It would only make them afraid of a beautiful part of nature, and of what possible use is that? I can’t remember ever believing any such stories but memory can’t always be trusted, so I may have.

According to what I’ve read flies like hoverflies, or blowflies like the one seen in this photo, visit flowers to sip their nectar and taste their pollen. Flies sip the nectar for strength, which they need to keep flying, and the pollen helps them produce healthy eggs. Since they are hairy, bottle or blowflies help with pollination by carrying pollen from one flower to another. I walked though a field of Queen Anne’s lace flowers one day and saw as many flies as I did bees.

Some of the dogwoods are whispering things I’d rather not hear, so I didn’t listen. I just admired their beautiful colors.

A few posts ago I talked about the legume family and how you could identify them by the flowers, which have a standard and a keel. Here, on showy tick trefoil flowers you can see the vertical, half round standard and the keel, which juts out at about 90 degrees or so from the standard. Inside the keel are the reproductive parts. When ready the keel opens and lowers, and the reproductive parts show themselves as they’ve done here. Strong, smart insects like bumblebees will often force open the keel to get to the goodies ahead of time.

Every time I see a bicolor hedge bindweed blossom I remember when I had to search high and low to find one, because 99% of them were plain white. Now it’s just the opposite; all I see are bicolor ones and I have to search for the plain white ones. It’s an interesting lesson on how flowers evolve to attract more insects. More insects mean more pollinated flowers and that means more seeds. More seeds increase the likelihood of the continuation of the species, and continuation of the species is a driving force in nature.

One evening this cottontail saw me and crouched down to make itself small, as if it wanted to melt into the earth, but as I stood and watched it relaxed and made itself “big” again. I like it when animals sense that I mean them no harm, as this rabbit did. After taking a couple of shots I thanked it and left as it went on munching white clover. I could have artificially lightened this shot but I wanted you to see what I saw. I liked all the lights in the grasses.

Eastern amber wing dragonflies are very pretty but also quite small; I’ve read that they are only about an inch long. I saw them swarming around a pickerel weed plant at a pond and noticed that they never seemed to land. They were always in motion, so I gave up trying to get a shot. Then one day when I wasn’t near water the one shown above flew in front of me and landed on this grass stalk. As you spend more time with nature you find yourself becoming increasingly thankful for what once seemed small or insignificant things, like a dragonfly or a rabbit willing to pose for a photo. Gratitude tends to seep in quite naturally, as do love and joy.

A bee foraging on pollen had its pollen sacs filled to almost overflowing, by the looks. Knapweed pollen is white, as we can see. It’s a beautiful but supposedly invasive flower. I say supposedly because in this area it stays mostly on the embankments the highway department planted it on. I do see it in the wild occasionally but usually just a plant or two.

I’ve always liked the buds on Joe Pye weed as much as the flowers but of course the butterflies and bees prefer the flowers. Last year I found a colony of several plants that were covered in monarch and great spangled fritillary butterflies. I hope I see the same this year, because I still haven’t seen a monarch.

One day I found a little orange skipper butterfly probing for nutrients in the gravel along the side of a road. I got home intending to try to identify it and found so many species of little orange skippers it seemed like it would take forever to identify it, so little orange skipper will have to do for a name.

Pretty little pale spike lobelias have started blooming. Though their color can range from white to deep blue, most I’ve seen this year have looked like the one in the photo. This plant reaches to about knee high and grows in what can be large colonies. Each single flower could hide behind a standard aspirin. Next will come their cousins, Indian tobacco lobelia.

I don’t know who Barbara was but this plant is called Barbara’s buttons. It’s a native perennial plant (Marshallia) in the aster family. The flowers ae quite pretty and unusual, and probably about the same diameter as a large hen’s egg. I’ve read that it grows on roadsides, bogs, or open pine woodlands but it is said to be rare, even in its native southeastern U.S. It can be found for sale at nurseries specializing in rare, unusual and / or exotic plants. I first found this one last year in a garden at a commercial business building.

Like most other plants flowering raspberry is blooming well this year. I’ve known them for a very long time so they seem like old friends. I always like to see their cheery blooms, but even though their fruit looks like a giant, end of your thumb size raspberry, they seem tasteless to me. People have said that you have to put them on the very tip of your tongue to taste them but I’ve tried that as well, and all I’ve tasted is nothing. It was as if I was trying to taste air.

Invasive Japanese honeysuckle berries go from green to this electric, neon orange, and then to bright red, and the birds love them. That’s why I say once the genie is out of the bottle it’s near impossible to get it back in. True, you’d need an army devoted to nothing but honeysuckle control, but why not organize one?

It appears to be a great year for hazelnuts but in some places the blueberry crop has failed. In other areas like hilltops and mountainsides they’re doing fine. I met someone just the other day who told me the apple crop has also failed in certain orchards because of the late freeze, and he said his hay crop will only bear a single late cutting this year. You can’t cut hay in the rain.

I found this plant growing in the garden of a local business and realized that I didn’t know its name. The flowers looked like small hollyhock or rose of Sharon blossoms, but only half the size. The scalloped, basal leaves were shiny and stem leaves were narrow, like willow leaves. The plant was about 3 feet tall and loaded with flowers. I took a couple of shots of it and Google lens told me it was a false mallow.

With flowers like these I was sure it had to be in the mallow family because it had “that look” but false mallow was one I had never heard of.  After a little reading I found that it doesn’t like real hot weather and goes dormant until it gets cooler unless it gets regular watering, so I think I’d try it first where it got mostly cooler morning sun, even though some instructions say full sun. It blooms in mid to late summer and is drought tolerant and deer resistant, which would make it valuable in this area. If you like hollyhocks but don’t have the room this one might be for you; another name for it is “miniature hollyhock.”

I found a peachy daylily in my yard that I had forgotten I had. That’s the beauty of daylilies; you can fuss with them if you like but they are in fact a “plant it and forget it” perennial. If you’re looking for a low maintenance garden, daylilies should be near the top of your list. With early, midseason, and late varieties that come in just about any color but blue or black, you can do a lot with them.

Beautiful swamp milkweed is still blooming. One of the benefits of the overcast skies and rain has been longer blooming times for many plants. Some I’ve seen have been blooming for close to a month, and that’s unusual.

I was crawling around on the forest floor, getting shots of mushrooms when I noticed something blue in the cleft of a large boulder. Prying it out with my finger wasn’t easy but I got it out and saw that it was a painted stone. There in the woods it looked like a waterfall falling over the edge of the stone. Whoever painted it has some artistic ability; I thought it was nice how they got the feel of falling water with their brush. Now though, when I see it in a photo, it looks like snowy mountain peaks and trails, trees, and sky. Unless someone was on their hands and knees as I was they would never have seen it, so I wonder what the point of hiding it there was. In any event it I enjoyed seeing it, so I owe a thank you to whoever put it there.

If you want a photographic challenge try enchanter’s nightshade. Not only are the flowers smaller than a pea, but the plants usually grow in deep shade. I’ve had years when I just couldn’t pull it off even after trying many times, but this year after maybe a dozen tries I got lucky. Enchanter’s nightshade isn’t a nightshade at all, but is related to evening primroses. Its small round seed pods readily stick to your clothes and I sometimes find that I’m covered with them when I get home.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe the enchantress drugged Odysseus’ crew and turned them into swine. Circe, who was the daughter of the sun and granddaughter of the oceans, gives enchanter’s nightshade its scientific name Circaea.

As children, we are very sensitive to nature’s beauty, finding miracles and interesting things everywhere. As we grow up, we tend to forget how beautiful and magnificent the world is. There is magic and wonder for eyes who know how to look with curiosity and love. ~ Ansel Adams

Thanks for stopping in.

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