At
Today, I started with a question which may be central to predicting what will do well on our expanses of disturbed ground. A “flat” was created when the original church was built 10 or 12 years ago and excavation was required to create a storm water retention basin. The basin was required to prevent flash flooding from parking lot runoff. The flat has become known to some as the “Coming of Age Plateau.” The past four years have seen little use of the eight raised beds which were created from materials rescued when the “Garden Grubs” were displaced by excavation spoils from the construction of the sanctuary. To the south and east of these beds, shrubby growth has emerged which I wanted to identify.
My memory from visiting the site in summer was of some growth which I had guessed might be sumac, young ash trees seeded from trees just to the east of the plateau, and a wide variety of weeds. Photo 1 shows the alternate branching of a fast growing plant which I had thought might be sumac. Photo 2 is a close up of one of the stems. When I got home and went to the books, surprise, surprise, my conclusion is that maybe some of the walnuts I threw out there in the fall of 2001 germinated and started growing like a bad weed. This young tree is between eight and ten feet tall at the tip, and would have had to grow up to 2’ 6” a year to reach this size. The long soft branches coming out from the main trunk are more like 3’ in length and appear to be a single year’s growth.
Photo 1
Mystery Tree
The drawing in our text of walnut buds looks very close to the buds pictured in Photo 2. On my walks around the Washtenaw Country Club golf course near my house, there are several clumps of well established and nut bearing walnut trees. Over two successive seasons, I collected garbage bags full of windfall walnuts in the fall and dragged them out to the UUAA “back 40” where they were distributed in various ways. These walnuts may have come up from nuts I simply tossed back into the weeds behind the fire circle used for “coming of age” celebrations in 2001.
Some of the most energy intensive efforts I made were to bury handfuls of nuts in 4” deep holes across much of a weedy leveled area which was subsequently totally buried when the UUAA congregation contractors removed spoils from the excavations involved with the construction of the church’s new Religious Education wing. All of the vegetation in this area which was just beginning to recover from being disturbed in 1993-4 was destroyed in 2003-4.
At the time I planted walnuts, the flat there looked like it had potential as an “orchard” with good sun, a fairly level terrain, and enough water in the swale next to the road to indicate that the ground was not going to dry out as much as the higher elevations closer to the church. So much for working without a plan involving the whole congregation…
Photo 2
White Sumac?
If Photo 1 and Photo 2 are of a young black walnut, as I try to
convince myself they are, I should mark it carefully in the spring so that
someone deciding to “clear brush” on the coming of age plateau doesn’t cut it
down thinking it is Sumac. Unfortunately,
when I went back on
One of the things I’ve recently come to understand about young walnut trees is how fast they grow the first few years. The bark of young walnut is not rough like the older trees, but smooth and fairly soft. I need to see leaves on this tree to be sure. We cut a lot of young ash which had been made into Swiss cheese by the Ash Borers and died. Those trees also appeared to have been growing at a phenomenal rate and had smooth bark uncharacteristic of a more mature Ash tree.
Another plant which showed up in the area may be “Red Osier.” A red stem shows clearly in Photo 3 below: Subsequent thinking suggests otherwise. These red stems are “single stem” growths. Red Osier is a shrub which grows a large number of branches up from the same point.
Photo 3
Is this Osier?
In an area nearby (see Photo 3), I found many single red stems of a similar type but not as bright red:
Photo 4
Red Stems
The sky was a low overcast which provided an interesting background for the silhouettes of young trees. This young ash tree looks like it is reaching for the sun. In a few years it will probably be dead of Emerald Ash Borer. They seem to be active everywhere we have ash trees. They killed a “specimen” Green Ash the congregation had plated near the main entrance which probably cost us $250 5o $500 to have planted a few years ago. They are in the process of killing a number of 40+ year old bigger trees down toward the place where the creek crosses the road to the septic field.
Photo 5
Forlorn Ash
One of the lessons I learned the hard way is the difference between buckthorn and hawthorn. As I became aware of “invasive species” issues and buckthorn, I noticed a thorny shrub which was “taking over” a significant portion of old field on the UUAA property. For a while, I even attacked the wrong tree, cutting down a number of young hawthorns that were forming a dense stand in an area now totally buried by our construction spoils. The following four photos clearly illustrate the difference between common buckthorn and hawthorn. The thorns on buckthorn are tiny little points at the ends of stems. The black berries around its seeds stay on through the winter. Looking up at a buckthorn silhouette against the sky makes it easy to see the thorns and berries.
Photo 6
Buckthorn Berries
Hawthorn, on the other hand, has thorns that come out of the sides of the stems, not at the tip. They are much longer, up to 1 ½”, harder, and sharper. See Photo 7 below: The tree does not have berries on it.
Photo 7
Hawthorn Spikes
The bark of the main trunk of young buckthorn is smooth and much of the buckthorn growing on our property has a silvery cast to its bark. Photo 8 shows some young buckthorn stems. Photo 9 shows a fungus which has attacked a big old buckthorn down in a wet area that is muddy much of the year. When the tree gets older, the bark eventually does get rough, especially near the base of the plant. We have some “monster” buckthorns growing in areas which were probably not mowed since some time in the 1970’s. These buckthorn trees are up to 35’ tall and shade out almost everything beneath their drip lines.
Photo 8
Grey Buckthorn stems
This fungus has been growing in the same place near the ground on an
older buckthorn shrub for at least three years since I first noticed it. I’ve wondered for a while if it will
eventually kill the buckthorn. If you
look closely you can see ridges in the surface which form when another wave of sporeophyte development occurs on the underside of the bracket.
Photo 9
Bracket Fungus on old buckthorn
Hawthorn gets a rough bark very quickly so that even relatively small stems are no longer smooth. See Photo 10 below. In the background to the left is the base of a buckthorn about the same diameter as the hawthorn in the foreground. Note how buckthorn branches cleanly up from around the base of the main stem and can grow multiple stems from the same root. If you cut one of these off near the ground, several new stems will shoot up from around the base of the one you cut off. Europeans used this shrub to grow a “natural fence” because of this habit. If you keep cutting it back it will get thicker and thicker until an impassible barrier has grown up. Well tended buckthorn hedges could keep cattle from straying off a field almost as well as a modern barbed wire fence.
Photo 10
Typical young hawthorn trunk (Thousands here)
Further down the hill in a fairly wet area, there is a shrub which appears to have grown up very densely in a thicket and then all at once at the same age begun a process of dying back. If you look carefully, one of the middle stems on this one is dead and split open. I still have been unable to identify it. It isn’t buckthorn.
It may have exhausted a critical nutrient what allowed it to flourish, it may be a short lived shrub, changes in the amount of light as a canopy forms over it may have doomed it. A mess of grape vines may have decided to climb over the entire group of shrubs and contributed to their decline. What is interesting to me is that there are so many plants like this all together in one area that are all dead or dying at the same time. One or more insect is rapidly breaking down the dead stems. Fungal growth may be helping. Vines are swarming over the clump as well. I must make an effort to fight my way back into this area in the summer and see what kind of leaves, if any, are growing on the branches of this one. Looking at the photo, the branches of this shrub give the impression that it may simply be a different variety of buckthorn. We have two distinct “strains” of buckthorn growing on our property. One is quite dark brown and tends to have a shiny bark. The other is grayish and when it gets big, the bark on older parts of the stem can be scaly rather than smooth.
Photo 11
Clumping Buckthorn
Young ash trees which are being eaten by the borer do the same thing the buckthorn does when you cut its’ main stem, they shoot out new branches from the ground next to the main trunk. Photo 12 shows an example of new branches popping out of the ground around the base of a young ash.. Photo 13 shows what a young ash trunk with borer infestation not yet completely fatal looks like. Note the rough spots on the bark and the holes where borers have tunneled their way out.
Photo 12
Ash shoots from root
Photo 13
Borer holes in Ash
One of the taller trees near the “low lying” eastern border of the UUAA property is a fairly young and vigorous cottonwood. This tree is close to three feet in diameter at the base and goes straight up more than 60 feet. This tree may actually be on our neighbor’s property.
Photo 14
At first I thought that the galls pictured in photo 15 were seed
heads.
Photo 15
Pine Cone Galls
Galls imitating seed heads. Why
do they do that? Won’t the thing that
eats the seeds come and break into the gall?
Photo 16
Vervain
Photo 17
Multiflora Rose – this is a
typical “old field” plant that came with white settlers.
Photo 18
Goldenrod?
Photo 18 had me stumped because I didn’t take enough notes. The seed heads have a white “fluff” and the plant is common on our “old field.” A variety of goldenrod?
Photo 19
Aster?
This one has even bigger flowers than the last, but is clearly
related. Is it another variety of Aster?
Photo 20
Dock rosette
This type of rosette is very attractive to the deer. They dug it out of the snow in several places.
It is probably part of a large variety of dock.
Photo 21
Egg Case
An insect nest/egg case half way up the stem of a
woody plant. I’ll
need to record more information if I’m ever going to hope to identify some of
these things.