What trees need us to know

Last week at New England Grows, while Toby was manning the table for the Ecological Landscape Alliance (its shiny new name hasn’t made it onto the website yet, but the ELA is an outstanding organization, and so is their material), he struck up a conversation with Jeff Ott, owner of Northeast Shade Tree in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Jeff told him about a workshop he’ll be giving on March 6 for landscape professionals; it’s called “Tree School for Landscapers; The Built Landscape From An Arborist’s Perspective”.

The Old Elm on Boston Common, 1876
Courtesy Boston Public Library via Flickr; Creative Commons License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

Jeff, who has been an arborist for the last 36 years, had the great good fortune to work with Alex Shigo — probably the most influential tree researcher of the 20th century. Recognizing that more intellectual cross-pollination between arborists and other landscape professionals would benefit the landscapes on which we all work, Jeff decided to put together this workshop. The timing is good, before the spring planting and construction season gets rolling, so I’m aiming to go, and hope that other landscape architects will seize the opportunity as well.

Here’s the Tree School announcement.  Don’t be alarmed about the absence of an address:  you send your registration form and check ($75) to:

166 Clinton Street, Portsmouth, NH  03801

And here’s the Tree School Agenda, which outlines what will be happening through the day.  Contact Jeff if you have further questions; he can be reached at jottphc@gmail.com, or by phone at 603-463-7512.

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Root work

Contractors, arborists, and landscape architects in Massachusetts would do well to check out the Ecological Landscaping Association’s September events list.  The ELA is offering a number of really good workshops, on topics ranging from Boston-area restoration projects to the use of fire in landscape management, as well as a two-part, two-day workshop on root issues.  

One day of the root work will focus on soils(f you’ve read any of this blog, or Taking Place In The Trees, you’ll know that I’m interested in roots.)  In the air tool workshop, entitled At The Root: Air Tools Workshop, Rolf Briggs and Matt Foti will be talking about using air to work in the root zone, to decompact soils, to transplant trees and shrubs and also about how to plant nursery-grown stock properly.  

Matt and Rolf have done a similar workshop for the Mass. Arborists Association in the past, and Matt holds an annual workshop on proper planting techniques.  Being able to see what a root system looks like is eye-opening.  Learning — not just from written specs or a generic tree-planting detail — how a tree or shrub should be planted is essential, and well worth the price of admission.  I have been to at least three of these workshops, and learn something new at each one, and so can say that this workshop is one every landscape architect who designs plantings, and every contractor who sells plantings should attend.

Michael waters in a hemlock whose root flare has been excavated with air.

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Weeping willow — the nature of the beast

A year ago I wrote a post on dappled willows (Salix integra ‘Hakuro Nishiki’), comparing one rigorously maintained specimen and one planted-and-forgotten specimen. Two takeaway points from that post (I hope): 1) plants in a garden usually require at least some maintenance — more or less, depending on the genus and its role in the garden; and 2) willows really want to grow.

Here’s a photo illustrating the second point. This willow — I think it’s an old weeping willow (Salix babylonica) — clearly had started to break apart, and had apparently become fairly hazardous. Its owner whacked the entire top off, and the willow responded with this explosion of shoots. Willows grow fast and grow weak, but they’re vigorous enough to continue growing even if they break up, fall over, are pruned to the nth degree, or are cut down, which is what makes them such great coppicing plants. But that’s a topic for another post…In the meantime, enjoy the photo, which I took in a New Hampshire seacoast town.

Cartoon character or tree? Weeping willow growing into a new form after having been topped.

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Thriving live hemlock

That last post made a good point — sometimes the leftovers in a landscape can be used as a feature in and of itself — but I much prefer the photo here. This hemlock is very much alive, and lives outside of Boston on private property. Carl Cathcart, Consulting Arborist, took me to see this wonderful tree last July, and you can see more photos of and information on the tree at Taking Place in the Trees.

To get an idea of the scale of this tree, look just to the right of the tree's center; Carl Cathcart is standing on the ground under the tree's canopy, and his legs are just visible.

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Ceci n’est pas un arbre

Or, ‘This is not a tree’.

Thinking again about, and then past the pollen issue, I wonder if humans had such strong allergic reactions in pre-industrial times. In much the same way that we have been using the world’s oceans as a dumping ground for every substance we don’t want to deal with, we have been pumping fine particulates into the atmosphere in ever-increasing quantities since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Maybe pollen's not the real problem. Photo courtesy of The Library Of Congress, via Flickr.

We breathe oxygen. Oxygen shares atmospheric space with pollen and with myriad other particulates; our bodies work to filter out the particulates as we draw in oxygen.

Certainly, pollen poses challenges to the smooth operation of the human body. And planting fewer pollen-abundant trees might help breathing conditions to some extent. But really, now — shouldn’t we also look at the overload of particulates continuously (not only seasonally) streaming into our breathing space from coal-fired power plants, miscellaneous smokestacks, vents, trains, trucks, buses, and cars? And act to place more stringent limits on emissions from all those sources?

Making the natural world the culprit is easy. Calling ourselves to account for the consequences of our much more harmful actions may, as painful as it is, may be the more responsible and fruitful response.

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Then he took Berlin

Brian Rose’s website, the subject of yesterday’s post, also features his photos of the Berlin Wall and its environs before, during, and after its fall. He writes about the experience of place in Berlin, and for anyone whose knowledge of the Wall is limited (mine was derived mainly from watching Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close — wonderful movies, in which the Wall is a character, but not the main character in them), Mr. Rose’s chronicle, called The Lost Border; Photographs of The Iron Curtain is well worth exploring. Don’t miss it, in fact — it’s an affecting series that depicts and describes how the Wall and the zone around it informed, and in ways continues to inform — the national consciousness of the once-divided and now unified Germany.

Photo by Svenwerk on Flickr

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First he took Manhattan…

A friend recently sent me a link to the website of Brian Rose, a New York photographer. Mr. Rose’s work is worth a look (or two or three); his photo series called New York Primeval chronicles his exploration of ‘wild’ parts of NYC. Knowing that Manhattan, at least, has been invaded with all sorts of extremely competitive plant genera (to see examples, take a look at Leslie Sauer’s The Once and Future Forest, which among other things describes the restoration of some of Central Park’s woodlands), it’s absorbing to study the Rose photos and try to figure out what plants make up today’s wildness in them.

This series, with its horizontally scrolling format, also affords a gratifying graphic experience: by grabbing and dragging the scroll bar beneath the photos in each of the three sections (‘One’, ‘Two’, and ‘Three’) it’s possible to scan through all the photos in that section, and to recognize the horizon line as a datum for the whole collection. I can think immediately of two other artists — Saul Steinberg (see this link) and Andy Goldsworthy — who have used a single line to organize a series of disparate items. Steinberg drew his lines, Goldsworthy builds his with stone, stems, shadows, flowers, ice, wood, or leaves. It’s a pleasure to see the line used here to link all photos.

Pebble spiral done in tribute to Andy Goldsworthy; shadow makes the line. Photo by Escher on Flickr.

Andy Goldsworthy's The Wall That Went For A Walk at Storm King in upstate New York. Wall as datum, organizing, defining, and questioning the edge between woodland and meadow and land and pond. Photo by Dr. Curry on Flickr.

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Sign

As I was driving down a Cambridge street last Tuesday this scene caught my eye. My heartfelt good wishes and thanks to whatever forward-thinking kind soul who planted these crocus bulbs and let them naturalize through the lawn; after a long and cold and grey winter they were balm for the eyes.

Apologies for the small image size — the light was about to turn green, so I had to snap before I could zoom in.

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Deskside greenery

Cattleya in bloom; Ripsalis in background

Another grey and cold day in a long, cold month. Going to my desk and working is a good antidote to the gloominess, especially when the Cattleya next to my drawing board blooms (as it did last fall), or the Ripsalis in the window each January reliably turns from a mop of green string into a mop of green string and yellow confetti. Each plant has its own delicate flower fragrance, which rests quietly in the air until someone walks through the room and stirs up faint currents of deliciousness. It’s a good reminder to use scented plants in the landscape.

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Deskside landscape

The upside.

Years ago, a friend lent me a copy of this originally tiny ad from Nature magazine; clearly, it had already been copied and enlarged quite a few times before I got a copy of the friend’s copy. I keep it next to my desk, sometimes for encouragement, sometimes for a laugh. When a different mood strikes, or I need to step away from the desk after too long there, I flip the FomeCor placard over to see this other image:

The other side.

When I do that, clearly it’s time to take a walk outside and see what’s happening in the natural world, or even just to pat the cat.

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