Trees in Love

Two trees embracing and kissing on the Divine Property, and I never noticed them until now. Views from both sides.

I Don't Hate Winter Anymore

The winter solstice, the day the daylight begins to lengthen, specifically Sunday, December 21, 5:03 p.m. Missouri time, is one week away. I read that the solstice was also once the day of Saint Lucy, Queen of Light. John Donne wrote a poem about it, which begins:

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
            The world's whole sap is sunk;

I raised a cup of cocoa to John Donne and to central heating.

Hating winter meant hating a quarter of life, so I had to change my approach. I've posted about caulking, covering windows, and clothes. Daily I push myself out the door, saying as I drive, walk, or feed birds, "Is this really so bad? I dread this all year? It's not bad at all." I gave myself things to look forward to. They cost money, but I tell myself I'm stimulating the economy. This mild December in  eastern Missouri has also helped me toward acceptance. I still hate below-zero temps and icy roads. On today's walk, as rainclouds made an exit, I tried capturing the bald light from the low-slung sun. This is what it truly looked like, without filters or anything.

Wonder

One bright autumn morning back in the old days when kids walked to school, at the corner of Marquette Street and Washington Avenue a tree I had never noticed before stood chrome-yellow and sunlit and beneath it on the leaf-covered sidewalk were glowing dark warm chocolate-brown nuts or pods, glossy like Hershey bars and finely oiled. Marveling, I lost track of time. It was my first experience of wonder. At last I pocketed one, crossed Washington Avenue, and half a block from school the bell rang and I ran so as not to be late to my first-grade class, because nobody then was late for school. All day I felt and gazed at this marvel I now know as a horse chestnut or a "buckeye," not edible but beautiful. The glossiness faded, but the wonder of that discovery is still with me and is part of why I live here today.

Well, today after too much work and no fun I came home and noticed that last night's little rainstorm had knocked some nuts and branches out of the shagbark hickory next to the house. I'd picked some nuts back in August, but now their outer shells had darkened and dried enough to fall to earth, split open and show, or fling to the winds, the ivory-shelled seed shaped like an acorn with pleats and no cap, containing the prized wild hickory nut.

So I began to gather them, and, getting my basket, poked around beneath the other shagbark hickories in my yard, gleaning dozens and then a couple of hundred hickory nuts, some still in their tailored casings. This was the most fun I had all day, and early tomorrow I'm off to the Divine woods with my basket to see if I can't gather a couple more pounds of wild hickory nuts to dry and then crack and eat, or stir into chocolate fudge, and to give away at Christmas, as the trees have given them to any creature who will stop and notice the bountiful earth beneath their feet.

The Trespasser

My first autumn here, in 1998, a red pickup tore out from the woods through the meadow, skidded in a spray of gravel onto my lane and down and away onto Highway F. Caught a glimpse of the driver -- a bald old man with his mouth gaping like Pac-Man -- and the license plate: New Mexico. I followed the tire tracks and crushed grass back into the woods. The trespasser had made my woods his dump. He hadn't dumped anything identifiable, though, just cans, bottles, rusted oil drums, old miniblinds, an old sink, and so on.

Called the sheriff. Two deputies came and asked me everything except my personal body measurements. I led them into the woods and showed them the fresh dump. They knew who the dumper was but pretended they didn't; only one old bald guy around here had a big brand-new red pickup with a New Mexico plate, and if I hadn't been so new I would have known him, too: the area's biggest landowner and richest man.

Every day I marched back into the woods and hauled out heavy bagsful of his trash. I did it 18 times before I got tired of it, and some of it is still there. At the spot where he'd driven across the meadow and between trees into the woods I wanted to erect a barrier. I couldn't haul stones big enough. Finally down near the road I found sawn pieces of a tree trunk. I couldn't lift them so I lugged and dragged five pieces uphill and down my lane one by one. It was the hardest physical labor I have ever done. Set up four of the pieces in a row.

The photo shows three of them. All four are are still there, and behind them, instead of open meadow, are young oaks The oaks are my work, too. While hauling trash I noticed that the red cedar trees, nice enough but an invasive, non-native species, were choking off the young oaks and hickories. So every possible day for several seasons I went into the meadow and yanked, chopped, clipped and uprooted all red cedars I could. If the cedar trunk was big enough, the stump wept sticky red tears like blood. I did it for the native oaks and hickories.

Today the barrier of stumps still stands and behind it are several stands of young oak trees gaining strength every day, and no one's going to be driving his pickup truck between them anytime soon.

Drought's First Casualty

I heard "CRAACK!" and turned just in time to see this fully-leafed branch from the huge twin oak peel off and land, completely blocking our only access road. Thank God I wasn't under there and my car was garaged. My neighbor and I were now trapped so I phoned the handymen at once. They said, first thing in the morning. With time to inspect it I tried to find out what had gone wrong with a branch that looked healthy.

What looks like interior rot is the tree's heartwood, and in any tree it's dead already, having done its job. As you know, a tree feeds itself through the wood just beneath the bark, and its concentric rings are what hold it up. It's like a hollow metal pole; its strength doesn't depend on its core. I didn't see real rot. And a sick or bug-infested branch wouldn't have such healthy greenery.

It was, however, a horizontal branch on a very old tree, richly weighted with other leafy branches, after two consecutive years of severe drought. In June we didn't get a full inch of rain here (the city got a bit more than we did). Our towns cancelled Independence Day fireworks for the first time ever because of the fire hazard, and I hope the kids shooting off fireworks for fun aren't doing it anywhere near our dry-as-dust woods and fields.

Where the branch peeled away

Next morning the handymen chainsawed the branch and also amputated the branch from the redbud across the lane that broke beneath the weight of the oak branch. The twin oaks must be among the oldest trees on the property; they are 80 feet high at least and a glorious sight as you drive up toward the house. Branches do fall from them sometimes, but usually only dead ones. Hope not to see any more like this.

The End of a Cedar Tree

Two full-grown trees in front of the old boys' camp bathhouse got sawn down, for no reason except they might have been growing too near the electrical wires -- but there's been no electricity running through them for 30 years. For love of the trees I counted the rings: 54. The camp buildings, now abandoned, were erected in 1957. It's a perfect match. Clearly these trees were planted to screen the bathhouse doors, and kept growing although the camp closed in 1971.The camp and trees are my exact contemporaries. With God's help I will not be abandoned to the elements or cut down at 54.

Twin Oaks and Twin Oaks and Twin Oaks and....

About 150 years old (judging from the rings of similar-sized trees) this pair of oaks looms over my lane, across from the garage, and they're massive. See, if you can, my six-foot picnic table at their feet. Wind and ice rip off some branches, but in autumn they simply rain acorns and some of 'em take, especially just to their north which is sunlit meadow. And the young trees (three are pictured below) are twin oaks just like their parents. That tickles me no end. I uproot or hack down competitive and invasive red cedars and vines to keep the native Missouri oaks and hickories thriving. After living here 10 years I can see the results, new oaks that will long outlast me, and am so very happy.

How to Burn Bagworms

 1. Get a pole, then rip and bat these horrible huge translucent sticky bags, each full of a thousand squirming baby bagworms, out of any tree you can reach. I got three big bags that were skeletonizing the leaves on my hickory tree. If I'd left 'em, the worms would crawl out, be adult in a couple of days, turn to moths and reproduce, and next year my proud tree, which shades the Divine cabin and provides genuine Missouri hickory nuts for wildlife, would be sicker.

2. Lay the bags side by side and wrap in newspaper. Don't wrap too tightly because then the bags won't burn. In addition to being gluey as spiderwebbing times three, they're also somewhat fire resistant.

3. Set newspaper on fire. Dance insanely around it while it burns.

4. (Not pictured.) Make sure no bagworms have survived. If they have, wrap them up in more newspaper and set it on fire. Bleeding hearts, please know that plenty of  bagworms in torso-sized bags are in all sorts of trees way up beyond my reach. Yet I think of Mahatma Gandhi's advice: "Anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

The Many Moods of LaBarque Creek

A one-lane bridge crosses a one-lane LaBarque Creek up the road just a bit, and I sat on the railing and looked at the dreamlike water, usually crystal-clear but chocolate-gelato-colored because an inch of rain fell the day before, and watched it sparkle in a setting of ultra-rain-soaked greenery, and I sighed because I am so in love with it and it is all I have ever wanted, and because it looked almost like a Japanese painting. I wanted to capture that and show you. Here's also a photo of the little bridge's warning. I sometimes crawl down the bank and when it's passable go hunchback beneath the bridge seeking fossils and crayfish, which survive only in very healthy streams. And I did once scoop up a glassy little crayfish hoping to show it to a friend. With its little toothpick arms it defended itself, pinching the palm of my hand (ow!), making me drop it back into the water.

You can't imagine how as a kid of about eight or nine I pined to sit by streams, to study their creatures, to watch the light on them, to listen to them. Instead I visited a vacant lot and after rains watched a rill that ran into a culvert, and listened to its trickling, and hoped that someday I could have what I have now.

Song of the Cicadas

The band you will shortly hear is called "The 13-Year Cicadas" and these cicadas singing their #1 hit will rock your world, make yo' liver quiver and yo' knees freeze! The video, taken on the Timberstone trail, lasts 35 seconds. Be there or be square. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k-dRyQJCBw

March 26 in Missouri

They say here, "If you don't like the weather, wait 24 hours, and you'll see how good it was." Hamster-sized snowflakes fell today. Thursday was a mildly sunny day, about 70 degrees, a great day for walking and climbing...I enjoyed the tiny buds on trees, small mayapples and wake robins springing from the forest floor, and looking for a jack-in-the-pulpit. I told a friend, "It should always be early spring." Then last night it got cold. Nothing on the ground this morning. But 5 inches of freakish snow on the ground by 7 p.m. It covered up my daffodils, violets, hyacinths. I baked chocolate chip cookies; what else could I do?

Underground Cable

This week's work, hating and subverting Japanese-honeysuckle vines, invasives with woody runners as thick as your wrist, that snake out of the earth and twine their way up trees, strangling them. To complete the kill, they load the treetop with so much vine that the trees topple. This vine is dead, but it only shows you how the thing wants to squeeze the jesus out of everything in its path.

Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is most evident in winter, and I sever as many "cables" as I can, finding them so grossly offensive I feel driven to cut them even knowing the cut end will sprout five more tentacles. Easy to I.D. the living vines because their leaves, dammit, are evergreen. In some areas the vines droop from branches practically forming curtains. There are only two ways to kill it dead: a springtime controlled burn, or cutting and painting the root end with Roundup herbicide. Obviously those are jobs for pros and I can't do it throughout my hundred Divine acres. If I had a magic lamp one of my three wishes would be: No invasive species!! This plant is of the Devil.

Alas, it is said that the entity that introduced it to the state was the MDC as ground cover for home gardens. It escaped and is ripping down rows of trees everywhere I look. Positively grievous. Picture taken on the Timberstone trail.

Woodpecker Apartments

Tried the Flint Quarry Trail hoping to see a flint quarry. But instead I saw Pileated Woodpecker luxury highrise apartments. Woodpeckers pair up, and you'll notice they all have the same address, but each pecks out his or her own place, giving each other space. This must be what keeps them cheerfully whooping and yammering, biggest and noisiest birds in the forest, always raising more kids just like themselves, and my favorite birds of all time.

Nobody was home.

Friend of mine once said the best name for a human apartment building would be "The Balzac Apartments." I never laughed so hard.

Unfoldings

I look with reverence at plants. Brave things, alone, unfolding out of rock, or between cracks in sidewalks, or in the dark where they live on little love or water. They freely give fruit that's the basis of the food for all living creatures, and flowers that feed all sorts of amazing aerial and terrestrial creatures (a bunny just ate the leaves off my sole surviving baby kale!). In a a miraculous partnership plants trade oxygen for the carbon dioxide breathed out by those of us who are mobile. The finest trees grow greater and more impressive as they age, falling with a mighty crash, totally spent, after a hundred fifty years of patiently waiting for human beings to "get" what trees know and demonstrate and witness: that everything's a miracle and it's enough to be alive, stand still and contemplate it all as the earth turns through starry space...

Missouri Redbuds

Picture of the road next up from mine. No rhyme or reason to these; they're along the roadsides, not in clusters, scattered, but there is nothing like Missouri redbuds this time of year, making pink glory out of the life we've got. I heard that I could strip the flowers off the branches and eatum, that they taste good, but I'm not quite that hungry, thank you. I admire too the city's fine magnolias and weeping-cherry trees, but wild flowering trees like redbud and dogwood have my vote for most romantic.

Purple Paint = Don't Hunt Here

Here's a tree I purpled some years ago -- with a brush, because there was no handy can of purple spray paint -- with a sign that was nailed up many many years before that. Since 1995,when the Missouri Purple Paint Law took effect, in Missouri purple paint on trees or posts means, "Don't trespass. Specifically, don't hunt here." For anyone who needs to know: "It is illegal to hunt deer on any land that has a "no trespassing" sign put up. . . . A land owner may place purple paint on trees or posts to mark their property. This purple paint is to be treated the same as a no trespassing sign. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, purple paint is bound by a court of law as a legal method of informing hunters of no trespassing." I purpled again this fall, but know enough now not to do it on a shaggy-barked tree like this one.

Male Flowers at Prom Season

Oak trees have catkins -- that's what these long strips of tiny flowers are called -- and catkins are long streamers of male flowers, releasing their pollen everywhere during prom season. Just as in the old V.D. movies, the catkins then drop off one by one, until your car or roof is covered with both yellow pollen dust and thousands of spent catkins.

It was TreePete who answered me "Catkins" when I asked what they were. He doesn't come around anymore, not since I invited him over and left him to tend the barbecue grill and he let everything burn rather than simply say he didn't want to barbecue.

TreePete aside, oak branches simultaneously have little red barely visible nubs. These are the female flowers. They hide ovaries that develop into the more familiar offspring of the oak: acorns. But they couldn't do it without the male flowers. The acorns too drop off onto your car or roof until you're fit to be tied.

Frosty Morning

I'd dislike January if I didn't get divine gifts for my birthday, like this one: A frosty morning. I got a morning, imagine that. That's more than some have. One birthday I got a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Sometimes it IS all good.