Surprise!! Trees Grow

I am a fan of Sherlock Holmes, having read and reread all the Conan Doyle stories many times.  Conan Doyle was indisputably a very intelligent man and his stories are real lessons in the power of deductive reasoning.  However, even a learned man such as he suffers from some common misperceptions about trees as living, growing, changing things.  In the story "The Musgrave Ritual" Holmes is attempting to solve a riddle (written 200 years prior) that he thinks will lead to some sort of hidden treasure.  One of the clues in the riddle involves the shadow cast by an old elm tree.  Even though the poor tree was struck by lightning and died a few years earlier, the owner of the estate recalls that as a child he was required as part of his math lessons to calculate the height of all the trees around the house.  He tells Holmes that the tree was 64 feet tall.  With this information Holmes calculates the length of the shadow that would have been cast by the tree at a certain time if it had still been standing. From this he locates the "treasure" and solves the mystery.  Pretty clever.  

Except,  that  this would only work if trees did not grow.  Holmes (or rather Conan Doyle) was like many people and their perceptions of trees as something more akin to a statue or large lawn ornament than a living thing. We remember those big, old trees from our youth that we can go back to as adults and still see standing there like "sentinels" guarding the past. In some cases they may seem to have not changed much since we have grown too.  I recall a woman when I worked on the Prescott National Forest whose family had operated a youth camp south of Prescott for many decades.  She grew up there and when we proposed a thinning to reduce fire hazard and improve the health of the pine forest she was skeptical.  She had lived there all her life and she did not want us to change her beloved forest.  At the time she must have been in her 50's and the trees she was discussing were mostly about 70 to 90 years old.  When she was a child, say 45 years ago then, these same trees would have been only 30 to 40 years old, probably 20 to 30 feet shorter and much smaller in diameter. The forest would have been much denser in terms of numbers of trees per acre.  So, just from the natural growth of individual trees and the natural thinning from competition the forest she was in as an adult was quite a different thing than she would have experienced in her youth. 

You can get a general idea of the age of a young pine tree by counting the "whorls" of branches from bottom to top.  Each year a pine tree grows a central leader branch vertically, surrounded by a layer of horizontal branches.  One layer of horizontal branches per year.  Once trees get very old (say 30 to 50 years) the lower branches begin to die off and eventually even the dead branches drop and any remnant is covered up by wood and bark as the tree grows in thickness. Up until then you can look at the tree and do a quick count of branch layers (whorls) and see how old the tree is.  One thing that is very interesting to do is to count back from the top of the tree to estimate the height of that tree at a point of time in the past.  I first came to the Kaibab National Forest in 1975, nearly 42 years ago.  I have what I think are vivid memories of my first years here.  When I count backward as I have described, I find how much shorter the forest was when I came. In fact, though I discuss tree growth a lot in my profession, I am surprised at not only the height change but the fact that many trees I am looking at now where not even here or were very small seedlings back then.  

So what do we make of this natural change in things.  Well, for one thing, it teaches us the futility of expecting that somehow we can "preserve" nature.  Prevent change.  And that change in the natural world is a very bad thing.  I see this in the discussion of the repercussions of climate change.  I will not discuss the merits of the arguments for and against human influence being the main factor behind recent measured changes in climate.  I do, however, take exception to the idea that whatever changes have a occurred or will occur will invariably result in something bad. Maybe like that woman in Prescott we are afraid to lose what we think we had in our youth.  But we must realize that what we think we had and could keep "preserved" is an illusion.  Nature will change things. Nature has changed things.  Just look around. Take a lesson from the trees. 

Rare But Extremely Common

Rare But Extremely Common

There are plants that are extremely rare in every sense of the word.  They only grow in a few places.  Maybe you have to travel to the ends of the earth to catch sight of them.  However, every plant has its range. When you are on the edge of its range it can become very rare indeed.  Most of us live in one place at a time.  Sometimes for a very long time.  And we have a range within which we normally work and play.  If we are interested in plants or trees or birds or insects the intersection of our normal range and the ranges of all these things define what we think is common.  So when we only rarely happen on a certain plant, for example, it can become (or at least it does for me) something kind of exciting.  

In my long career with the U.S. Forest Service on the Kaibab National Forest I have ended up walking a lot of it.  Walking as the job of a forester is a passionate belief of mine and perhaps another blog post.  But, at any rate, I know much about the Williams Ranger District where I worked for 24 years.  I have been known to get excited about seeing a certain tree or shrub someplace I didn't expect or growing to a size I didn't expect.  Most of these plants are very common in the national or worldwide sense but rare enough within my home range to catch my eye such that I will note and remember their location. 

Perhaps one of my most exciting finds is of a plant that has a worldwide range and even has "common" as part of its name.  This is a shrub known as common juniper or ground juniper (Juniperus communis).  Northern Arizona is at the very southern extent of its range in North America. At this latitude it would only be expected to be found on the highest mountain peaks.  I have found it in only three places on the Williams District in all my literally thousands of miles of walking over all those years.  (One of those lone patches, on Bull Basin Mesa, was burned and destroyed in the Wildhorse Fire in 2009.) As common as this plant is worldwide I cannot tell you how exciting it was to find these isolated clumps.  One group of plants is only 3 or 4 feet across.  This clump is separated from the nearest known clump by over 20 miles distance.  I won't say it couldn't occur at a few other spots but it is very uncommon.

Here is a photo of the group of plants near Sitgreaves mountain:

 You can see that its distinctive color and growth habit really make it stand out within the pine forest.

Closeup of Foliage of Ground Juniper

These plants are surely leftover from the days of much cooler climate after the last ice age.  Truly what can be called "relict".  In time they too will be gone.  But for now they are the kind of find that can really make my day in the woods one to remember.  

Deer's Ears and Beautiful Places 

There are places I love. I am thinking of a lovely little valley of green grass and bracken fern and aspen and large old tall oaks with scattered pine. At the right time of year a plant grows there that is totally imposing. It makes me think of the jungle or the lush northwest forest. It goes by two names Monument Plant or Deer's Ears. I used to think it was two different plants and perhaps it is. It grows as tall as me or taller maybe 6 feet with whorls of big green leaves which gives it its name. It starts out looking like this:

Deer's Ears

Later in the season it puts up the huge stalk. It should have at the end of the stock a large red or blue cluster of flowers. But it doesn't. Look close at the stock and there are the flowers green in whorls at the base of the leaves. Regular whorls as you follow up the stalk and clustering toward the top.

Monument Plant

This area  I am thinking of south of Williams, AZ on the Kaibab National Forest lies at the head of a draw in the closest thing to a “cove” you will find in the southwest pine forest. The cove I refer to is a term used in the east for those moist, deep-soiled sites that grow tall beautiful hardwoods like tulip poplar and walnut. This is a different type of cove but shares the moist deep-soiled character though in a relative way compared to other sites in the southwest.

There are other similar places that sit at the base of steep hills that mostly face north topped by basalt rimrock. Bracken fern grows from the base of the rocks and pines are tall and oaks are large and grass is lush and green in spring and late summer. Sometimes these are the places that grow aspen. But everything we see is compared to everything else and these green places stand out from their surrounding dry ridges above and dominating pine forest below and all around. And when we enter there we know we are in a different place than the average. Though I love the average, plain old, pine forest of average grass and pine needles and pine trees large and small on rocky rough soil of clay and silt.

 

I love most to descend into these areas from a hot ridge of struggling pines and even cactus. To enter the shade of a massive old oak and wade through the high grass and maybe see a monument plant. But then again there is something special early in the morning or later in the afternoon when the shadows are long and the light is subdued and maybe it rained and the air is thick and almost misty and it smells like the wet summer pine forest which you must experience to know. It's then that I like to enter these coves from below and ascend to the base of the surrounding slopes on three sides of me at the head of this like the apse of a cathedral. And like the apse would be appropriate for altar and sanctuary to worship the creator. I should kneel and pray here to Him who authored this beauty to draw us to heaven like the worship and sacrifice of the altar. Drawing us up to heaven. Like the trees who point the way upward to Him. Hints of paradise. 

 

And I miss these places right now in winter but know the bare oaks and pines heavy with snow must be buried right now so that we can see the green and smell the lush and know the smell all the rest of the time. But I am lonely, longing for it.