Local Ecologist

The following is excerpted from "Wood" in Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro with images by this blog for Festival of the Trees 66 . Many people recognize trees by their leaves or by their general shape and size, but walking through the leafless deep bush Roy knows them by their bark.  Ironwood, that heavy and reliable firewood, has a shaggy brown bark on its stocky trunk, but its limbs are smooth at their tips and decidedly reddish.  Cherry is the blackest tree in the bush, and its bark lies in picturesque scales.  Most people would be surprised at how high cherry trees grow here--they are nothing like the cherry trees in fruit orchards.  Apple trees are more like their orchard representatives--not very tall, bark not so definitely scaled or dark as the cherry's.  Ash is a soldierly tree with a corduroy-ribbed trunk.  The maple's gray bark has an irregular surface, the shadows creating black streaks, which meet sometimes in rough rectangles, sometimes not.  The

We reprinted on May 7, 2010 an NYU Alumni Magazine article about the university's "public" gardens including the Schwartz Plaza Native Woodland Garden.  The alumni magazine article reported 39 species growing in the 2200 square-foot garden such as ferns, sedge, wild ginger, and sarsaparilla.  Also growing in the garden were non-native trees like littleleaf linden ( Tilia cordata ), pictured above, Japanese maple ( Acer palmatum ), and Japanese pagoda tree ( Styphnolobium japonicum ). When we first saw the garden, several lindens rose above the fern and wild ginger understory in its northern section.  This fall the trees were removed to accommodate a construction project and were replaced this month with American hornbeam or Carpinus caroliana .  The species is described as A handsome tree in many locations, the tree slowly reaches a height and spread of 20 to 30 feet.  It will grow with an attractive open habit in total shade, but be dense in full sun. The mu

If you follow us on Twitter ( @localecologist ), you already know that the first version of this post was eaten by the proverbial dog.  Since the time we drafted the essay and now, fall color has peaked in the city.  In some places you can still see brilliant yellows and yellow-oranges.  Although there are three classes of pigments responsible for fall color in broadleaf, deciduous trees, the most common public trees across the five boroughs exhibit in the yellow-orange-brown range.  Yellows are produced by xanthophyll, oranges by carotenoid, and reds and purples by anthocyanin. The ten most common street trees across NYC's five boroughs and their associated fall colors are: London planetree (yellow), Littleleaf linden (yellow), Norway maple (depends on the cultivar), Green ash (yellow), Callery pear (depends on the cultivar), Red maple (red), Honeylocust (yellow), Silver maple (yellow), Pin oak (red-brown), Ginkgo (yellow) If you spot red- and purple-leav

Image: Fallen sassafras branches, New Jersey Snow-covered trees were not among the topics in the submissions in this round as the October 27 deadline preceded the Northeast snow event.  Last weekend, New York and other Northeastern U.S. cities received snowfall.  For New York it was record breaking: not since 1952 has snow fallen before Halloween.  My brother's sassafras (shown above) was still in leaf and lost a major branch due to snow loading.  Image: Scotch Pine wasps, image courtesy of Seabrooke Leckie Seabrooke Leckie's Canadian Thanksgiving was sunny and dry based on the photographs of the "nice patch of woodland habitat" near her in-laws house.  In that woodland, Leckie discovered Scotch Pine wasps feeding on the scale nectar produced possibly by Pine Tortoise Scale ( Toumeyella parvicornis ). Another discovery comes by way of Dave at Fidaldo Island Crossing.  On a visit to Washington Park in Anacortes, Washington, he observed from a distance wha