O tulip tree, how I love thee!

Tags

biology, ecology, flowers, Liriodendron tulipifera, nature, plants, taxonomy, trees, tulip trees

One of my favourite eastern North American trees is in flower! This is the Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). I think it has beautiful flowers.

Let me count the ways!

1. Your flowers are unique and amazing.  What other tree has flowers like this?  So literally, botanically, perfect.*  This description from Wikipedia is almost poetic:

“Flowers:

May. Perfect, solitary, terminal, greenish yellow,

borne on stout peduncles, an inch and a half to two inches long,

cup-shaped, erect, conspicuous.

The bud is enclosed in a sheath of two triangular bracts

which fall as the blossom opens.”

 

2.  Your latin name is so perfect too.  Liriodendron tulipifera.  It has tulip right there!

3.  Your trunks grow so straight and tall, they were once used for ship masts.  I still think they are lovely straight edges in a forest of imperfections.

4.  Your leaves look like tulips too!

From my tree book.

5.  You are of the Magnolia family, but everyone thinks you are a poplar! (which is one of my favourite tree families, including such lovelies as the gold and white aspens and the cottonwoods.)

Golden aspens in the fall.

6.  You produce copious amounts of nectar, making you one of the best honey trees!  (You also dripped nectar all over my desk, making it very sticky, but I forgive you.  Mostly because it was also delicious.)

7.  Your floral forms are considered basal, one of the earliest flowering forms of angiosperms.

8.  Because your flowers are not specialized, they are good for everyone (even me)!

*Perfect flowers, botanically speaking, have both stamens and carpels (or both male and female parts).

A Final Affection, by Paul Zimmer

Tags

A Final Affection, nature, nature poetry, Paul Zimmer, poems, poetry, trees

A Final Affection

I love the accomplishments of trees,
How they try to restrain great storms
And pacify the very worms that eat them.
Even their deaths seem to be considered.
I fear for trees, loving them so much.
I am nervous about each scar on bark,
Each leaf that browns. I want to
Lie in their crotches and sigh,
Whisper of sun and rains to come.

Sometimes on summer evenings I step
Out of my house to look at trees
Propping darkness up to the silence.

When I die I want to slant up
Through those trunks so slowly
I will see each rib of bark, each whorl;
Up through the canopy, the subtle veins
And lobes touching me with final affection;
Then to hover above and look down
One last time on the rich upliftings,
The circle that loves the sun and moon,
To see at last what held the darkness up.

- Paul Zimmer

Bud burst!, and Metamorphosis by May Sarton

Tags

bud burst, leaves, May Sarton, Metamorphosis, nature, nature poetry, outdoors, spring, trees

Whee! Spring! (This is a Tulip Tree)

Metamorphosis

Always it happens when we are not there–
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.

Lovers of wind, who will have been aware
Of a faint stirring in the empty air,
Look up one day through a dissolving screen
To find no star, but this multiplied green,
Shadow on shadow, singing sweet and clear.
Listen, lovers of wind, the leaves are here!

- May Sarton

Just another beautiful winter day and, Blue Field, by Lavinia Greenlaw

Tags

Blue Field, Colour, Lavinia Greenlaw, nature, photography, snow, trees, winter

It’s an exceptionally beautiful day…

And I wanted to share this winter wonderland.

There is a wet, icy snow clinging to everything…

And the sky was so blue.

And every path looked like an adventure.

Sometimes the light amazes me.

The light this morning on campus was so breathtaking.

The light can make anything beautiful.

Especially this little tree.

These old elms, with their bare limbs above the path, like dancers…

My bike is safe and warm at home. I bet these guys are jealous!

But we all have different ways of carrying our burdens don’t we?

Some of us bow our heads…

Even my lovely hemlocks share the burden…

Blue Field

A flood as the day releases
and the whole snow world
is neither wet nor deep, but primary.
Colour so inherent, it does not fall
but rises from my skin,
the snow, the trees, the road.
This blue isn’t built or grown.
It has no tissue, nothing
to touch or taste or bring to mind
a memory, no iris or artery,
no gentian, aconite or anemone,
no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,
no titanium or turquoise,
no mercury or magnesium,
no phosphorus, sapphire or silver foil,
no duck egg or milk jug,
no chambray, denim or navy,
no indigo, octopus ink, no ink,
no element. The blue moment,
sininen hetki in a language that claims
no relation but greets in passïng
picture blue, cyan. Ultraviolet
twilight, higher than the heaven
of swimming or flying – no splash.
A time without clouded objects,
in which you might become the glass
you swallowed through cold.
Light draws back
behind the rim of the eye as it closes.
I keep my distance, as things turn blue
through stillness and distance,
as everything blue is distant.

- Lavinia Greenlaw

Insect Pests of the NE US (Full Book)

Tags

drawings, field guides, forest pests, insects, pest guide, trees

I’ve posted about each of these species individually over the past couple of weeks.  The full book is available for download as a pdf here:  ForestPestsoftheNEUS.

These are representatives of 13 of the insect families listed in the “high impact” category from the Aukemaetal_2010 economic impact assessment of North American forest pests.  There remain several families that I did not cover (listed at the bottom of this post).

All of the drawings are here and you can click on them to link to their detail page.

And tomorrow I can talk about something other than insects, whew!

Beetle Families

Buprestidae: The Emerald Ash Borer

Curculionidae: The Ambrosia Beetle

Chrysomelidae: The Elm Leaf Beetle

Cerambycidae: The Asian Long-horned Beetle

Scarabaeidae: The Japanese Beetle

Wasp Families (Symphyta)

Diprionidae: The European Pine Sawfly

Tenthredinidae: The Mountain-Ash Sawfly

Siricidae: The Old World Wood Wasp

Moth Families

Lymantriidae: The Gypsy Moth

Tortricidae: The Pine Shoot Moth

High impact moth families not shown: Coleophoridae, Gelechiidae, Geometridae, and Plutellidae

Bug Families

Adelgidae: The Woolly Adelgid

Diaspididae: The California Red Scale

High impact bug families not shown: Aphididae, Asterolecaniidae, Coccidae, Eriococcidae, Margarodidae, Pseudococcidae, and Psyllidae

Thrips Families

Thripidae: The Pear Thrips

One other family not represented was in the fly order (Diptera): Cecidomyiidae

Don’t you leave me behind…

Tags

Autumn, beauty, Colour, Fall, inspiration, leaves, photography, trees

Autumn is photogenic, don’t you think?

Virginia creeper always turns this blood red colour…

Amateur’s guide to the trees of Northeastern North America

Tags

botany, common northeastern trees, drawings, field guide, guide to trees, nature, tree identification, trees

This gallery contains 14 photos.

When my sister and I had both just moved to the northeastern United States a few years ago, she requested …

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The Sycamore on Balance, by Katy Didden

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Katy Didden, nature, nature poetry, poems, poetry, sycamores, The Sycamore on Balance, trees

The Sycamore on Balance

A symmetry of forces, yes,
but not of shape. The roots: a mess
of curves. Like slow snakes
they incorporate
rocks. The tree’s full weight press-

ing down, the trunk arrows skyward.
For humans, centering’s awkward.
You lack longevity,
can’t fight gravity,
grow heavy. What wayward

cantilevering keeps you calm?
When sorrow settles, blights your limbs,
what dark contortions
fix you to the source?
Contrition. The light-aimed psalm.

- Katy Didden

Planting Trees, by Wendell Berry

Tags

growth, how do you tag a poem?, nature, nature poetry, Planting Trees, poem, pollen grain, sycamore and maple photos, time, trees, Wendell Berry

Trees, trees, trees, I love trees.  So much.

Planting Trees

In the mating of trees,
the pollen grain entering invisible
the domed room of the winds, survives
the ghost of the old forest
that stood here when we came. The ground
invites it, and it will not be gone.
I become the familiar of that ghost
and its ally, carrying in a bucket
twenty trees smaller than weeds,
and I plant them along the way
of the departure of the ancient host.
I return to the ground its original music.
It will rise out of the horizon
of the grass, and over the heads
of the weeds, and it will rise over
the horizon of men’s heads. As I age
in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased by the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.

- Wendell Berry

Counting-out Rhyme, by Edna St.Vincent Millay

Tags

beech, Counting-out rhyme, cout, Edna St. Vincent Murray, elder, maple, nature poetry, poem, trees, willow

Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Color seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.

-Edna St.Vincent Millay