Outside My Window

Flowers! 

I found these crocuses blooming at Schenley Plaza and saw my first turkey vulture in Oakland this afternoon.  Spring is on its way!

Update, Friday morning, 5:15am:  Robins are singing in the dark outside my house.  This is new; they must have arrived overnight.

Update, Saturday morning, 9am: Grackles in my back yard, the first of 2010.

(photo by Kate St. John)

After a weekend of above freezing temperatures and bright sunshine — yay! – here’s a sign of spring you might see on the dwindling snow.

These are sycamore seeds, about a half inch long.  They’ve been in seed balls on the trees throughout this long, rough winter.

By now the binding that holds the balls together is weak and the goldfinches are hungry.  The finches pull apart the balls and eat what they can but the rest floats to the ground.  The tiny hairs help the seeds disperse in the wind so instead of a big clump you’ll find them littering the snow.

Watch for the seeds in your neighborhood.  You’ll find sycamores with their distinctive peeling bark near water sources, especially near creeks.  In Pittsburgh our London plane trees are similar to sycamores and you’ll see this same seed effect below them.

Thanks to Marcy Cunkelman for reminding me to watch for this.  Yes, spring is on its way.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Last weekend I attended an owl prowl at Sewickley Heights Borough Park hosted by Fern Hollow Nature Center.  Even though it was cold and dark and our focus was on owls I learned something new about emerald ash borer (EAB), the insect blight that’s killing our ash trees.

At the edge of the playing field, April Claus showed us two dying ash trees.  Both had crown die-back, D-shaped holes in the bark, sucker branches on the trunk and a lot of woodpecker damage.  The dieback and sucker branches indicated these trees were struggling for their lives and losing the battle.   Extensive woodpecker damage indicated the trees were infested with bugs. 

What bugs?  All the signs, especially the D-shaped exit-holes, pointed to EAB.

Before taking the next step park staff carefully inspected both trees and determined they were indeed doomed.  They then cut a sample of bark from one of the trees and sent it to bug experts for analysis.   When they cut off the bark they found extensive galleries (the tunnels inside the bark, pictured here) and larvae imbedded in the cambium.

Yes, it is EAB and there is no cure.

So now what?  Sewickley Heights Borough Park staff and volunteers are examining all the ash trees in the park, looking for similar damage.  They hope to select a few choice ash trees and protect them through preventative treatments.  The treatments are targeted and expensive and cannot save all the trees, only a few.  The hope is that EAB will reach a peak and then recede, as did the gypsy moth, and that these few trees will survive as breeding stock for the future. 

Other than trying to save a few trees there is nothing anyone can do.  As April said, “Right now there is no end in sight.”

(photos by April Claus, Director of Environmental Education, Fern Hollow Nature Center)

p.s. See two prior blogs on this topic:  The Month for the Ax… and …Purple Panels in the Trees

Welcome to the Christmas month.

When you take a walk in December’s woods you’ll find very little green except for this plant, the Christmas fern, Polystichum acrostichoides, so named because it’s green during the holidays.

Christmas fern is a common, evergreen, perennial fern that grows in the woods in most of eastern North America.  It’s one of the few ferns I can recognize because its leaflets are shaped like Christmas socks or like Santa’s sleigh.  (To see the sleigh shape turn the leaflet sideways with the “thumb” pointing up.)   From afar the plant looks like a clump growing in well-drained rich soil.

People used to use this fern in Christmas decorations, though I must say I prefer pine for its Christmas-y smell. 

Keep your eyes open for this splash of green.  It brightens December’s short days. 

(photos by Dianne Machesney)

Fall is a good time to cut down diseased and dying trees so I was not surprised when Tony Bledsoe told me he saw a diseased ash tree being cut down at Pitt’s campus. When he mentioned the location, I remembered seeing a tree there that looked like this one dying of emerald ash borer (EAB). 

Emerald ash borer is present in Allegheny County and is becoming the scourge of our ash trees.  The larvae of this pest burrow under the bark and eat through the tree’s vascular system.  After a tree becomes infected it dies in 1-3 years.

Tony and I both wondered if the tree at Pitt was afflicted with EAB and if so, how the tree company could prevent the spread of this dangerous bug.  Can the waste wood be burned?  Can it be sold as lumber?  Can it be dumped at a yard debris site?

I asked Steve Miller of Bartlett Tree Experts, a Board Certified Master Arborist whom I met at an urban tree tending workshop.  He told me there are rules about wood transport and best practices for wood management.

The rules are that Allegheny County and a large part of western Pennsylvania are in a wood transport quarantine zone. We must not transport firewood because it could spread EAB to uninfected areas.  The waste wood probably won’t be sold as lumber because it’s damaged and it’s from a quarantine zone.  

The recommended way to dispose of EAB-infested trees is by chipping, burial or burning, but the wood should not be stored as firewood through the winter months.  The larvae are hiding under the bark.

If you have a diseased tree in your yard, be careful what you do with it.  The important thing is to know what you’re looking at.  Is it an ash tree?  It is afflicted with emerald ash borer?   Is it time for the ax?  

Get good advice.  Ask an arborist.

(photo from Pennsylvania DCNR’s EAB website.  Click the photo to see it in its original context.)

Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), native to Asia, captured the hearts of American gardeners in the 1860s.  What an ideal plant it seemed, with gorgeous red berries that appeared just in time for festive holiday decorations. 

Unfortunately it escaped to the wild and is now an invasive vine that thickly covers our native plants.  It spreads easily because its fruit tastes good to birds and is now listed as invasive in 21 states and 14 national parks.  What a mistake!  

And yet, it is beautiful.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

After the leaves have fallen there’s one surprising bright spot in November’s forest – a yellow flowering tree nicknamed Winter-bloom.

Common Witch-hazel (Hamaelis virginiana) is a shrub or tree, 10-25 feet tall, that defies the odds and blooms from September through November.  Its ragged yellow flowers aren’t noticable during October’s splash of colors but now they stand alone, odd but beautiful.

Witch-hazel has other odd traits.

• Though it blooms in the fall, it doesn’t set fruit until the following August, nearly a year later.
• Just before it blooms the old fruit explodes, dispersing seeds up to 20 feet away.
• Witch-hazel can find water; its branches are used as divining rods.  (Is that the “witch” part?)
• And you probably have witch-hazel in your medicine cabinet, an extract from its bark.

Witch-hazel is a good tree for wildlife as its buds, seeds and twigs provide food for ruffed grouse, pheasants, bobwhite, deer, rabbits and beaver.

It’s good for me too because it makes me happy to see the winter bloom.

See Chuck Tague’s October 9th blog for close-ups of witch-hazel’s flowers and seeds.   Photo by Dianne Machesney.

I thought I’d missed my chance when I didn’t write about this plant on Halloween – more on that later – but Chuck Tague’s recent blog on tree buds gives me the perfect opportunity to discuss this scary looking plant. 

Compared to the beautiful twigs Chuck photographed this one looks positively wicked.  So what is it?  Here are some hints.

1. This bud is as fat as your thumb and covered in thorns.
2. It grows on a tree that’s only 5 to 15 feet tall.
3. The trunk is very thorny too and only 1 to 4 inches in diameter.
4. The bud will sprout very large twice- or thrice-compound leaves that are 2 to 4 feet long!
5. The flower is one huge flat-topped cluster that blooms July to September.
6. Its fleshy, black fruit droops from the top of the tree.  The berries are such good food for birds that when you find a stand of these trees in autumn you’ll find a flock of robins, too.
7. The name of this tree evokes Halloween.

And it is… (drum roll) … Devil’s Walking Stick (Aralia spinosa), also called Hercules-club.  The trunk is so narrow it resembles a walking stick but only the Devil would dare grasp it.

Want to look at pretty buds now?  Check out This Bud’s for You.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

Very soon all the trees will be bare in my neighborhood.  This is already the case north of Pittsburgh.

A week ago I visited the Clarion River in Jefferson County where I noticed that even the oaks were bare.  At the Allegheny Front last Sunday the leaves on the mountain had fallen but in the valley the oaks were russet, the tulip trees golden.  In the valley the leaves were putting on a final show.  By now it’s probably over.

However, the show isn’t over yet if you have non-native trees in your area.  Trees from northern locations are out of sync with our photo period so most of them still have leaves, some are green. 

Our native maples lost their leaves two weeks ago.  The maples you see now with yellow and green leaves are Norway maples which respond to the amount of light they receive in Norway in October – about 10 hours per day.  Pittsburgh’s days aren’t that short until early November so these foreign maples are delayed.  They’re on Norway time.

Eventually even the non-natives will catch up.  How will I know when all the leaves are gone?  When I don’t have to rake anymore.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

This morning the fog rose from the river and blanketed my neighborhood in frost. 

Above the fog the sky is clear, the sun shining.  Both fog and frost will be gone soon.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)