HANGING UP THE HAT

Here in Philadelphia, there are trees and then there are trees.

On this particular day, I was hunting for the first kind of tree.

It goes by the name of mountain laurel.  It’ll never be the biggest tree in the woods.  It’ll never be the kind of tree that shows up on the nightly news but I’ve been on the lookout for mountain laurel for weeks now.

I’ve been trying to catch its flowering, which I’ve heard is spectacular.

I already knew where they were growing.  They were up there, off the trail…

…typical of the mountain laurel, sprouting up on a steep and rocky hillside called a ravine.

That’s French for a violent rush of water and it describes the type of land that makes the shape of a vee, the landscape that forms around a narrow valley cut deep with a running stream.

That’s exactly where I was, on a trail called the Ravine Loop.

Away from the path, up the sharp banks of the stream?

That’s mountain laurel country.

That’s why they’re so hard to find.  They’re off the trail.

They’re way up here…

…growing on the pitched and slanted shores of the Ravine Loop.

It’s hard to get up here, rough going and slippery with rotting compost.   I had to keep my eyes to the ground and so I noticed the small leaves popping out of the woodland carpet.

These are the other kinds of trees.  Big trees.

Here’s a chestnut oak…

…and here’s a tulip poplar.

The big trees, they are a-coming.  Some of them are already staking out their claim.

Once they take over, they can choke out whole fields of sunshine, drowning out the understory with their high green canopy.  They don’t leave much room for the smaller trees like the dogwood and the redbud, the crabapple and the hawthorn.

And, of course, my prey for this afternoon…

…the mountain laurel…

…that small tree with the dark evergreen leaves and the crooked trunk.

Its bark has a very stringy and shaggy texture, like an old frayed rope that’s been too many days out to sea.

Its flower would be a real boon to my blog.  For starters, it’s the state flower of Pennsylvania…

…usually depicted next to our state bird, the ruffled grouse.

Their flowers grow in groups of twelve or more, they say, at the terminal ends of the branches, upright above the leathery leaves.

From what I’ve seen in the field guides, the flowers are bright and showy, resembling little cups.  Something found in a child’s tea party.  They’re white or pink and each flower has ten long pistils, purple at the tips, that clamp down on the petals and push the flower open.

Even more remarkable, they’re supposed to be a very action-packed bloom.

They are spring-loaded, wrote John Eastman in his field guide for forests and thickets, and they actively bombard an alighting insect with pollen.

You can test this mechanism yourself with a pin or grass blade.  The slightest touch…

..and he goes on and on.  I wanted very badly to test this mechanism myself…

…but I was too early.  They were just barely budding.

I’ll come back here next week to catch them in bloom but, by that time, this whole story called Philly Trees will be over.

This is the final post, the last adventure.  This is the big finish and this is exactly where I want to end this blog…

…off the trail.

SPRUCE!

New year…new coat of paint.

About two weeks ago, just before the 2013 New Year’s weekend, on day six of the Earth Renewal Moon, Philadelphia got snow.

A lovely, bright, roaring burst of driving snow, just the perfect way to begin the new calendar and to mark the season of the Earth Renewal Moon.

The Medicine Wheel totems for this moon?  You got the quartz, the birch and the snow goose…three totems with one thing in common…the color white.

And, right on schedule, snow.  Just before the New Year’s parade?  It’s a sign.

2012?

Yesterday’s news.

Snow is nature’s fresh start…the open page…the blank canvas…turning every landscape into a playground…

…in the words of Thoreau, the great revealer…no escape…all tracks in plain sight…the palimpsest of the previous seasons finally, ultimately, complete for the year…the last chapter writ…

…and, I ask, is there any other scene that better evokes the wild wonder of youth than a snowy morning through a frosted window?

Thanks to snow, the old becomes new…the old becomes young again.

WILDWOOD TULIPS

No frogs.  No frogs for the blog.  Not yet.  I’ve been looking and I can’t find a single frog in this city.  I’ve only got about ten days left under the Moon of Returning Frogs, only ten days till the next moon rises.  I’ve got to find some frogs in the next ten days.

Frogs or no frogs, I’ve been enjoying this moon nonetheless, especially the recent cold and rainy weather.  These cold and rainy days are setting things right again.

We had a warm winter, too warm, and I don’t trust warm winters.  Everything was happening just a little too early this year: maple leaves, cherry blossoms, magnolia flowers, asparagus, taxes and lettuce.  Too fast, too early…but now this recent spate of cold and drizzly days have slowed it all down and we’re getting back to schedule.  Funny, how the Wheel rights itself all on its own.

That’s what I like, especially this time of year, just at the brink of the growing season.  No need to rush through asparagus.   

Just the other day, at the local farmers’ market, among other seasonal things, I saw a farmer selling some pokeweed. 

 

Normally grown in dark Amish basements, this strange native plant looks a little like asparagus.  Growing it in the dark gives it that groovy, fluorescent color.  It’s really cool to see, mainly because it only grows in this little pocket of the Northeast, out there in Lancaster Dutch country. I didn’t buy any.  It doesn’t agree with me.  Technically, botanically, it's got a little poison in it.  The cookbooks say you got to boil it three times to remove its toxins but the Amish kids say that’s bunk.  I don't argue with the Amish kids.

On the way back to my car, I noticed something on the ground. 

 

I know this flower.  It’s the season of the tulip poplar.  Of course.  Just in time for the rain.

PATTERNS: A KEY TO NAMING THE TREES

People are always asking me: Jon Spruce, how would you define ‘nature’ using only one word?

One word?  That’s easy.  Patterns.  The one word is patterns.

If you said cycles, I wouldn’t kick you out of the cabin.  That’s an excellent word to describe nature but I can’t see nature's cycles in my lifetime and I certainly can’t see them tree-hunting on these city streets. 

When I stare into the shaman’s fire and think in terms of nature’s endless cycles, I see images of Pangaea dispersing into continents, India crashing into China, dinosaurs surviving as birds, ice ages melting into rainforests, magma rocks building sedimentary shelves, underwater volcanoes sprouting sandy islands, drought and rain burying fossils, a 2.5-inch cone that I can squeeze between my fingers growing into the California Bigtree we call Sequoia and, above it all, the milky cloud-cover spinning forever around our blue planet.  And moss.  Lots of moss.

I’ll stick with patterns.  When I’m out tree-hunting, I’m looking for patterns.  The patterns help me identify the tree.   

Maybe it’s the way the branches are growing – opposite or alternate?  Maybe it’s the pattern of leaf shapes and sizes.  It could be the bark or the fruit.  If I can recognize the pattern that the tree is growing into, then I got a good shot at putting that tree into a family or a group, one step closer to knowing its name.     

Patterns in trees.

I’ll show you what I mean.

SOUTH PHILLY TUNDRA, WEST PHILLY WOODLANDS

The other day, I was snaking my way through the streets of South Philly, trying to avoid baseball traffic on my way back to the rat-race of Center City.  It was, typical for this week, sunny and brisk, clear and windy.

I ended up on Ninth Street, heading north, ballgame on the radio.  Stop signs on every corner kept me moving at a snail’s pace, the perfect speed for urban tree-hunting.

I might as well have been hunting underwater.  

SOUTH PHILLY STARK

This part of South Philly is an urban tundra, as treeless as a clear-cut, unwooded, unshaded and unseasoned.  Lately, all over the city, I’ve been breezing around, absolutely bedazzled by the budding trees and leafing branches, spinning in circles trying to catch all the colors like I was trapped in a kaleidoscope. 

Then this.