Month: August 2015

One of the last intact maple-basswood forest in Milwaukee county was about to be made into a parking place for trucks back in 1972. The County bought it and preserved it as Cudahy Nature Preserve. It is only around 40 acres, but it had managed to avoid the ax for a couple hundred years, so it had the trees, soils and some natural communities intact.
 
I started to go out there before it was a park. I have a relationship with it long term. I went out there and walked around the day after my mother died in 1972. My cousin Ray Karshna used to live across the street, so I would visit him and then look in on the forest. It is thick and dark. Deep shade trees like maples and basswood are dominant. There are some oaks, but mostly near the edges. Milwaukee is a very interesting ecological region. The range of beech trees extends only about a mile inland from Lake Michigan. The Cudahy Forest is just a little too far inland.

My other pictures show Lake Michigan at Grant Park. And the sugar maple brewery on Lincoln Avenue. Interestingly, the logo shows the seeds of a Norway maple, not a sugar maple.
 

Bur oaks are characteristic of “oak openings” or areas of oak mixed with grasslands. The famous naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote about them in “Sand County Almanac.” They are robust against fire, which is one of the ways they survive. They grow slowly. Some get pretty big; others just get old but stay small.

There are two bur oaks that I know “personally.” One is at Dover Street School and the other in Humboldt Park. Both are big and old. They were old when I was young. The first pictures is at Dover. I played under it when I was in kindergarten. It used to be surrounded by asphalt, which evidently did it no harm. Now it has grass. The other one is in Humboldt Park. I admired it since I was young, although not as long as the one at Dover St.

The next picture are honey locusts along Pine Avenue. They were planted in the 1970s. They take a very long time to grow, but they keep on going and get pretty big. The last picture is a big old cottonwood at Grant Park. I like cottonwoods. They grow fast and don’t live long (for a tree) but they are good early succession trees.

Finally getting around to posting from my trip to Milwaukee a couple weeks ago. My sister did a better job of posting some of the social stuff.

My posts are mostly about changes with trees, so please feel free not to read more. I am interested in changes and trees. I am surprised sometimes how fast and sometimes how slow things change.

Let me start with my old house on Dover Street and the trees. So you can see how fast they grow, or not. It is only with my advanced age that I get some perspective on tree. The big trees are not always the oldest ones. And some get to a particular size and then just kind of stay that way.

The first picture is a silver maple. My uncle Ray Karshna planted it 1967. He dug it out of the bushes at his house. I was a volunteer. The maple grew fast and then mostly stalled.
Next is my basswood tree. I planted that in 1972.  I brought it home from the woods on College Avenue, carried it in a plastic bad riding my bike.   I pruned it and guided it over the wires and now it is pretty robust.

The horse chestnut on the hill is from 1966. I grew it from a chestnut that year.
Finally, we have the crimson Norway maples. They were planted in 1973 by the city of Milwaukee.