Month: May 2016

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Beech trees in Newport, RI (and elsewhere)

Nothing lasts forever. Trees live a long time, but they too succumb. I noticed the many beautiful beech trees in Newport. I also noticed that they were not all in the best of condition. A quick research confirmed.

The beech trees were planted during the gilded age, about 120 years ago. The mansion builders, or at least their landscape architects, loved the beech trees and for good reason. They are truly beautiful and stately trees. Many are the European variety of beech. In their Central European forests home they live around 400 years. although they rarely do. In Newport, they do not make it so long. There are lots of reasons. One is that the beech trees have shallow roots and any kind of traffic on them causes them distress. Anyway, they are nearing the end of their generation.

Newport has a couple of options. They can try to save the old trees, or they can replace them. A combination of both makes sense. It is great to keep the magnificent old trees alive as long as possible. On the other hand, we do not want to create a geriatric ward of trees.

European beeches come in a couple varieties. The copper beech is popular because of its reddish leaves, but it doesn’t grow as big. There is an American beech, also a beautiful large tree. We have lots of them on the farm. The American an European beech look very similar. The European variety has somewhat more rounded leaves and tends to be stouter, while its American cousin is taller. European and American plants and animals are often similar because the continents were connected until the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.

Beech have a very interesting ecology. They are shade tolerant and disturbance adverse, so you find them naturally only in places that have been left alone, no fire or other disruption, for a fair amount of time. In Europe, beech forests tend to predominate and thrive in places that were cleared by neolithic farmers. We are talking human induced changes from the stone age, that is how long these factors can persist. It is also interesting to note, however, that these are not adverse changes.

Wisconsin is the western edge of the beech range and it is very interesting in Milwaukee, which is both on the western and southern edge. Beech trees grow naturally only as far as the fog from Lake Michigan reaches. I know this makes sense only to those in Milwaukee, but let me explain. Beech trees grow in Grant Park, but they do not reach even very far away from Lake Drive. That is how narrow their range. If you go as far west as Howell Avenue, you will find no naturally regenerating beech trees. We are talking a natural range of of maybe only 1000 yards from Lake Michigan. Fascinating, IMO.

My pictures are some of the trees in Newport, except for the last, which is a big American beech I took in Ohio. I will attach an article re in the comments second.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25beeches.html

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A classy guy

When King George VI visited Hyde Park, Mrs Roosevelt (mother Sara) wanted to take down a collections of revolutionary cartoons ridiculing the British monarch. Somebody forgot and when the King & Queen came in, they seemed to go immediately to the wall with the cartoons.

The King looked for a while and then said, something like, “Wonderful drawings. I see some I don’t have in my collections.” The guy had class.

My other picture is the Goulash Place in Danbury. It is unrelated to the Hyde Park. We stopped there and had Goulash. It was good, but I think it is hard to run a restaurant with a menu consisting mostly of Goulash and foods that go with Goulash.

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FDR – heroic age of conservation

The first half of the 20th Century was the heroic age of American conservation. The Forest Service was founded in 1905, the National Park Service in 1916. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) came out of the New Deal. The 1940s brought the American Tree Farm System (ATFS) and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic described in the “Sand County Almanac.”

I chose to use the term heroic age specifically and not golden age. Heroic ages produce the good stories and the … heroes, but they are not pleasant for the people living through them. Heroic times require heroes and heroic effort precisely because time are so tough.
The push toward conservation was provoked by severe ecological disasters. A series of disastrous forest fires culminating in the Great Fire of 1910, called variously the “Big Burn” or the “Big Blow-up.” Call it what you will, it burned about three million acres and killed 87 people, mostly firefighters. Even w/o it burning up, experts predicted that we would run out of wood within a few decades. The horrors of the dust bowl, the worse hard time, have entered the mainstream American imagination, but we usually fair to understand the extent of the loss of soil and productivity. Yes, the heroic age of conservation was a dark, dusty and dangerous time and people who thought deeply about the environment probably thought it would only get worse.

We have come a long way, but some of the solutions from the heroic age have become burdens today. Conservation heroes such as both Roosevelts and Gifford Pinchot used warlike metaphors to describe the fight to improve the environment. I just did it too, since it is hard to get away from their formulation. But then the concept of struggle is big in any heroic narratives.

One of the things Pinchot did was to put fire in the role of enemy of the forest. It is easy to criticize this as a mistake but it made sense at the time. He was struggling to get acceptance for the Forest Service and for conservation more generally. America’s recent experience with fire made it easy to identify this destructive and deadly force as the enemy. Ordinary people could easily see the need to protect forests from the destruction. It worked too well and for more than a half century, we fought to keep fire out. This fundamentally changed the ecology of the ecosystems and built up excess fuel that fuel leading to even more disastrous fires.

There is no enemy and no struggle when you think systemically and ecologically. Factors are more or less appropriate contingent upon the situation at hand. Moreover, the situation is constantly changing, making the appropriate response different ever time. The thing you need to eradicate today may be the thing you propagate tomorrow. It is further complicated by the obvious fact that we alter the situation by working with it, even by just looking at it.

Anyway, these are some more of my thoughts from Hyde Park. You see what you look for. I could talk about FDR’s social or economic reforms, but I still see the conservationist.
My first picture is the Hudson Valley near Hyde Park. Next is a collection of New Deal posters about the National Parks. These posters were made as part of the Federal Arts Project, part of the WPA. After that is FDR talking to Gifford Pinchot and finally is me listening to a “fireside chat” in a reproduction of a 1930s kitchen.

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FDR tour 1 – The ecology of leadership

Franklin Roosevelt was the most consequential president of the 20th Century and our United States would be very different w/o him. Studying FDR is one of my hobbies. He was a fantastically complex and interesting character. He broke all the rules of leadership and yet did it better than anyone else in this century. I have read dozens of books featuring or actual biographies. Of course, I have watched Roosevelt on “The American Experience” and the Ken Burns’ series. So I thought it was time to see his house at Hyde Park.

On the drive up from Virginia, we listened to the audiobook “FDR” by Jean Edward Smith. I listened to it before but it was good to hear it again and let CJ hear it for the first time. There was a lot to this man but here I want to address a particular part of his personal leadership style.

Roosevelt was a tree-loving conservationist. You can certainly perceive this when you look around his estate at Hyde Park. He planted thousands of trees and even described himself as a tree farmer. The Civilian Conservation Corps was his favorite creation. I think that his appreciation of trees, soil and water influenced, permeated, his leadership style. He took an ecological approach to policy. He tried things, adapted the good parts, abandoned the bad ones and tried something else, i.e. try, observe, learn, and try again. It was an evolutionary process of variation and selection. FDR admitted that he did not know what outcomes would be. He commonly violated the ostensible rules of leadership by assigning many people to overlapping or even the same tasks and then letting them adapt to each other and to developing needs. Moreover, he understood that he needed to let things develop and not over control. He chose good people and usually let them do their jobs, but he was not indolent. He was monitoring the system, in an ecological way, i.e. not concerned with the details of the things but the seams and relationships among them. As a tree-loving conservationist myself, I think I recognize this style and its origins. Maybe I am reading too much into this, projecting too much, but it makes sense to me. FDR’s style is the indirect, development-systemic oriented logic of the ecosystem.

One side note – FDR started working on conservation from his first term in the NY Senate. He got appointed to the fish and game committee and reworked the rules. But he lost a fight with the timber industry when he tried to regulation timber cutting on private land. It was good he lost. His intentions were good but his understanding was flawed. Roosevelt introduced a bill in 1912 (The Roosevelt-Jones bill) session that would make it illegal to cut trees smaller than a certain size. In this, he was extrapolating from what they do with fish. You let the little fish go so that they can grow into big fish. Trees do not work like this. Some trees are just small and will never get any bigger. They are small for genetic or competitive reasons, but either way it is wise to cut them. Beyond that, you may need to clear largish areas – big trees and small – in order to create proper ecological conditions for particular species.

My first picture shows Chrissy sitting with Franklin & Eleanor. The next picture is a wonderful oak tree in front of a hay field. FDR postulated that the hay field was cleared for a long time, even before settlement by the Dutch, because the oak trees, like this one, had developed that open branching structure characteristic of a tree growing in open conditions. The picture after that are a series of New Deal posters talking about conservation and the last picture shows a really big hemlock tree. You would almost never find a hemlock naturally growing in the open like that. This hemlock has been part of a garden for more than a couple centuries.
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Newburgh Conspiracy

I wanted to stop off at the place where Washington ended the Newburgh conspiracy, so I went to where I thought it was, i.e. Washington’s headquarters in Newburgh. I found a nice museum and a beautiful location, but not the site. Seems the actual conspiracy took place at New Windsor Cantonment, about five miles away. The woman at Washington’s HQ assured me that Washington had prepared his presentation in the building pictured. The building at the Cantonment has been reconstructed, but I figured that I got close enough.

I will attach background on Newburgh in the comments section. Please read it. It is one of the most important instances in American history. Washington’s action and his character turned the tide and prevented America debouching into the authoritarian dictatorship that usually follows successful revolution.

Washington was an extraordinarily disciplined man. Character to Washington was something to be build over a lifetime. He was very sensitive to this and played his role well. In the case of the Newburgh Conspiracy, Washington knew his speech alone would be insufficient. He needed to lean on his character and employ drama, which he did wonderfully. I will include a clip from a miniseries on Washington. It is worth watching in general, but go to 18 minutes and watch the Newburgh part.

My pictures are from Washington’s HQ and the museum. It was raining hard, so I didn’t my outside picture was a bit hasty. Notice the beautiful horse chestnut next to Washington’s HQ. The log is part of a boom that closed the Hudson so the British fleet could not divide the colonies.

https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/newburgh-conspiracy

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May 4, 2016

Some pictures from my tree farm visits – May 4, 2016. My new plantation is scary. We planted 46 acres: 15 longleaf & the rest loblolly. It is hard to find the little trees. But I remember how hard it was with the first forests in 2005. They are there (I hope). I found some. I also took some pictures of the 2012 longleaf and the loblolly plantations.

The first picture shows new growth on the 2012 longleaf. Next shows loblolly that will be twenty-years old this year. They were thinned in 2010/11 & we will thin again in 2017/18. Third picture is our new cut-over with loblolly in background. There are little trees in there, but they are hard to see. Finally is a picture of a loblolly among the longleaf. I cut it back a few months ago (I have to clip out the loblolly, since they will crowd out the longleaf.) Loblolly is one of the few pines that will sprout from stumps.

A few more pictures from the May 4, 2016 tree farm visit. The first is a picture of the beech-wood from the stream management zone (SMZ) We protect the water by not cutting near streams and wetlands. Since these places are uncut & generally moist, after a while you get beech-maple forests.

Beech will Not reproduce in full sunlight, so they only show up after trees have been on the land for a long time.

This is contrast to pine, which will not reproduce in their own shade. This you can see in my second picture. Notice the pines in the overstory and none in the understory.

Oaks are in between. They do not like to grow in the shade like the beech, but they also do not need or want full sun like the pines. Growing oaks requires “openings” of at least a few acres. Also oaks can stand some fire. Beech have thin bark and most fires will kills them. Southern pine are actually fire dependent in nature.
So you need to have a different strategy for each ecosystem sustainability. If you want beech-maples, cut a few trees or none. If you want oaks, clear a patchworks and maybe allow some fire. If you want pine, you need to clear cut and burn. Each is appropriate in its own way.

Oaks enjoyed a much better environment a couple centuries ago, when land was cleared and sometimes forests filled in along property lines. It was sunny, but not too much. Ironically both preservation and exploitation are bad for oaks.

However, I planted a few among my longleaf. They can stand some burning and I think it will be a nice complementary landscape. I got twenty-five bur oak and interspersed them. They are the type of oaks Aldo Leopold talks about in the fire-dependent oak-opening ecosystems. The last picture is my crimson clover. I just think it is pretty.

Finally – the first picture is a little ravine near one of the roads. The road was going to wash into it, so I got 20 tons of rip-rap and made the boys put it in by hand. They still remember that day’s work with great fondness.

The next picture is our wires. Dominion Power in its generosity has an easement of eight acres of my land. We cannot grow trees but the hunt club plants wildlife plots. It is good for the animals.

The third picture is a lonely longleaf seedling that I could find, since there was nothing else growing near it. Hope it survives. I think it will. It has the advantage of being in a place of its own. It will stay in that “grass stage” for a couple years and then (we hope) shoot up like the ones you saw in the previous posts and in the final photo, which is my longleaf panorama. You can see they are taller than the grass now. The danger to them now is ice storms. Their long needles weight them down. This will be a hazard for the next five years. The really terrible ice storms are uncommon. We trust in the goodness of the Lord and the principles of probability to keep them safe.

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Finished the longleaf pine seminar in Franklin, Virginia

Longleaf used to be the dominant ecosystem in much of the tidewater south and even into the piedmont. It was an extremely diverse and rich ecosystem, combining a forest and a grassland. Longleaf pine cannot compete well with other woody plants or even with lots of herbaceous plants. The seeds will germinate only on mineral soils and the seedlings are easily overtopped. However, they have one big and decisive advantage. Longleaf pine is as close to fireproof as a tree can be. Fire passes over the seedlings and the thick bark of the bigger ones protects them. That nature range of longleaf corresponds very closely to areas with regular small burns.

Longleaf went into decline because of overcutting (they are great timber trees), because of hogs and more than anything else because of fire suppression. The overcutting is obvious and I will explain more about the fire, but what about the hogs? Hogs were semi-feral in Virginia. People let their hogs roam and they had big hog round-ups. The hogs ate almost anything, but they were especially fond of longleaf pine seedling, which are especially rich in carbohydrates. They ate the seedling and rooted around to wreck those they did not eat.
The hogs did damage but longleaf did not return after the hogs were mostly gone because fire was also mostly gone. Longleaf pine seeds germinate in fall, which is odd for a pine and they will germinate only on mineral soil, which requires a disturbance like fire to get rid of the duff. Longleaf is one of the few pine species that can grow in the shade, at least for a while, so longleaf forests could be uneven aged, with new pines growing in gaps caused by fires or other natural disturbances.

A longleaf pine stays in the grass stage (you can see in my picture) for at least a couple years and maybe more than seven. In that time, it does not grow up but it sets down a root system at least six feet deep. At this stage, it is immune to most fires that will kill hardwoods or loblolly. This is the secret to its success and lack of fire the explanation of its failure. The only time the longleaf is vulnerable to fire is when it is three to six feet high. It has grown beyond the safe and compact size, but still not tall enough to put its terminal buds are beyond the flame reach.

Once it gets to a decent size, longleaf can compete well, but fire is still needed to keep the rest of its ecology healthy and allow for the next generations, so a burn every 2-5 years works well. A good rotation is to burn after two growing seasons. Do it in the winter, so it is a cooler fire. After that, burn when they are more than six feet high and then every couple of years. A quicker fire is better, so a header fire is better than a backing fire.
Loblolly grows much faster in the first two years and will out-compete longleaf absent fire. A loblolly is not fire resistant until it is around eight years old. Studies show that longleaf catch up with loblolly at about age seventeen and are a little bigger by age twenty-eight. Longleaf live longer and have a longer rotation. The oldest longleaf on record was 468 years old. Loblolly live only half as long and many are in decline even a little more than thirty years. Nevertheless, loblolly is better if you are interested only in timber income. The short rotations will usually make more money. Even though longleaf timber is better, mills are unwilling to pay a premium in most cases.

Observers used to think that longleaf pine preferred sandy and dry soils because that is where they found them. In fact, they can grow on a variety of soils. The reason they were found on the poor and sandy sites is because those were the places left after settlers and farmers cleared the better land for agriculture. Beyond that, longleaf CAN live on poor sites where others cannot do as well.

The first picture shows South Quay Sandhills Natural Area and one of the only remnant stands of indigenous Virginia longleaf. This is where the seeds come from for longleaf planting in Virginia. Virginia does not grow the seeds. They are sent down to North Carolina. They do it for Virginia, since they currently have more experience. The next picture shows the cones of the longleaf (big) and loblolly. It also shows the sands and weak soil. The reason the longleaf are still here is that the soils do not support agriculture or competitors. The trees in picture #1 are about eighty years old. They are so small because of those soil conditions, but they may be the progenitors of trees all over Virginia. Sometimes it is lucky to be poor.

Third is  a burned over area planted with longleaf seedlings. You cannot see the seedlings, but this is the environment they need. The next picture is four years later. This is a bit of a problem. They missed the burning after two growing seasons and the competition has gotten out of hand. They cannot burn now because the longleaf are in the vulnerable stage. It can still be salvaged, but it is not good.