A Black Locust Blowdown?

Tom Ingersoll Answers the Call.

By Felix Carroll

In a patch of woodland, during a wicked windstorm, a whole bunch of trees blow down. They happen to be black locusts. And because Berkshire County happens to be home to Tom Ingersoll, joyful opportunity ensues.

“Do you have time for an adventure?” he asks in a text message.

“Yes.”

“You got some decent boots?” he queries. “Always.”

Tom is waiting at the property in question, the beautiful Inn at Kenmore Hall, in Richmond, Mass. Behind its historic main house, a vast field slopes “Sound of Music”-like down to a dewy haze of bottomlands. Along the way, the patch of woodland presents itself, distinctively scalped by a vengeful wind shear.

Probably a hundred or more black locusts lay slain and eerily ordered, side by side, north to south, an entablature of trees and trenches.

“There it is,” says Tom, arborist, owner of Ingersoll Land Care and a Berkshire Botanical Garden trustee.

First, a confession: I’ve got a thing for black locusts (Robinia Pseudoacacia). My locust-loving intertwines with this guy: Tom. I first met him 20 years ago in the swampy flats of nearby Sheffield. I had been preparing my first real vegetable garden. I had envisioned natural, rotresistant, non-milled, non-conforming fence posts to frame out and safeguard a nutty, congested assortment of interplanted fine foods. A friend advised “locust posts” and “Tom Ingersoll.”

I bought a couple dozen posts from Tom, about 5 inches in diameter, 8- to 10-feet long, that he had harvested himself. Another 10 years later, living in a new home and arranging a new garden, I repeated the process with Tom. Both gardens remain, all those posts still standing at attention, sun-scorched, faithful sentries — highly impressive.

In the years since, I’ve enjoyed Tom’s arborist-oriented educational Instagram posts (at ingersoll_land_care). Having heard about this recent black locust blowdown at Kenmore and of Tom’s involvement in the clean-up, I sought him out. Which brings us to this field and its mussed-up woodlot on a wintry day this past March. The hills alive with the sound of his tree crew chain sawing, I finally could ask, “Tom, what’s the deal with black locusts and why do they make you happy?”

The deal is this: Not all is necessarily happy in this story, because black locusts really aren’t supposed to be here. Black locust trees were brought here from the South and planted beginning about 150 to 200 years ago.

Why?

“Because they make fantastic fenceposts,” Tom explains.

So then what happened?

“They escaped,” he says.

Maybe we could think of these escapees as the Pretty Boy Floyds of invasives. An outlaw, yes. But behind their distinctive, deeply furrowed, corrugated dark bark — their rot-resistance and sinuous strength — lay a mostly benevolent outlaw (unless their roots have torn through your septic system).

Get this: Because they are a legume, they can improve the soil by pulling nitrogen from the air. And not only do they make for excellent posts, but they also are prized for use in pergolas and handrails. Tom has even milled black locust for boardwalks, decks, potting sheds, tables, and tent platforms. High in BTUs, black locust also makes for first-rate firewood.

And anyway, these escapees have no intention of leaving. Go ahead, try: Chop them down. They’ll likely sprout back up. Pull them out by the roots, and they’ll reach for a clutch of earth from which to prosper once again. Because they taste yucky, most bugs and birds don’t care to dine upon them.

They grow fast. They’re clonal. They travel in packs — er, rather, they tend to grow in groves. Peer-pressured, sunseeking, they force one another to rise accommodatingly pole-like.

And unlike our prized oaks, for example, black locusts thrive in crappy soil, like abandoned gravel pits. And like our native poplars, white pine and birches, they behave as pioneer species, quick to move in upon disturbed land.

Tom grew up marveling them, the reason for which warrants a little trip down memory lane.

“I grew up in a house that had been built in 1955,” he says. “By the time I was a little kid, the porch, which was made of pine, had rotted, but the posts that supported the porch were still in perfect order.”

Yep, the posts were locust, set into bare earth.

“To this day, the posts that were planted 68 years ago are still sound,” Tom says. “You could straighten a nail on them.”

Tom recalls that on his childhood home of 15 acres, three black locusts had purposefully been planted amidst an apple orchard and vegetable gardens. When that land went fallow beginning about 40 years ago, those three black locusts eventually became thousands of black locusts.

He refers to his kinship to black locust as a “love/hate relationship.” Because of his business, he can put them to good use. “But my suggestion to anyone who has black locusts is to keep them in jail,” he says. “Mow around them. Don’t let them escape. Otherwise, they will send out root sprouts in a radial fashion.”

Here at Kenmore, the hope is to transform this beat-up locust grove into meadow with native oak and hickory.

As for those slain black locusts, here’s a happy ending: In Tom’s possession is a cut list. Turns out a good deal of the black locust has now been transformed into an outdoor classroom for Farm in the Garden Camp assembled by the craftsman and designer Aaron Dunn. In its final form, the structure is 15 feet by 30 feet in diameter and about 10-feet tall.

“Repurposing an invasive species into something beautiful — that makes me happy,” says Tom.

Where is it?

Berkshire Botanical Garden. You can see for yourself this summer.