March-A Time To Connect With Trees Linda Popelish

March - A Time To Connect With Trees

By Linda Popelish

We humans have recently lost a heart-breaking number of our tree neighbors to droughts, wildfires, and human actions. An event on January 19 of this year stunned me. A Mono wind of 80 to 100 mph brought down at least 15 Giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park. The heaviest sequoia known weighs 2.7 million pounds. I can’t imagine what the sound was like when one of these enormous trees hit the ground. Even fallen, their trunks are higher than a person’s head. The size, age and beauty of a sequoia overawes anyone. I was lucky in my working life to get to survey and camp in the Sierra National Forest and visit some of these giants. The “presence” of big trees in a forest affects you in a way that is hard to describe— “deep silence, the soaring of space, and the insignificance of me” is as good as I can do. Even the large firs, pines, and incense cedars of the Sierras dwarf a human.

I cannot help but be humbled next to any tree. All trees, of whatever size and species, are amazing and crucial to the health and well-being of people, and to the Earth as a whole. I am a transplant to the Southwest, but I have been here most of my life. I am still learning that no tree should be taken for granted—not a single pinyon or juniper (cedar) in our woodland or “pygmy” forest, nor a Ponderosa pine or Quaking aspen up at McGaffey. As a footnote, I’d like to mention that the timber guys I worked with in the Zuni Mountains found a huge juniper, more than a yard in diameter, as I remember. They named it the MOAJ (Mother of All Junipers)—a bit of making fun of the fact that our working environment was not only a forest of trees, but also a forest of federal acronyms. I hope it is still alive.

We Are All Connected

Trees are the ultra-example of how all life on earth is connected. Trees breathe out oxygen and take in carbon dioxide, the opposite of mammals like you and me. Trees are a living being that can make food from sunlight through photosynthesis. Forests can be important carbon sinks. One large oak can drink up 100 gallons of water a day and discharge it into the air.

Even as a decaying corpse on the ground, trees are vital for the ecosystem as a source of nitrogen and micro-habitats.

Among the innumerable books and articles written about trees, to me The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) and Forest Bathing by Dr. Qing Li (2018) stands out. The Lives of Trees by Diana Wells (2010) is another. These are my sources for the amazing abilities of trees.

The Overstory is a long and complex novel about the interrelationship of trees and humans, and how that relationship could look in the future. I think it is the most thought-provoking book I have read in the last few years. Do you want to know: What is it like to live on a small platform 200 feet up in the air in the limbs of a redwood? What does one botanist believe (and show by example) is the only way for a person to really help our planet live on? Are trees using humans to try to survive? Turn the pages of The Overstory to find out.

More Marvels of Trees

THEY ARE OLD

“No other organism on earth lives as long as a tree.”

A bristlecone pine in California has been determined to be 4,850 years old and recently another is believed to be more than 5,000 years old. Giant sequoias can be 3000 years old. We have ancient trees right in our region. A Douglas fir in El Malpais National Monument, a tree only 7 feet tall, was 650 years old when it died in 2014. According to the Las Cruces Sun News (June 14, 2018) among the oldest trees in New Mexico are another Douglas fir at El Malpais (1275 years old), a Limber pine (1670 years old), and a Rocky Mountain juniper (over 1900

Camping under big trees in the Sierra National Forest 1982: Linda Popelish

years old). You can search the web for the Methuselah tree and the Yoda tree to see some neat photos. You don’t have to go far to see an old tree: a Ponderosa pine at McGaffey can be 100 years old.

And then there are clonal trees, or colonies, of a single organism— genetically identical trees all connected by one root system that are so much older than any of the trees above.

According to the USDA Forest Service, Pando is such a colony of more than 40,000 individual Quaking Aspen trees in Utah. This colony is estimated to be 80,000 years old.

The fact that some trees grow by adding discernible rings each year proved to be a special gift of understanding that trees gave us. The great discovery of tree-ring dating, or dendrochronology, enabled people to learn how a tree grows, how climate patterns have changed through millennia, and when a tree died, not just to the exact year, but often to the month or season. Archeologists can now see the pattern of room building at Pueblo Bonito since they know exactly when the trees used for roof timbers were cut. They can learn where the trees originally grew and how long they were stockpiled before used. All this is a case of trees telling us about our own past behavior.

THEY ARE DIVERSE

Over 60,000 species of trees inhabit our Earth. Trees have tremendous differences in leaf type and size, how they propagate and spread, what the seeds/ nuts/ fruits are like, how their roots are designed to anchor them. Some drop their leaves and some are evergreens. They can blossom before they fruit, or after, or all at the same time like the orange tree. The list could go on and on.

THEY ARE SURPRISING

They may not move but they communicate.

Scientist in recent years been astounded to learn that trees communicate underground and through the air and help each other to heal and survive. Check out the “wood wide web” which a friend just mentioned to me. Trees not only talk to each other but feed each other and build enormous immune systems as well. Here’s how the author of The Overstory ( p.142) describes it: TREES continued on page 47

New Mexico Arbor Day March 12, 2021

National Arbor Day is the last Friday in April, but like many states, NM set aside a day that reflects the best time to plant trees locally, the second Friday in March.

Arbor Day was first celebrated in 1872 in Nebraska. Within 20 years, it had spread to almost all of the states. In 1970, Richard Nixon proclaimed it a national holiday.

The founder of Arbor Day, Julius Sterling Morton said: “Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future”.

Tree New Mexico promotes tree planting throughout the Land of Enchantment. See their resources and programs at: treenm. org

Views of the Sierra National Forest 1982: Linda Popelish

10 Fun Tree Questions

1) What is the State Tree of New Mexico? 2) Name a spice that comes from a tree. 3) Why did the US Army cut down Sitka spruce in the Pacific Northwest during World War I? 4) The bark of what tree is used for wall tiles, bulletin boards and stoppers? 5) You and the tree in your back yard come from a common ancestor. True or False? 6) Which tree fruit, a very popular staple in Mexican cuisine, was eaten by megafauna (huge mammals like giant sloths) more than 13,000 years ago? 7) We’ve been destroying the world’s forests in an area larger than the state of Connecticut (5,567 square miles) a. every year b. every 10 years c. every 50 years. 8) People learned how to leach toxic tannins from this nutritious nut so that they could eat them. a. walnut b. chestnut c. acorn 9) Which of our birds is very important for dispersing pinyon seeds (nuts) and therefore is vital for the survival of the tree? 10) What percentage of New Mexico is naturally forested?

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