Wooded Country Roads

One of the things I like best about the landscape around the valley is simply driving down various sideroads to see what you come upon, views that open up, crops being grown, or views that close in.  There are several roads in our area that are open in the summer but not in the winter, where the road allowance has grown up in trees.  They make a beautiful brief interlude in your driving.

 

 Sideroad 7, Southgate Township

 

 4th Line A Old Euphrasia Township

 

35th Sideroad, Old Artemesia Township

Honey Locust Trees

Driving here and there recently I've noticed clusters of lighter coloured trees in the distance occasionally.  Then one day I drove past such a group of trees fairly close - they were honey locusts.

Honey locusts are actually in bloom just now, and their blooms are so obvious that they turn the trees white.  These trees were recommended for fencerows and windbreaks many years ago, and you find them planted in groups around old homesteads, and occasionally a row of them forming a fencerow down the edge of a field.

You can recognize them even in the winter by their twisted, crooked trunks and upper branches.  There are no nice soaring symmetrical canopies; these trees seem to have to fight their way to reach the sky.  

The blossoms are somewhat like pea flowers, hanging in heavy clusters.  Although the leaves are already out, they will fill in after blooming so the tree does end up looking green.

Poplar Fluff

Would you believe, one of the most searched for pages in my 3 years of blogging is a post I did on poplar fluff about this time 2 years ago.  I think it's popularity must be due to there being little written on the topic, and in some places (like Edmonton) there is so much that it's a nuisance.  People want to know what it is, so here's the true, detailed story:

 

Poplar trees produce their seeds in catkins, which hang unpollinated on the trees in early spring.  Once they are pollinated, green seed capsules form (above), and when they break open the seeds are released, each carried by a tiny parachute of fluff.  This is what you see stuck in the tree, floating through the air, or lying on the ground (below).

 

Sometimes the fluff accumulates on the ground so thickly that it looks like snow!  Google 'poplar fluff' and choose 'Images', and you'll find pictures from cities like Calgary or Edmonton (where poplar are one of the most common shade trees), where the ground is white.  Headlines reassure residents that it is not allergenic, and in Moscow, the mayor is 'going to save the city from the fluff'!

We don't get nearly that amount of fluff here, just a little floating through the air like big snow flakes, or a bit on the ground.  Here's a full catkin covered in fluff that fell off on one of our young spruce.

If you dissect this story, you find that there is an intermediate stage of seed pods or capsules forming, shown in green above.  These develop after pollination, but they are not seeds, rather they are the containers for the much smaller seeds with their parachute of fluff.

As these capsules dry out, as they do in late June, they turn brown and split open, releasing the tiny seeds and fluff.  This is the event that brings the 'snow in June', and decorates your lawn with bits of white.

A close look shows the dry, split capsules along the catkin, and the fluff bursting out.  In comparison, a single seed with it's attached fluff is miniscule - see below.  And that's the story of the poplar fluff.

Tamarack Cones

The new year's tamarack cones are forming just now.  A bit like the spruce I profiled earlier, the young cones are a deep reddish-purple, embedded with the needles on young branches.  Some branches seem totally laden with them.

 

We've planted about 20 tamarack in a back corner of our property, just to enjoy the yellow needles in the late fall.  Tamarack are one of those unusual trees, both coniferous (producing cones), and deciduous (losing its needles over the winter).  But one of the small trees has young cones that are yellowy-green rather than reddish-purple.  I'm going to have to wait and see what the difference is.

Leaves

I can't let the month of May go by without paying homage to the unfolding leaves that create the world around us, completely changing the landscape we live in each year as they turn the earth to green.  Walking the woods in May I'm always enchanted with the delicate life unfolding in each leaf, everyone of them different, but all contributing to the bright fresh yellow-green of spring.

These are a patch of ostrich fern I caught in the woods on the farm west of us, growing at the edge of a wet patch, with the sun shining through in early morning.  Ferns have long been one of my favourite plants in the woods, especially in spring as they initially unfold their fronds in a characteristic fiddlehead shape..

Beech leaves, which unfold from long slender reddish-brown buds into brilliant green leaves all in the space of a week, the leaves marked by strong parallel veins reaching out to the side of the leaf.

And of course maple leaves.  The sugar maple is probably the most common hardwood tree in all the forests of Grey County, if not much of southern Ontario. And they are one of the first trees to gain their leaves in mid-May, contributing a lot to turning the landscape green.

And finally, these are ash leaves in our own backyard just a few evenings ago, when the evening sun was shining through them like a cloud of large bright yellow-green confetti.  The ash (mostly white ash) are the last among the trees to unfold their leaves, often standing mostly bare still while other leaves are already green.  And may of our small ash seedlings and saplings suffered heavy damage in the unseasonally late frost last week, their first leaves all frozen and dead.  I'll be watching to see how readily they regrow.

Spruce Flowers?

When we first bought our place, one of the first things I did was start planting trees.  In the first year or two I planted about 75 little white spruce, all starting out life as an 8" high seedling.  Most of the first ones are higher than my head now, and one in particular, is nearly double that.  The bright green of the new shoots when they burst through the brown scales and start to expand is one of the marks of late May, contrasting with the older dark green of the rest of the tree.

But when I walked by one tree I noticed something different.  It's not one of the biggest among the trees, but about 8' tall.  It had the green shoots bursting out, but it also had small brown cones and small purple cones (below).  I guess I was a little slow, but it took me awhile to work out what I was seeing.

The brown 'cones', not real cones at all, but softer light brown pollen cases, were the male flowers, while the purple cones waiting to be fertilized were the female flowers.  It will be interesting to see if any pollen from the brown flowers reach the purple cones and they mature into actual spruce cones.  The pollen cases will dry up and disappear, while fertilized cones will grown into the woody cones we're all familiar with.  You don't usually see this difference at all, because it happens high up in mature treees, but this is unfolding right before my eyes.

Cherry Blossoms

It's the time of year for flowering trees as well as wildflowers.  The cherries, serviceberries and of course the apples are all in bloom.  Driving around the countryside you spot the odd tree here and there along the road or along fencerows or the forest edge, covered in white blossoms.  These are some bright white blossoms I passed on the 7th Line south of Meaford last week.

I stopped along the road and got out to take some closer pictures and figure out what tree it was. It turned out to be a pin cherry, with amazing white blooms against the bright blue sky.

Sugar Maple Flowers

In just a few short days of warm May weather, brilliant yellow-green has coated the sides of the valley as hundreds of sugar maple come into bloom.  That first shine of bright green replacing the brown of early spring you may think are the leaves unfurling and starting to grow, and you're right - in part.  But the bulk of that yellow-green colour is actually the flowers of the sugar maples.

Generally inconspicuous, tree flowers aren't often noticeable, and they certainly aren't the bright colours of other wildflowers.  But we all know that sugar maples have keys in the fall, and those seeds have to come originally from the flowers.  Below is the spreading green canopy of maples, sweeping up the west side of the Beaver Valley, here just north of the ski club.

Depending on circumstances, individual trees stand out as if they are lit up, with a very pale yellow-green colour.  Usually the flowers are only in the canopy, and it's hard to get a picture.  But trees along the forest edge or in fencerows provide a chance to see the flowers close-up.

The lower branches of this big old maple, near Lake Eugenia, gave me the chance to get the close- up shown at the top.