Another Day, another storm

The storms certainly keep coming, and, worryingly, the trees keep succumbing.  Today at 3:30 a very brief but intense cell blasted through campus. We’d lost power for a little bit, I don’t know why. The weather station recorded about 1/4″ of rain in 15 minutes, with a peak wind gust of 35 mph, from the north. This was enough to take the life of a poor Hackberry tree.

Hackberry by Warner Science

This poor tree had been scarred at the base years ago, maybe by a random mouse, maybe by something mechanical. At any rate, the worst place to wound a tree is right at the base. A tree has a very hard time compartmentalizing the wound at the base, and structural integrity of both trunk and root system is compromised. Look at the picture below-the wound was on the north side of the tree. The roots rotted away on that side, and the strong north wind gust toppled the tree right over.

Base of Hackberry

I took these pictures on my way home at 4, but I would imagine the rest of the campus trees are fine. A perfect wind knocked this one down. I’ve already got a replacement in mind.

EDIT: Middblog just posted some YouTube video of the rain here-it’s impressive.

Poison Parsnip

The poison parsnip is starting to bloom on roadsides, and, being one of those plants I get asked about (and emailed about), I thought I’d fill you in on the nastiness.

Poison parsnip, Pastinaca sativa, is actually Parsnip, the root vegetable. As a vegetable, it was popular in colonial times, as it matures under a very short season, and tastes best after the cold set in. Potatoes became more popular, and parsnip escaped cultivation, and has plagued us since. Related to carrots, they haunted my childhood, not only for an ingredient in pot roast, but an unfortunate nickname through grade school. I bet I would like them now, but I just can’t bring myself to try them.

The poison comes from a chemical in the plant sap called psoralen, which reacts with the human skin to cause (ready for this?) phytophotodermatitis. In a nutshell, the sap reacts with UV sunlight, and causes mild to in some cases quite severe burns. I’ll speak from experience here-a mild case can cause red skin, like a steam burn from your tea kettle. I had full second degree burns on all exposed parts of my legs one year, blisters from shorts to socks. Oh yeah, I was just a poster child for horticulture that summer. The blisters healed after a couple of weeks, but the dark reddish brown blotches stayed for the better part of a year.

The sap is not an oil, unlike poison ivy, so it won’t linger on your clothes, pets, lawn mowers, etc. Being phytotoxic, one must come in contact with the sap in the sun in order to get the burn. When dealing with parsnip, I pick cloudy or even rainy days. It is also safe to brush up against, unlike poison ivy, as the plant does not seem to exude sap from unbroken leaves or stems.

The plant is a biennial-a rosette of leaves the first year, and flower stalks the second. (Parsnip in the store is a one year root). I find this makes eradication a little difficult. Biennials are hell-bent on flowering in their second year-if they don’t, what’s the point to life? So cut down too early, and they form many smaller flowers, and therefore more seeds, than left untouched. The best time to mow seems to be right after they flower, but before they have set seed, like you can fool mother nature that way. Unfortunately, roadside mowing seems to coincide with an earlier mowing, followed by a later mowing spreading the ripe seeds around.

It thrives on roadsides, and other poor growing locations, because the rosettes in the first year are poor competitors, and can’t keep up with a healthy stand of vegetation, such as grass. This is actually the best control method, growing better plants to choke out the parsnip. Other control methods go all medieval, by digging, ripping, pulling,repeated mowing,  or just plain cursing the plant out of exisitence. Seeds of parsnip are viable in the soil for up to four years, so vigilance is required. A little herbicide does wonders, if you are so inclined.

Wild parsnip can be found on parts of campus, but not on campus proper. It is along the road down by the recycle center, in such a large patch to make control nearly impossible. Thanks to a timely email from Peter Ryan, there is none in the no-mow zones. His eyes are better than mine. If anyone else in blog-land sees a single plant or two creeping up on campus, let us know. Here’s some pictures taken today along Bi-Hall Road of a couple of plants I found. It’s best to recognize your enemy.

Middland all a-twitter

I seem to be on Twitter. I’d been resisting for days, weeks, even months. Readers of this blog probably have picked up on the fact that I don’t even sneeze in less than a half a paragraph. However, a recent re-reading of Strunk and White, rule number 13, Omit Needless Words, got me thinking that maybe I should challenge myself. 160 characters in a tweet is plenty to make a fool of yourself, but more challenging to be useful and informative. And Patio Furniture Day, the day the landscape department puts out all the outdoor furniture for the summer just begged to be tweeted to the students.

The final revelation was the ability to tweet pictures from my cell phone, via TwitPic. One of my reasons for starting this blog was the sharing of plant pictures, as I see much more of the campus than most of you, and there are some beautiful things on this campus you really ought to see, and maybe even walk to at lunch. Putting pictures on a blog, though, is a process, one I’m readily willing to go through most of the time, just not in the growing season. See the dilemma? Heck, I’ve still got pictures of every type of crabapple blossom on campus on my desktop computer, from May 2009.  Today’s twitter picture was a Catalpa blossom, on a tree across from Emma Willard. Took a quick picture, sat down at lunch and sent it as a text/picture message to twitpic, and presto.

My cell phone isn’t too fancy, and I don’t text with the dexterity of my 13 year old, so don’t expect much. But come on over, if you’re a fellow twit (wait, that’s not what i meant…), twitter, oh, whatever.  http://twitter.com/middland.

If a Tree Falls…

I’m not much of a Twitterer, although I’ve been called a twit many times.I don’t want to get tweets on my cell-my phone vibrates so violently at the slightest ring or text message that while weeding I end up shrieking like my 10 year old thinking I just weeded a bee’s nest. But I do check some from time to time, MiddBlog being one of my favorites, and they cross-tweeted (is that the right phrase?) a posting from Audrey Tolbert, who with Cody Gohl are blogging their Middlebury summer. (They are going to learn the Vermont secret-we put up with winter for the summer. Not too hot, not too sticky, and, so far this year, not too buggy.)

Anyway, she posted a picture asking“If a tree falls in Midd and there’s no one on campus to hear it, does it make a sound?”. Yes, Virginia, it certainly does.

Silver maple-Hillcrest Road
Silver Maple-Hillcrest Road

This is a Silver Maple tree behind the Chellis House. The storm I reported on last week, well, this was one of the trees that fell over. The picture does not do the size justice, as the trunk of the tree was at least 4′ in diameter. Look carefully, you’ll see about 1-2″ of live wood around the trunk, and the rest was hollow.

Close Up of trunk

One of the surprising things about this tree falling was its aim-it fell in absolutely the perfect direction, missing the woodline separating Hillcrest Road from Adirondack Road, missing Chellis House, the Queer Studies house, and the garage next to Chellis. We couldn’t have asked for anything more.

I wasn’t going to write about this poor tree. I am actually embarrassed by this. While I knew the tree had structural problems, I had no idea the extent of the damage inside the trunk. Look at the close up picture-those are weeds growing between the main stems at the top of the trunk. Large trees like this will often collect leaves there, and eventually grow things. It is the trunk decay that is surprising, and I feel like I should have known about this problem. Two arborists I respect both looked at this tree, though, and said that I had no way of knowing how bad it was, that they see this all the time, one going so far as to say “this is what Silver maples do.” So they made me feel a little better, and now I’m not blushing in embarrassment posting these pictures.

This tree is now cleaned up and gone. We’ve caught up on most of our storm damage, thanks to some very hard work by our landscape department and some excellent outside contractors. The elm I wrote about below Mead Chapel is OK, although more bare now. Once the hanging branches were pruned out there was more left of the tree than I had first thought, so that’s good. Many of the elms had some broken branches here and there, and a handful of other trees on campus had a branch or two break. Overall, not as bad as it could have been.