Author: Tim Parsons

A Better Weather Forecast

| Tim Parsons

Thanks to an Environmental Grant several years ago, the Landscape department has been running a personal weather station down at the track off of Porter Field Road, with a second more recent station up at Breadloaf campus. We depend on these stations for primarily for snow removal and IPM strategies. The data are also streamed to the Weather Underground, a weather web site that accumulates and posts data for over 10,000 stations across the US.

Any compulsive weather addicts know how tricky it is to forecast weather for a region-most people say the forecasters are “wrong”. A better interpretation would probably be to say they aren’t accurate, and Vermont is a great example of why. The National Weather Service has various offices, and ours is in Burlington at the airport. They cover a large area, from Lake Placid to Montpelier, and from the Canadian Border to Killington. The only way to accurately forecast an area this large is to break it into regions. For example, our region is number 9, Western Addison, including the cities of Vergennes and Middlebury. And here lies the problem with forecasting, particularly in the winter. Middlebury campus is under the same forecast as Lake Champlain, and Vergennes shares the forecast with Brandon. It’s a huge geographical area, and one forecast for such a space is bound to lose accuracy across the region. Addison may get an 1″ of snow, low in the valley, while East Middlebury may be getting hammered with 6 times that, under the same forecast.

The Weather Underground has been taking the National Weather Service forecast, and re-packaging it on their website, along with access to some great radar maps, blogs, photos, etc. Recently, however, they’ve starting forecasting themselves, called Best Forecast, and what makes this different is the data, not only from all of the NWS weather stations, but all of the personal weather stations such as ours. Slate just wrote a great article explaining this. Suffice it to say that Best Forecast is now taking into account microclimates, so when pulling up a Middlebury forecast on the WU, we are getting a Middlebury campus forecast.

How accurate? We’ll find out tonight and tomorrow. The NWS is forecasting a dusting to 2″ of snow tonight, with an additional 3-5″ possible tomorrow before it changes to rain. Temperatures mid 20’s tonight, mid 30’s tomorrow. Best Forecast? Lows of 28 tonight, 50% chance of snow or rain, high of 45 tomorrow, snow than rain in the afternoon, snow accumulations of 1″ possible. I’m not placing bets on who is correct here, but the Best Forecast feels right to me. I’ll post an update when all is said and done.

UPDATE 4PM: The NWS issues forecasts at fairly regular times, 3 PM or so being fairly regular. Their update for the western addison zone has changed slightly, 2-4″ during the day tomorrow, changing to rain in the afternoon, back to snow Friday night with an additional 1-3″. Mid 30’s tomorrow, mid 20’s tomorrow night. Best Forecast has changed little-snow and rain tomorrow, accumulation 1″, chance of ice pellets, snow and rain friday night, only 60% chance, no accumulation mentioned.

UPDATE 12 NOON FRIDAY: The NWS has changed their forecast, as the storm seems to have slowed down from the west. No snow last night, and only light snow now at noon, not accumulating. So do we call this a win for Best Forecast? Both forecasts now are in line with each other for snowfall tonight, 4-6″, but Best Forecast is calling for temps today around 45, with the NWS saying mid 30’s, which it is now. I’d be surprised if temps rise today.

Lydia’s Tree Sculpture

| Tim Parsons

Public Safety called our department this last fall semester. They were concerned about potential vandalism to one of the trees near Johnson. For once, I was one step ahead of them (hard to do, they do a great job on campus). I’d already stopped one day and introduced myself to Lydia Jun.

Lydia was a student in Sanford Mirling’s Sculpture I class, and was designing a piece using one of the Princeton Elms along Chateau Road. I love it when students use the landscape in their classwork.Lydia had used long steel rods bent into a U shape on one end, and draped the rod up into the branches of the tree. The other end of the rod was gracefully connected through wood to a person seated on a wooden stump. As the wind moved the branches of the trees, the motion would carry to the occupant of the stump.

I wanted to share her work on the blog, and asked her to send me pictures when she was done, and a brief description. As always on my blog, click on the picture to download the larger shot. Guest blogging begin, and thanks Lydia!

 

Naturalism

I’m currently in Sculpture I with Sanford Mirling. My project was supposed to be a wooden prosthetic. The following is the statement for our sculptures.

Is there every enough time? Four performances take on the typical time constraints of a Middlebury student and attempt to resolve them through whimsical, and at times absurd, extensions of the body.

But I found this idea of cyborg somewhat silly considering our bodies make us perfectly capable of doing tasks while there are people out there in the world who are missing limbs. So I played with this idea of Restless Leg Syndrome which the restless leg is treated as a disease. It’s somewhat disturbing how far people go to attempt to control their environment. My piece demands this sensation of restless limbs from the shuddering branches to the person. Also, the large movements of the trees which transfers to tiny movements of the limbs is a backlash to the demand for big results with the least effort in society. “Imperfection” is beauty. Subtleness screams.

The tree and I got along in harmony.

No-Mow at Richard Stockton

| Tim Parsons

I recently received an email from Jessica Okazaki, from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, asking about Middlebury’s no-mow program. She is interested in starting a similar project at her school. Read more at her Facebook group called “Lose the Lawn”. I’m sure she isn’t the only one thinking about this on a college campus, so I thought that rather than just responding to her alone I would turn the answers into a blog post. A couple of her questions are below.

 For my project, I am hoping to plant native plants to this pinelands region, (or even better -native endangered/threatened species if they can grow on this soil). In some areas, I think I would like native grass, similar to lawn but needs no mowing… so that the students can walk on them without killing the plants… if that’s possible…..

 I would like your tips / advice on how to prepare the right soil for native plants and some specific plants you might recommend.

 I’ll speak first about the sites you have in mind, and keep in mind I’m looking at this from 300+ miles away, and don’t know much about the Pine Barrens. Your master plan is an excellent document, and has some great insights into your landscape in general.

Middlebury College and Richard Stockton seem to have drastically different landscapes, not only ecologically but from a human standpoint as well. Your beautiful campus is considerably more condensed, surrounded by woods (at least according to Google Maps). Here at Middlebury we have a relatively large but spread out campus. Many of our no-mow zones are many acres in size, while some of the areas you have in mind look quite a bit smaller.

Our no-mow zones are simply that-areas where we have let the lawn go. Native and non-native wildflowers are infiltrating the areas, and we are achieving a nice effect of contrast between mown lawn and no-mow, helping to differentiate sections of our campus. Because of their size, we couldn’t possibly think about re-landscaping these areas with plants, or even reseeding. It would be nice to plant these areas in Meadow plants, but the labor and herbicide needed on this scale would be far too costly. Your campus, though, seems to have many little pockets of lawn that aren’t needed, and these certainly can be re-done in native grasses and wildflowers. I think, though, that I wouldn’t try to find native grass that can be walked upon by students, but think in terms of taking entire areas out of circulation completely, and leaving the trafficked areas in lawn.

The problem is the amount of traffic in small areas, especially on college campuses. We affectionately refer to these as “goat paths”. No plant can take a constant traveled lane like this, particularly fussy native wildflowers. Focus on a healthy lawn in these areas.

In terms of preparing the soil for your project, there is no way for me to give any specific recommendations from here. A soil test would be a crucial first step before anything happens. I do have some general advice, though. Based on many of your pictures posted on the Facebook group, your campus suffers from the same general problem as ours, that of soil compaction. I see in many of the rainy day pictures standing water in the lawn, and you mention that it is the lawn not able to absorb the rainfall. Truthfully, it isn’t the lawn absorbing rain, but the soil. A hard, compacted topsoil cannot soak in a rainfall, and water does tend to run off. The best cure to relieve compaction is to eliminate the stress (probably foot traffic, lawn mowers, etc.), and to add organic matter, such as compost. Aeration would certainly help as well. Rain gardens can be used where water concentrates.

Here’s a photo of a nice pine stand. No lawn underneath, but who cares? This is probably because of the soil and shade from the pines. There probably are wildflowers that would grow in an area like this, but not many. Dry shade can be tricky.

Photo by Jessica

Here’s the same area (I think, remember I’m 350 miles away), after a hard rain. This screams compaction, possibly from foot traffic heading toward the parking lot? Or was this just a heck of a rain storm?

Photo by Jessica

In terms of other soil amendments, I constantly remind myself that I can’t fight geology-you have to play the cards you are dealt. If your soil conditions are radically different compared to the plants you would like, you probably aren’t looking at the right types of plants. Lists abound of native plants and certain well-behaved non-natives appropriate for all types of soil and landscape conditions .When amending soil one really needs to amend an entire bed, not just planting holes, and these can get costly in large areas. Certainly minor adjustments, such as fixing a nitrogen deficiency aren’t terribly difficult. In general, and listen for many other horticulturists gasping in pain as they disagree, wildflowers don’t need super rich soil to thrive, certainly not like our coddled landscape plants of today.

This is the area mentioned on the Facebook group as the first area to plant. I see evidence of compaction here too.

Photo by Jessica

If I’m reading the maps and your description correctly, I like the area you’ve chosen to trial. Establishing a new bed can be difficult, and it is nice to have it surrounded by buildings/parking lots. I always think of weed infiltration-if the area you want to plant is surrounded by lawn, the seeds from those grasses and lawn weeds can blow in and make the new bed harder to maintain, as the weeds need to be removed frequently in the first couple of years to avoid the competition.(They’re called weeds for a reason!)

Another thought is to work closely with the Grounds department. One of the best parts of our no-mow program was the reduction in labor from constant mowing. We’ll be honest-some of our no-mow areas were picked because we didn’t really want to mow them (!). Some small no-mow areas you may like to plant may take 3 times as long to mow as other areas because of obstructions such as trees and planted beds. You can get a larger bang for your environmental buck by removing these slow to mow zones.

Here’s a picture from the Facebook group of an area you think should not be lawn.

 

photo credit-Jessica

To me, extending the bed from the building would add a tremendous amount of weeding that would have to be done, although it is hard to get the right context where this is on campus based on this picture. If the bed were eliminated and the entire area planted in natives the strip would still need to be mown next to the walk (tick control), leaving an awkward area in between that strip and the building.

This is a good area for no-mow-

photo by Jessica

Extending this existing bed/wild area under the trees would lose quite a bit of lawn, and look in the landscape like a logical extension of the area.

Lose the lawn here too-

Photo again by Jessica!

This area looks unused, with no doors or pathways evidenced. It also looks hard to mow, with a lot of weedwacking. A native stand of plants under the trees would look quite attractive. The trees do seem to be planted in a grid, was this supposed to be (or is) an outdoor recreation area?

Your last question, that of specific plants, I’m afraid I’ll be no use. New Jersey is a world away ecologically compared to the Champlain Valley. A little bit of googling while eating my lunch led me toward some interesting sites-like the Plants of Southern New Jersey, and some interesting work on Native Warm Season Grass Meadows, including an interesting PDF here from the New Jersey NRCS.  I liked Professor Jack Conner’s blog.

I wish you the best of luck. Let us know how it goes.

 

 

Squirrel Business

| Tim Parsons

I’m primarily a plant person, because I’m slow on the uptake and not very observant. Someone says “Look at that bird!” and by the time I’m looking even close to the right direction, let alone focusing in on what a bird is, said bird has flown far, far away. Trees, wildflowers, landscapes-easy to see, and prone to stay in one place. Since starting at Middlebury, though, I’ve become enamored of our extensive squirrel population.

Photo Credit-Dan Celik (Thanks!)

Aristotle named the squirrel ‘skiouros’, combining  two Greek words, ‘skia’ for shade, and ‘oura’ for tail, or, in some ancient Greek slang, ‘he who sits in the shadow of his tail’. The French created the word ‘esquirel’, from whence came the English ‘squirrel’.

Our breed of squirrel on campus is the Eastern Gray Squirrel, native to the east coast from Manitoba to Florida and eastern Texas. Squirrel fossils date back to 40 million years ago, and know number over 365 species in seven families, including ground squirrels, tree squirrels, and flying squirrels. Clearly, our Middlebury squirrels are tree squirrels. This time of year their nests, or dreys, are seen high in some of our trees, or in the several hollow trees we have scattered about.

We seem to have some squirrel ‘families’, or at least some serious inbreeding going on, although it does not seem to be as notable this year as in past years. While all white or black squirrels can often be seen in urban populations with little to no predation, up by Mead Chapel for the last several years we had a group of gray squirrel with thin, wiry red tails, more like a red squirrel. The difference in the squirrels between Mead Chapel and the library quad was quite striking. Now the Mead squirrels have fluffy tails, but they are still red.

Squirrels are ‘scatter hoarders’, making many small caches of food in various locations. They are known for their spacial memory, remembering where up to 1000 of these sites are. Food types are generally tree seeds, including many nuts, although they’ve been known to feast on fungi and tree bark as well. When food is scarce they will even turn carnivorous, eating insects, frogs, small birds, even other squirrels (!).

They are most well-known for feasting on nuts, however. In fact, their love of seeds started this post. While preparing to remove the lightning struck spruce, we noticed a large cache of spruce cones underneath the tree. Given a sudden abundance of a food source, a squirrel will make a temporary pile to await better burial and hiding later. Spruces were prosperous this year in cones, and if you’re a squirrel you can’t let a good thing go to waste. The seed of the spruce sits at the base of a seed scale, and each cone can have many scales. Squirrels seem to process the cones, flaking away the bracts to reach the seed, and then later burying the seeds for retrieval later.

 

If I were a squirrel, though, I’d be waiting for acorns. A good source of protein, their size is probably a meal unto itself. While humans don’t like the bitter tannins found in many acorns, the squirrel doesn’t seem to mind.

 

I remember my first fall here at Middlebury, and thinking our Red oaks had a terrible disease. The ends of the branches, the new growth, would lie scattered about the base of the tree. Dan Celik, custodial supervisor extraordinaire, has noticed the same thing, and took pictures for the blog. Squirrels, even though they have a brain the size of a small walnut, aren’t too dumb. They go to the end of an oak branch, and gnaw with their teeth until the end falls to the ground, where they can easily and quickly harvest the bundle of acorns attached.

Photo Credit-Dan Celik (Thanks!)

Become a Vermont Tree Steward

| Tim Parsons

This comes to me from a friend of mine-a Kate Forrer, of the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program, UVM Extension. There are over 350 SOUL graduates throughout the state, and everyone I know that has taken it has loved it. Through Vermont Interactive Television the course can be taken in Middlebury, and Kate says if there is room at the site she will open it up to Middlebury students at no charge. I’d take it if I were you…

 

Don’t Delay- Register Now to Become A Vermont Tree Steward

Early Registration Deadline Extended until Friday, January 13th for statewide course 


Are you passionate about trees?

Do you want to learn more about them and how to care for them?

Do you want to make a difference in YOUR community?


Then you may be interested in the Stewardship of the Urban Landscape (SOUL) course offered by the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program. The course prepares participants to become stewards of the forest in which they live by covering topics from tree identification, biology and planting to resource assessment, landscape design and conservation planning.  Through a series of eight evening sessions, offered through Vermont Interactive Television and three Saturday hands-on sessions, participants will gain 40 hours of instruction and become part of an invaluable community forestry network. This educational opportunity is based on fifteen years of SOUL Tree Steward programs which has graduated more than 350 Vermonters!

Winter Course Dates: February 11 through May 12, 2012- including eight Wednesday evenings; 6pm-9pm, and three Saturdays: February 11th, March 10th and May 12th

Locations: Evening sessions offered via Vermont Interactive Television at the following sites: Bennington, Brattleboro, Johnson, Middlebury, Montpelier, Newport, Randolph, Rutland, St. Albans, White River Junction and Williston. Saturday sessions in nearby location. 

To Register: Visit http://www.uvm.edu/extension/environment/soul/

Questions: Contact Kate Forrer, Program Coordinator, via e-mail soul.treesteward@uvm.edu or call 1-866-860-1382.

Planting Dolomite

| Tim Parsons

One of my regrets in my college career lies in one of my favorite courses, Intro to Geology. I took the class Pass/Fail, which left me with just enough knowledge to totally confuse the hell out of myself. I loved the class-I remember the labs most of all. Like going to the Lake Mansfield Trout Club, in Nebraska Notch at the base of Mount Mansfield, walking along the top of a lateral moraine in the woods, and making a hard left as the moraine turns into a terminal moraine.
I don’t remember much of the classwork, however, nor the tests. I still have the textbook we used, and I’ve been meaning to re-read it for the last 20 years since the class, as I found it fascinating. Geology is a language all its own, and not being fluent, or even knowing how to ask to use the bathroom, makes it difficult to read.
So Middlebury, be careful what you wish for, wanting a pass/fail option. Would I enjoy reading about geology if I had a stronger foundation in it, rather than skimming a class for an easy pass? I know I certainly would find it less frustrating, and the month plus gap in my blog writing would have been quite a bit shorter as well.

The other problem with geology, besides the language, is understanding time. We understand hours, minutes, days, weeks, even years, to a point. Humans can understand a generation or two, but go as far back as even 200 years, and time becomes irrelevant. How can we understand 4, 5, even 8 generations ago? I had a many greats-grandfather burned at the stake for witchcraft, but aside from creeping me out I can’t comprehend that far back.
And geology? Forget about it. The unit of time in geology is MYA, an abbreviation for Million Years Ago. The fossil record talks of rocks formed 200 million years ago, for example, but what does that mean? The Green Mountains were origniannly formed 450 MYA, but that’s as hard to grasp as 450 years ago, 70 years after Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas.

I’ve planted many trees and shrubs here at Middlebury, and I love it, but planting rocks always seems to stick out in my mind. This fall I got to plant another. Dr. Peter Ryan, a professor of geology here at Middlebury (and excellent guest blogger) taught a course this summer for the alumni college called Vermont’s Geological Landscape: From Continental Collisions and Mountain Building to Groundwater and Streams. One of the field trips was to Pike Crushed Stone, up the road from Middlebury in New Haven, Vermont, and the source of much of our gray stone we use landscaping next to buildings on campus. While in the quarry they found a piece of rock with enough interest that Alum Paul Diette  generously donated transporation to move said rock up to campus, where we ‘planted’ it on a leftover square of concrete up near Bicentennial Hall for future classes to admire.

I’ve no idea why the concrete was there, but I think it was a piece left over from the old observatory that was up on that section of campus.
I thought the site appropriate, for several reasons. It’s proximity makes for easy teaching (not that the geology labs I’ve seen walking around have any fear of travel), but the a goal of Bicentennial Park is local trees and shrubs, so local rocks seem a good fit. I dream of filling the area with local rocks to sit upon, a nice contrast to Smog.

Paul has named the rock Diette-Ryan New Haven Iapetus Ordovician Seafloor, a pretty big name for a relatively small BFR, but was my lauching point into researching just exactly what this rock is. I’d always called this type of rock by it’s local name, Panton Stone. This limestone rock is used quite a bit locally in landscaping, as the pretty blue gray color and blocky fracturing make it natural for making stone walls, like a small wall north of Allen Hall next to the Atwater Dining plaza. Or better yet, look at the huge blocks of stone the next time you are out front of the Davis Family Library. Look close. You’ll notice fossils, lots of them, scattered throughout the stone, and this provides a convenient, if difficult way to age the rock.
Our new rock doesn’t have a lot of exposed fossils, and the couple showing only confused me further researching that. So instead I cheated, and went to the Vermont Geological Map to look up more specifically the type of rock, and a closer date.
As near as I can tell, this limestone is a ‘Beldens Member’ of Dolomite, dating it to about 480 MYA. The lack of many prominent fossils, probably lost in deformation and metamorphism, are good clue for age. The exposed ledge below Gifford Hall is probably in the same member family as this rock, writ large.

Vermont 480 MYA was a tropical paradise, like the present day Bahamas or Arabian Sea. Tectonic forces were pushing Vermont slowly to where we lie today, but back then Vermont was a shallow tropical sea,about 20-30 degrees south of the equator.
We sat in the Iapetus Ocean, forming part of a continent called Laurentia, comprising of our present North America Craton, combined with Greenland and parts of Scotland. (Iapetus was the father of Atlas in Greek myths, one of the original titans, and the Iapetus Ocean is the father of what we now call the Atlantic Ocean, named for Atlas.) Geologists have named this Ordovician time, in the Paleozoic era. The name comes from the British geologist Charles Lapworth, who in 1879 named the era for rocks found in Scotland.
Ordovician time was preceded by the Cambrian era, which saw life on earth diversify and explode into the many phyla we see today. Life in the Ordovician time continued to flourish, even as it was doomed at the end of the era in the Ordovician-Silurian Mass Extinction Event, the second largest (of five) such events we fellow earthlings have gone through.
Land wasn’t very interesting, mostly algae and mosses, but the calcite sea was an explosion of creatures, forming some of the earliest reefs. Around 480 MYA, when our rock was formed, the ocean was thought to be about 45 degrees Centigrade, limiting the amount and diversification of creatures, and therefore our fossils in the rock. The air cooled around 460 MYA, and more creatures arose, (http://www.anr.state.vt.us/dec/geo/foschamp.htm),filled with calcium rich creatures with hard exoskeletons, slowly dying to form what we now see as a hard limestone rock. Maybe we can see some foreshadowing, as carbon dioxide levels were 14-16 times higher in the atmosphere than present day, and high sea levels covered much of the continents in sea water. The globe was mostly ice free.
So for millions an millions of years, sea creatures were born, died, and fell to the shallow sea floor, slowly building the gray rock we move today.

Streaked throughout our rock are white lines, pure calcite precipitated out and laid down in cracks in the sea floor. A couple of fossils adorn it, although aren’t easily identifiable (know what they are? Post in the comments please!).


As well as a bump. The bump may be a piece of Chert, a poor cousin of flint, formed when silica replaces calcium carbonate.

Fancier cousins include Opal, Agate, and Onyx, while our possible chert probably wouldn’t even make a good arrow head or ax, an early use for chert.
The best feature of the rock is the fossilized waves seen across the top. Imagine being a kid the the edge of the Iaptetus, one of those days when the tide was very low, and seeing how the waves formed ridges along the surface of the sand. The tide rises again, water levels return to normal, and a new shelf deposit of rock starts to form, hiding the wave marks, that are only exposed again by the quarrying process 480 million years in the future.

So, as near as we can tell, the rock dates to somewhere between 480-460 million years ago, but we are still stuck with the concept of time. That sounds like a long time ago, but so does breakfast at times. Paul put it best, giving a concrete time example to our rock, and a poetic end to the post.
Our sun rotates around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, slowly, taking somewhere between 225-250 million years to make one rotation. Humans, as a species, have made 1/1250 of a trip. Our rock, two whole trips around.

Lightning 1, Spruce 0

| Tim Parsons

Anyone around this summer, or past readers of this blog, will remember a large thunderstorm that ripped through Middlebury two days after Independence Day.  Several trees were struck by lightning, which I wrote about after the storm.

The largest tree struck was the Norway spruce in the Main Quad, one of the ones remaining after we removed part of the line. I wrote this summer how the tree was struck at the top, and exhibited a spiral shaped scar all the way down the trunk, exiting at the root flare. We didn’t know if the tree was going to make it or not, but had hopes.

It’s not the voltage that kills trees, but the water. Over 100 million volts strikes the tree, but it is the water heating quickly turning to explosive steam that causes failures. (Another blog post, on a lightning stuck Ginkgo, has much more detail) Damage in trees can be tricky, often with the worst of the damage unseen.

There was damage seen immediately. Long strips of bark went flying across the quad, and a scar opened up, spiral shaped, following the grain of the wood down the trunk. The high sap content of spruce makes it susceptible to such long scars.

I’d been worried about this tree all summer, and was watching it closely. All the limbs near the scar started to die, and the color of the remaining ones seemed a little off, but still green.

During a closer hazard evaluation this summer I discovered two things, one bad, the other worse. The first was the size of the scar, and while this shouldn’t have surprised me, it did.

The scar that formed in the summer seemed minimal. While very long, it only seemed an inch or so wide.

Scar in summer

The bark hid quite a bit of damage, and another small crack that wasn’t even open this summer showed another major wound. Peeling away at the wound showed extensive damage, much larger than we’d first thought. Overall, it seems about 1/3 of the sapwood (the live wood beneath the bark that conducts water and nutrients) around the trunk has died, severely compromising the tree.

I’ve seen trees limp along with scars like this for many years, most often in a forest setting. Trees in communities are connected in several ways, relying on each other for support and nutrients. They also tend to be the best trees for the site, adapted to soil and weather conditions. Trees in an urban or landscape setting are under more stress, either from a singular status in the landscape, more exposed to wind by themselves, or stress from poor soil conditions its genetics just can’t handle gracefully.

This fall was a good one for fungus, with cool moist conditions. The base of this spruce showed a colony of fungi following along one of the major roots of the tree. Later that same month the same fungus appeared following a different root. This indicates a root rot, a type of fungus eating away at the roots of the tree.

I’ve spoken with an arborist friend of mine who suggests immediate removal. He’s seen similar cases, where trees exhibiting root rot like this suffer from wind throw, heaving over in a storm. The clay soils of our quad make this species very susceptible to this, spruce not being a deep rooted tree to begin with, in clay soils even more so.

While I like this tree quite a bit, the chance this tree could suffer a catastophic failure in such a busy location on campus is too much of a chance to take. The remaining tree, the large Norway spruce with the interesting trunk, will remain.

Tree Removals 2011

| Tim Parsons

Like most years, the landscape department takes advantage of the upcoming holiday break to do some tree removals. Not that we are doing anything under the cover of darkness-it’s more like we don’t want to break the solitude of campus with the cacaphony of chainsaws and tree chippers, not to mention the lack of stress we have when not having to do hazardous work with pedestrians walking around us.

Like last year, we’re working off of a hazardous tree list we’ve kept for several years now. Each year, the hazardous trees are inspected in the early fall, the best time to observe stress in the plant. We’re getting toward the end of the list of hazards that must be removed, as this year we’ve selected 6 trees that for reasons described below must be removed.

Actually, 7 trees, but one is sad and important enough to warrant it’s own post later in the week.

The first tree on the list is a big one, a Norway maple north of Starr/Axinn. Like I’ve written previously, this tree is held together by a web of cables up in the crown, two complete systems. The first set is a group of three cables holding the main scaffolds together, and the second set is a complete ring around the canopy. Like we’ve seen in the Black Willow that failed by Battell, failure of one of these limbs can compromise the rest of the cable system, and lead to total failure. For this reason cable systems should be inspected yearly, preferably whilst up in the crown of the tree.

This tree has been declining in health for the past several years.. Notice the greatly thinning canopy in the following pictures, with the interval between last year and this being by far the greatest loss.

Canopy fall 2006
Canopy fall 2010
Canopy fall 2011

The cabling systems were originally installed to protect against failure in the main trunk. Norway maples, though, have a life span, one that is quite a bit shorter than I’d thought, and this tree has reached the end of it’s life. Over 75% of the crown was dead wood, with hollow scaffold branches held up only by cable. Most worrisome was the appearance of several types of fungi, indicating rotten wood both in the trunk and in the root system. While I hate to see such a large tree go, we can’t risk failure in an area so heavily trafficked.

The next tree on the list is another large one, a Silver maple by the Davis Family Library.

Silver maples are poor compartmentalizers, meaning any wounds they suffer sit and rot, further decay going up the stem and into the trunk. This tree has a major defect at the attachment of the main scaffolds, and hollow limbs on two of them. This tree had a hanging branch several years ago, and I climbed up there on rope to remove it. After ascending, I noticed the branch I was tied into was completely hollow, an empty tube the length of the branch. I didn’t stay up long.

After any major windstorm I would always look towards this tree on my drive into work to see if it was still standing. The crack shown above has opened up in the last year.

Another Norway maple in need of removal is next to Centeno, another Norway at the end of it’s life. This tree, like the other, has poor scaffold attachments at the base, and suffers from major cavities with rot. The crown has also suffered major decline in the preceding year, losing much of it’s foliage.

Centeno maple 2010
Centeno Norway 2011

The rot in the trunk holds water, and is actually deep, over 1 foot. Note how, typical of Norways, much of the leaf surface is on the ends of the branch, and therefore much of the weight is as well. This raises a red flag, as high wind events cantilever the branch, with the foliage acting like a sail.

At the top of the stairs leading to the east side of Gifford is a Black Cherry tree, leaning towards the stairs and a nearby light pole.

Lean in a tree towards a target is always troublesome, or at the least worthy of a second, closer look. This tree suffers from a cavity at the root flare in the direction of the lean, indicating a weakened or even missing root system in the potential failure direction.

The last two trees on this removal list are both Sugar maples, which, given the percentage of Sugars on campus, is hardly surprising. The first tree doesn’t really have an obvious cause of death, but is nearly dead nonetheless. It’s located up at the tailgate area, near Route 30.

The final sugar to remove is located up by Hepburn, and to be honest I didn’t really want to see this one go.  In fact, it probably should have been removed several years ago, when its defect was first noticed. Students in my winter term class will recognize it, and the tree is prominent in all of my tree tours. Rarely do you see such a concrete example of girdling roots causing an untimely death.

Nobody ever said trees were terribly intellegent. This tree grew several roots that wrapped around the root flare, so as they grew the tree was slowly strangling itself.

Water couldn’t go up the trunk, nor nutrients down. It showed all the classic symptoms of root girdling over the last several years. First the top started to die back, as the very upper reaches of the tree starved. Next the side of the tree with the girdling died back, followed by major sections of the trunk. Finally the entire tree itself starved as it tried to reprioritize, but without sufficent water and nutrient flow just couldn’t retrench to live out its final days the way many mature trees do.

I’m compiling our Tree Karma score for this year as part of our Tree Campus re-application, but am fairly confident we’ve planted many, many more trees than we’ve removed, even with all the freak storms this summer. Feel free to contact me with further questions or concerns you may have.

Your resume, your life

| Tim Parsons

Nancy got an email the other day from a former student/co-worker at the Grille asking for help with a resume, and she shared the email with me. Rather fortuitous, as I’d been assigned to write my ‘personal biography’ for my upcoming TEDx talk, and I’d also been reading Ryan Kellet’s recent MiddBlog postings on job searching, (and one on starting, but for the sake of this post we’ll assume you’re already there) so my own resume was on my mind. I’ve been on both ends of the resume game, I’ve been at it a while, and I’ve had some excellent teachers along the way, so I thought this would be a good time to share some thoughts. Melody, this one’s for you.

First secret? You don’t have one resume, you have hundreds, one for every job you apply for. A resume is not a static document, but it’s a sales pitch, and one that you should customize for every job. Nancy is a great example. She’s done carpentry, house restoration, boat building, cooking in restaurants, supervising, senior care, day care, even landscaping (not for me, I’m a terrible boss). If she is applying for a cooking job, her resume will reference most of that experience, while a construction job will focus on her degree and experience in Historic Preservation.

And this works on a smaller scale as well. Let’s say you are applying for a job supervising a small work group. Your summer job as a camp counselor is probably more experience than you realize at supervision and it only takes a couple of words to make the cut into the ‘call’ pile.  Or maybe you are over-qualified for the position, but you’d really like to eat next week. Think carefully when describing your experience, and tailor each copy you send out. A resume is not a make it or break it document that will get you a job, but a well crafted one will get you noticed. The Career Services office has a list of ‘core competencies’ language that is excellent.

Another secret. You’re about to graduate, and you don’t have a lot of experience, so you may be afraid your resume may be a little empty. In reality, even a skimpy resume speaks volumes. When I am plowing through a stack of resumes, even for an entry level job, a well crafted document says a lot about the applicant. Spelling errors, bad grammar, and/or poor layout shows a lack of attention I find troubling in an employee, and don’t waste my time interviewing.

I won’t talk about formatting, style, etc. There is heaps of bad advice out on the net about resumes. The best way to separate the good from the bad? Any template that suggests a ‘mission statement’, ‘job objective’ or ‘personal goals’ section of a resume should be ignored with all due haste. I don’t care what your personal goal is-I know it’s to get a job. Give me and my tired eyes a break.

The best template I’ve found, with excellent advice to boot, is found at the Career Services Office right here at Middlebury. Keep your resume to one page. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t’ get fancy. Did I say keep it to one page?

What are other ways to fill out your first resume starting out in the big scary world? I’m not a terribly big fan of the activities and interests section most resumes have, but it certainly is a good area to fill out a lack of experience. Please, though, call the sectional  ‘additional’. What kinds of things am I looking for? Once again, it depends on the job I’m looking to fill.  Are you a member of a trade organization in my field? Do you spend your nights coding for free on an open source software project, or are you just laying about in your jammies playing X-Box? Are you an active participant in your life?

The best resume secret, though, is the hardest. You need to keep your resume updated. Constantly.  Maybe it’s your birthday, maybe New Years Day, or tax day, but once a year look over your resume. Maybe you have something to add. Maybe, like me, you look it over and see a subtle, but deeply embarrassing grammatical error. You may get asked for a resume in an elevator while making small talk. The person asking will forget who you are by tomorrow, after you spent the previous night re-writing your moldy, dusty, stale life. The same person will be impressed if your resume is in their in-box in half of an hour. Attention to detail, being an active participant in your life.

In the same vein, keep a list of extraordinary things, items that didn’t make it into this draft of your resume. Time spent volunteering, times you’ve been quoted in the newspaper, anything where someone paid attention to you. You’re special, so literally don’t forget it, and write it down.

My last piece of advice would be to constantly look for work, even when you aren’t. Always read the help wanted ads. They tell you more than you realize. A restaurant continually looking to hire line cooks has potential to be a terrible place to work, or a food co-op with high turnover might not have the atmosphere they think they do. Help wanted sections are the pulse of a community, the news behind the news. Trust me, the job of your life may come around when you think you aren’t looking.

New Year, More Damage

| Tim Parsons

I was asked (and jumped at the chance) to join Community Council this year, and was in a meeting last Monday when I was asked if there was any vandalism this year to the landscape. I happily reported we haven’t seen anything this year. I’d spoken too quickly, as the guys in the landscape department hadn’t been around the entire campus that day, but had been by tuesday.

We’ve certainly had our problems in the past (even have a tag for vandalism on the blog), but I was hoping the student (or students) had moved on, or at least come to see the error of their ways. I’d even heard through the grapevine that one of the perpetrators may have been caught.

‘Satomi’ Kousa Dogwood, a nice little pink flowering tree, was planted in Ross Commons near the plaza this spring. Someone tried their best to rip it up out of the ground last weekend.

You can see the broken branch on the ground, but the real issue here is the root system. Look at the root flare, where you can see the tree was repeatably pulled back and forth in an attempt to pull it out of the ground.

We had no choice but to dig the tree up and replant it. About 40-50% of the roots were broken in the process, all on one side. Hopefully youthful vigor will rally the tree and it will recover, but the outlook is grim with that much root loss.

More senselessly, two shrubs were pulled up out of the ground next to their holes at Battell South. They were Summersweet, a shrub so nice I wrote about it a little while back. We replanted those as well.

Let’s try and make this the one random incident this year, please.