Oak Watch

Native vegetation of Hawaii

2012-02-08T21:26:00.000-08:00

Months ago I promised to write a series of posts exploring various aspects of the native versus exotic plant debate. The idea was to publicly moderate my 25 year internal debate - trust me, it wouldn't have been as thrilling as it sounds - on the issue of planting native versus non-native trees.
I got into this whole glamorous and wildly lucrative forestry racket coming from a strong "nativist" position. Nature knew better than we about what plants to put where, and moving plants willy-nilly around the globe had unleashed Pandora's boxes full of ecological disasters (see also: Chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, kudzu, etc). I primarily viewed myself as, if not a preservationist - I have always been too much the conservationist/"wise use" advocate to fit that particular mold - then as a restorationist; our management and planting activities should be conducted with an eye toward restoring native landscapes.

My thinking has changed over the years. Depending on the day, or even the minute, I can argue equally passionately in favor of planting non-natives when appropriate (by which I mean appropriate according to me). The arguments in my head get very heated at times. I'm hoping therapy will help. Or drugs.
My basic thoughts in favor of planting non-natives (such as a highly productive southeastern hybrid oaks on corn-deprived Midwestern soils) are:
1) We live in a "post native" world - our soils and ecosystems have been disturbed and altered to the point where they are no longer able to support a "native" ecosystem

2) Plant ranges shift over time - what is native today might not be native on that same spot tomorrow. In the course of our lifetime the range in which paper birch is "native" has shifted a couple hundred miles north in my "native" Minnesota (to which my ancestors immigrated by way of Missouri, Switzerland and Alsace).

3) Every single plant species growing on Earth was, at some point, non-native to the spot in which it now grows.

I was reminded of one post I had intended to write when I went to watch the movie The Descendants last weekend. Actually, the movie reminded me of three things:

1) Oscar-caliber movies ain't what they used to be (what did George Clooney pay those critics?)

2) Hawaii has vegetation

3) A guy I really hate

Point #2 is one of my dozens of half finished posts, so this is a good chance to check one off of that list.

Read that again: Hawaii has vegetation. An archipelago formed from molten rock spewing from underwater volcanoes has plants. By definition, not one single species is native to the islands. By definition, every single one of Hawaii's "native" species was planted there unintentionally and without giving thought to the wisdom of their actions by animals. Without question some of those introduced plants created huge ecological disturbances and forced some earlier species to the margins of the ecosystem.

I have also mulled this same concept when paging through Sibley's Guide to Birds and seeing the section on accidental bird sightings (a phrase that amuses me for some reason). Every so often some Eurasian bird gets lost, or maybe decides to have a gap year abroad, and gets spotted in North America. And one would suspect that some of these wayward travelers deposit decidedly non-native plant seeds on North American soil, without the express written consent of the USDA.

Plants ranges move. They move faster and farther than we really think. We humans love to do two things: Move plant materials, and beat ourselves up over the consequences. But really when we choose to plant a non-native species we're really doing nothing new.

We also tend to look at a forest or a landscape and assume that it always looked like that, that it is supposed to look like that, and that any changes are therefore bad.

... then again maybe all of this is just a l-o-o-o-n-g way to go to justify to myself the planting of Korean sawtooth oak here in North America as part of a woody perennial agriculture system that beats the hell out of beating the hell out of our soil with corn.

As to point #3: Every time I see George Clooney I'm reminded of the surgeon who performed a minor procedure on our daughter a couple of years ago. The guy looked like George Clooney's younger, better looking brother. Even more annoyingly, he was a really nice guy and a highly skilled surgeon.

God how I loathed him.

Rest stop educates those who stop to read

2012-02-02T16:13:00.000-08:00

For travelers driving east out of Paso Robles, CA (Pass of Oak Trees) there are essentially two places to stop during the hour drive on Hwy 41/46 over to Interstate 5: The Jack Ranch Cafe, famous as the site where James Dean died in a wreck (and for the monument that now stands there in his honor), and a rest stop just east of Shandon.

I have stopped at that rest stop dozens of times. Actually it is probably more accurate to say that for many years I hoped to stop at that rest stop, and often times I really, really needed to stop at that rest stop (given the amount of coffee required to drive that barren stretch of highway in the wee hours of the morning without, at the risk of sounding insensitive, doing my own imitation of James Dean), but it always seemed to be closed for renovations. For about 15 years.

Thankfully the rest area is open now and has become a frequent stopping spot for me while driving to and from the San Joaquin Valley for work. The rest area is now a very nice one, with an interpretive display / historical marker in the walk way from the parking lot to the rest rooms. It's beautiful. It's informative. So of course for months I walked right past it without even noticing it. It was only while I was pacing around talking on the phone that I actually bothered to notice it, stop, and read it. I just about fell over.

(Click each photo to enlarge)

Which means this rest area in Shandon, CA has educated a lot more people in the last few months about acorns as food than this blog has!

The World Has Lost A Great Golfer/Complete Nutcase

2011-12-28T16:42:00.000-08:00

In the days before golf became a pathway to fame and fortune many talented young players decided against pursuing the game professionally in order to follow more lucrative and respectable careers. Like refuse collector. Or pawn broker. The great Bobby Jones remained an amateur is entire career. Francis Ouimet won the US Open but honored his promise to his parents never to turn pro (of course this was in the days when professional golfers were not allowed in the same club house as the "gentlemen" members). My wife's uncle was an outstanding collegiate golfer, but chose to take over the family travel agency rather than pursue a professional golf career. (Of course most of the above mentioned men were relatively affluent. I still love Lee Trevino's quote on the eve of the final round of the Open Championship in England; when Trevino, who grew up in poverty, was asked if the pressure of the situation might get to him he smiled and said something to the effect of, "This isn't pressure. Pressure is when you're playing for 20 dollars a hole and you only have 2 dollars in your pocket.")

Another guy who gave up a potentially lucrative - and certainly historic - golf career in favor of going into the "family business" was none other than the dear little leader himself, Kim Jong-Il. (Stay with me here.)

It seems that in about 1994 the Kimster played an 18 hole round of golf in 38 strokes under par. If par was the standard 72 strokes, that means he fired a 34. By way of comparison, the record round for a PGA tour - comprising the best players the world has ever seen - round is either 58 or 59 - I'm too lazy to look it up. Kim's round included not one, not two, not three, but 11 holes in one. Now, before you get all skeptical on me you should know this: Kim's historic round of golf was verified by both the official North Korean news agency and all seventeen bodyguards who followed him on the round. If you can't believe 17 guys whose next meal - and life - depends on the answer they give, who can you believe?

Now you might ask: how many years did the dear leader need to practice in order to reach this pinnacle, this surpassing level of performance? Zero. Apparently, this was his first round of golf ever. I know, it very nearly defies belief! Imagine what he could have done with a little practice. It's not unrealistic to think that a perfect 18 might have been within the reach of a player so prodigiously - almost supernaturally - talented. Heck, he might have even found a way to complete 18 holes in fewer than 18 strokes (perhaps splitting the ball with his driver and sinking each half in two different holes). If anyone could have done it, it would be L'il Kim.

By the time Kim humbled that North Korean course, professional golf had become pathway to millions of dollars. So one can only admire all the more the complete selflessness Kim displayed when, just like Alice's uncle, he decided to forgo a pro golf career and take over the family business at a critical time.

Unfortunately for the people of North Korea, the Kim family business was starving millions of people to death, and imprisoning, torturing and executing most of those who survived.

We have seen a lot of sadistic dictators. We have seen more than a few messianic dictators. But rarely has there been a dictator as batpoo/port-a-john rat crazy as Kim. That's because the only way someone that batpoo crazy gets to be a dictator is if his much more intelligent, enormously sadistic, completely messianic, and (very) slightly less batpoo crazy father secures the job for him. (And if he's willing to turn his back on a golf career.)

Starving people on that scale takes some real effort. All the more so in a land that stands as pretty much the last place on earth where acorns comprise a significant portion of the diet, and which still has "has" in the case of South Korea, "had" in the case of North Korea) an acorns-as-food industry. Starving people on that scale requires completely divorcing people from a longstanding and proven source of nutrition, making them utterly dependent upon grain crops, and then failing to provide the infrastructure to a) distribute those grain crops to the people and b) protect grain stores from floods and other unusual - but thoroughly predictable - disasters. It need not be said that famines are of course good for the dictatorship business (see also Mao Pse-tung and Joseph Stalin) in terms of consolidating power.

Control the food and you control the populace. Food = power.

We have the opposite situation in the US. The government isn't (intentionally) starving people. Instead it is paying grain farmers to grow more corn than the populace can possibly eat, and then subsidizing the food industry's efforts to cram more of that cheap corn down our willing maws. Here's a tip kids: You want job security in the future, become a physician specializing in diabetes.

The point I'm laboring to make here is that reliance on annual grain crops as our stable food source a) frees up more of our time for other leisure pursuits - like warfare - and b) allows the power hungry to alternatively starve or stuff us - whichever is most effective in achieving their goals and consolidating their power.

People who grow/gather their own food cannot be controlled as easily. Which would free up more time for the Kim Jung-il's, Joseph Stalins, Mao Tse-tung's and ConAgra's (yes I did just group them together) of the world for other leisure pursuits.

Like golf.

Kim's demise makes me wish I believed in a just and proportionate afterlife.

Leading the league...

2011-12-28T16:29:00.000-08:00

... in half finished blog posts!

Uniquely/paradoxically/idiotically nearly all of my blog posts - the modern/"paperless" way to publish your thoughts - start out as chicken-scratched ink on paper in a work/sales notebook or scrap of random paper.

I have compiled a depressing/impressive stack of half finished posts. In fact I have achieved a new first: I have not one but two half finished posts about how many half finished posts I have written!

If the rode to hell is paved with half finished blog posts I'm a hydrofoil racing down the river Styx.

Here is a partial list of the unfinished posts you can (or perhaps not) expect in early 2012:
Oak gall ink
California white oak acorns = dang tasty
The better balanoculture blog over the pond
Parking lots - too bad parked cars interfere with the perfect acorn collecting surface
Foresters & lawyers - My commencement speech post continued
Pistachios - words of wisdom and a blueprint for oaks from J. Russell Smith
Native plants and roller rinks
Toby Alone sequel - one more book and I'll finally crack the subtle allegory
Kim Jung-il and acorns
Your typical neighborhood hot dog/acorn bread stand on the bay
Rehashing old Northern Nut Growers Association notes and speeches
On the trail with John Muir

Yes, I just used a blog post to create a to do list. Sorry about that. But hopefully it will spur me to complete those half finished scribbles. Now if I can just find the notebooks I started them in...

Anyway, thanks for reading. We now have thirteen followers! Thirteen people can change the world. Seems like a rag-tag group of thirteen people changed the world pretty dramatically once before.

Ghost Oaks

2011-11-21T15:33:00.000-08:00

My work often has me hitting the road in my truck with the stars still overhead, in time to reach the hills around Paso Robles, CA at dawn - which means pea soup coastal fog.

It's my favorite part of my job, and my favorite time of the day, as ancient California white oaks (Quercus lobata) and California live oaks (Q. agrifolia) emerge from the mist. I like to think of them as ghost oaks from a time when the native people of this area relied on them for sustenance.

Unlike usual, I actually stopped the truck to take these shots. It's safety first here at Oak Watch!

(Click to enlarge)

There is a steel post next to the trunk of this tree which you can't see from this distance. In the morning mist I like to think of it as a decorated staff that indigenous California families would lean against their favorite acorn producing trees to claim their bounty for the coming harvest. I know I would have claimed this tree for my brood. In fact the post supports an owl box to help control rodents in the mist-shrouded vineyard just out of sight.

(Click to enlarge and frame ;-)

I am particularly happy with the (purely accidental) reflection on the hood of the truck.

Ansel Adams eat your heart out.

The Mississippi Mechanic of High Performance Oaks

2011-11-16T14:20:00.000-08:00

About ten years ago (or was it more than that?) Alanis Morissette had a top-selling CD which included the smash hit song “Isn’t It Ironic?” Ironically, none of the events described by Ms. Morissette (rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you already paid, etc.) were, in fact, ironic. Unfortunate, yes. Ironic, no.

It is, however, ironic that many of my heroes, or at least people whose attributes I greatly admire, are titans in an activity in which I have zero interest and couldn’t be paid to actually watch: motor sports.

I have written before in Oak Watch about Don “Big Daddy” Garlits. I have immediate admiration for a guy who can refer to himself – and get others to refer to him – as Big Daddy with a straight face. Beyond that, Big Daddy was a drag racing pioneer. It was he who changed the design of top fuel dragsters so that the driver no longer straddled the engine but instead sat directly in front of it. Garlits had this epiphany after an exploding engine nearly removed his legs; apparently he decided he would rather have the engine explode behind his head. This design innovation was based on the theory that while it is possible (and maybe even preferable) to reach 250mph in a quarter mile without a brain, it is physically impossible to do so without feet.

Garlits was the first to break the 170, 180, 200, 240, 250, 260, and 270 miles per hour barriers. If we assume that the pre-Garlits best was 169mph, that means that over the course of his career Garlits increased the top speed over a quarter mile by an astonishing 60%.

Another motorhead hero of mine is Burt Munro, the kiwi motorcyclist depicted in the movie World’s Fastest Indian. Munro took a 1920 Indian motorcycle – a bike with an original top speed of 55mph – and modified it continuously for 40 years. During the 1960’s he set world speed records for engines under 1000cc’s at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and once topped 200mph in an unofficial run. He cast many of the parts – minor pieces like pistons, barrels, fly wheels – himself using makeshift molds and tools.

In taking his Indian from a top speed of 55 to 200mph Munro improved its performance by a jaw-dropping 264%.

What I love about both of these guys is their painstaking attention to detail, and their single-minded determination to push the absolute limits of performance. To never, ever be satisfied.

What does this have to do with oak trees? Everything. Absolutely everything.

We need oaks to once again feed the world, to once again become the Staff of Life they were for thousands upon thousands of years, before we declared war on the soil, and before we sold our collective soul for the false food security of grain crops. In order for oaks to feed the world, we must first convince the world that oaks are fast growing trees capable of astounding productivity, and we must also use the genetic diversity/elasticity of the genus Quercus combined with modern growing practices, to make them even faster and more productive.

The oaks that surround us are the 1920 Indian motorcycles. They just need the arboreal equivalents of Don Garlits and Burt Munro to bring out their potential, to take them to the Bonneville Salt Flats of tree growth and show the world what they can do.

Luckily I know of one such man.

Let me ask you this: Say you plant an 18 inch tall oak seedling. How much would you expect it to grow the first year… One foot? Eighteen inches? Take a look at this:

(Click to enlarge)

This is a hybrid overcup x white oak (Q. lyrata x Q. alba). It was planted in March of 2011 as an 18 inch seedling. This photograph was taken on September 1, 2011 – six months later - at which point the tree was 8 feet 1 inch tall. That's 97 inches tall.

For those of you keeping score at home that’s 79 inches of growth in one growing season – in the first growing season. From a reasonable expectation of 18 inches of first year growth that’s a 340% improvement. You couldn’t pay me to watch a car race. But I’d pay money to sit (or should it be “set?”) in a Mississippi field and watch this tree grow. More exciting, and a much lower chance of being struck by flaming debris.

How do you make a race car go faster? You remove the things that limit its speed – feed it more fuel and more air. How do you make an oak tree grow faster (which is to say, how do you make an oak tree reach its inherent growth potential)? You remove the things that limit its growth.

You identify naturally occurring hybrids, especially in the white oak group. (That’s not as hard as it sounds; in fact I defy you to find an individual tree in the white oak group – or any oak – that isn’t, to some degree, a “hybrid.” But more than that you need to be able to identify individual mama trees with the potential for fast growth, and have a good sense of where papa pollen is coming from.)

You sow the acorn in root pruning pots to give it a killer root system. You plant with an actual shovel, not using the planting bar/stomp method, so the roots can fan out. You fertilize to overcome any deficiencies in our (usually) worn out soils. You prune laterals as they develop, to channel all that growth energy skyward. You aggressively control weeds, recreating the role that fire played in creating the momentary competitive advantage from which the mature oaks we see day benefited in their infancy.

And you use the best tree tubes, to keep all your painstaking work from simply providing deer browse, to reduce wind and moisture stress, and to provide protection from weed control operations. Under the heading of shameless self promotion (but self promotion in the furtherance of a noble cause!) the best tree tubes are for sale here.

The Burt Munro of oaks is alive and well, and living in Mississippi. His name is Dudley Phelps. And you can buy his hybrid oaks –and my tree tubes – here. Yes, Mossy Oak. Which means – as I have said so often before – that there are a whole lot of acorn-fed deer out there eating better and healthier than all of us.

At least now I can have a hero with dirt on his hands instead of motor oil.

This just in: Lest you think that rapid height growth of the overcup x white oak shown above comes only at the expense of diameter/caliper growth, take a look at this:

(Click to enlarge)

The base of a Totten hybrid oak (overcup x swamp chestnut), planted about April 1, 2011. Then again this tree is just a paltry 7 feet tall (having grown "just" 66 inches in its first growing season). The gray stake in the background is a 1" diameter pvc conduit pipe.

Anyone still think oak are slow growing? I didn’t think so. And trust me, there will come a day when 79 inches of growth for an oak seedling in the first growing season will be disappointing.

Oaks Wrought of Iron

2011-11-15T16:41:00.000-08:00

OK, so these oak leaves and acorns are probably cast - not wrought - in iron. But, 1) this is still one cool fence, and 2) I just like saying wrought.

Iron fence surrounding the fairground parking lot in Paso Robles - Oak Tree Pass - California.

Appropriate, yes. Cool, very. But what was laying in the parking lot was even cooler.

Oaks suspiciously absent from list of slow growers

2011-11-07T15:49:00.000-08:00

I have quoted J. Russell Smith's rant on poets and oaks ad infinitum, the gist of which is that oaks should sue poets for libel since poets universally use the oak as a metaphor for all things slow but solid (essentially casting oaks in the role of the tortoise in an arboreal version of the Tortoise and the Hare).

I just came across this.

The Morton Arboretum in Chicago planted a wide variety of trees, all of which were 10 feet tall at planting time (when of course what they should have been doing - if they wanted those trees to live a long, healthy life - is planting trees a lot closer to 10 inches tall, but that's another post for another day). 10 years later they measured the trees.

Trees that were more than 25 feet tall 10 years after planting were classified as fast growing. These included American elm and silver maple. "Moderately fast growing trees measured 18 to 25 feet tall. These included Green Ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica), Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioica), Thornless Honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis) , Linden (Tilia platyphyllos, T. cordata, T. xeuchlora 'Redmond', and T. tomentosa), English Oak (Quercus robur), Pin Oak (Quercus palustris), Sawtooth Oak (Quercus acutissima), Shingle Oak (Quercus imbricaria), Red Maple (Acer rubrum), Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum), and Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera)."

There's a whole lot of Quercus in that list, right alongside green ash and honeylocust... although how a major arboretum managed to somehow limit the growth of sawtooth oak and pin oak to just two feet per year causes me to serious question their horticultural acumen. Did they plant them in the parking lot??

"Slower growing trees were less than 18 feet tall after 10 years. These included European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior), Ohio Buckeye (Aesculus glabra), Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), Common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), European Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus), Ironwood (Ostrya virginiana), Norway Maple (Acer platanoides), Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), and Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea). "

So the list of slow growers is pretty much a Quercus-free zone.

OK, I just figured out how these people were able to limit oaks to 2ft of growth per year. People who manage less than 1ft of growth per year on Norway maple shouldn't even be allowed to grow oaks! Good grief, in Minnesota I had Norway maple volunteers in my flower garden reaching head height in one summer from seed if I let them (trust me, I didn't let them).

But my point - besides taking gratuitous pot shots at a highly respected horticultural institution - stands: Ask any 20 people on the street which trees they would expect to see in a list of slow growers and every last one of them would say oaks.

Damn poets.

Oak Watch - Readers Smarter Than Blogger

2011-11-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

Great comment to my previous post... Thank you!

Have you read Samuel Thayer's "Nature's Garden"? It has 50 pages on acorns. It also offers the best explanation that I have seen as to why red oak acorns are initially more bitter that white oak acorns. I won't go into the whole thing here, but he goes into great detail about how white oaks don't necessarily have less tannins, they are just locked up in hydrophobic pockets.

Also, high levels of tannins aren't always a bad thing. If you are storing acorns by drying them, they will keep longer if they have higher levels.

I haven't read Nature's Garden, but I sure will now! It promises to answer many of the questions I have posed about acorn bitterness and tannin levels, and no doubt explains why some acorns considered to be high in tannins were favored by indigenous people.

Thanks for the comment, thanks for the suggestion, and most of all thanks for reading!!

California black oak acorns: I was right

2011-10-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

Recently I tasted some raw California black oak (Q. kelloggii) acorns - acorns that had dropped from some of the same trees from which John Muir might have gathered up a handful for an afternoon snack. They had a strong flavor of tannin, but the aftertaste on the tongue was very short lived. This led me to speculate that the tannins in California black oak acorns are highly soluble in water and could be quickly and easily leached away.

I finally got around to testing my theory. Turns out - and let me tell you I'm as shocked as you and find myself on completely unfamiliar ground here - I was right.

I shelled a handful of them, and coarsely chopped the nut meats. I dropped them into a small pot of boiling water, and boiled them for about 3-5 minutes, at which point I drained them and tasted a few. The bitter tannin flavor was still there, but already greatly diminished. After repeating the process the bitterness was almost completely gone. After a grand total of 6 to 10 minutes of boiling I had acorns - from the supposedly bitter red/black oak group - that are sweeter than many of the supposedly sweet acorns of the white oak group I have tried. Here I'm thinking particularly of English/common oak, (Q. robur).

In "Use of Acorns for Food in California: Past, Present and Future," David Bainbridge gives the nutrient content of California black oak acorns as:

Water - 9.0%
Protein - 4.56%
Fat - 17.97%
Carbs - 55.48%

That will keep you going when hiking/mapping/preserving the splendor of the Sierra!

California live oak acorns: Sweet, aerodynamic

2011-10-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge)

The acorn of the California live oak (Q. agrifolia) wins the award for best performance in a wind tunnel. The thing is a beautiful, streamlined dart.

That also means it has a very high ratio of shell to nut meat, which in turn means you have to shell a lot of live oak acorns per pound of finished food. And yet the Chumash Indians did shell them, by the ton. Why did they bother? Here are two good reasons:

1. The California live oak acorns I have tried (and yes, I finally have been able to beat the squirrels, deer, turkeys, and bears to some of them) are some of the sweetest acorns I have tasted. They would need little to no leaching, a time savings that would more than offset the added time needed for shelling.

2. According to Dr. David Bainbridge's awesome paper, "Use of Acorns for Food in California: Past, Present, Future," the nutrient composition of Q. agrifolia acorns looks like this:

Water - 9%
Protein - 6.26%
Fat - 16.75% (more than double that of most other California oaks, save California black oak and interior live oak)
Carbohydrate - 54.57%

Of course those silly, uneducated Indians thought that fat is actually a necessary nutrient. We, of course know better. We know that fat is evil, and our cravings for fat are merely an evolutionary mistake best sated by consuming kajillions of calories of low-fat foods. That's why we are so thin with low levels of type II diabetes and they were so... hey, wait a minute! Could it be that they knew something the people whose fortunes depend on cramming more and more corn-based products down our throats don't want us to know? Can't be.

Pass the chips.

The Oak Wilt Saga Continues: Prologue

2011-10-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

In the spring of 1989 I was chosen by my classmates to give the commencement address for the University of Minnesota College of Natural Resources. I wasn’t sure what I had ever done to them to make them hang that millstone around my neck, but I vowed to repay their cruelty with the longest, most boring graduation speech in school history. Mission accomplished.

It’s true what they say: You never remember what your graduation speakers say. Even if – perhaps especially if – that speaker is you.

I do remember two things I said. The first is that I quoted Aretha Franklin, something not generally done during a forestry school commencement speech. Thank you.

The other is that I told a story – a parable really – that went something like this.

A lawyer, a doctor and a forester attend a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. Let’s call him Ed. Over cocktails Ed turns to the lawyer and says, “My company is getting sued by a competitor for…” but before he can even finish his sentence the lawyer holds up his hand to halt him, saying, “Sorry, Ed, but I never discuss legal matters in a social setting. If you’d like, please set up an appointment with my secretary and I’d be happy to discuss your case at length.” Ed, ever the genial host, takes no offense and makes a mental note to set up an appointment with the lawyer.

Later, over hor d’oeuvres, Ed says to the doctor, “Say Doc, I have been having this shooting pain in my lower back and I was wondering if…” but once again he is amicably but firmly cut off in mid-sentence by the physician who said, “Sorry Ed, I never discuss legal matters in a social setting. If you’d like, please set up an appointment with my office and we can discuss your symptoms in detail.” So once again Ed makes a mental note to call the doctor’s office the following week to make an appointment.

Just as the main course – a sizzling steak with a piping hot baked potato and perfectly steamed broccoli – hits the table, Ed mentions in passing, “You know, I have an oak tree in the back yard that looks sick and…” For the third time that evening he doesn’t finish his sentence. Only this time he is not interrupted. This time the forester has already put down his napkin, stood up and is heading for the back door to examine the ailing tree. Reluctantly, Ed takes a longing look at his perfectly prepared steak and follows the forester out the door.

Over the course of the next 45 minutes Ed receives an impromptu tree care seminar, on everything from proper planting and watering, to insect and fungal pests of oaks. Ladders, pruning saws, and ropes are involved. By the time they return to the table the forester is dripping in sweat, the dinner is stone cold, and Ed has received about $3000 worth of free advice and services.

My point – and I did have one – was not that foresters shouldn’t be generous in sharing their knowledge and expertise. It was simply that we should place a higher value on that expertise. Until foresters start placing a higher value on their own specialized knowledge, how can they expect others to do so? How can they expect to earn the r-e-s-p-e-c-t (yes, this is where Aretha came in, and no, I did not sing it) deserving of a profession every bit as noble and important as medicine or law?

I think that part of the reason foresters don’t value their expertise more highly is that they are more acutely aware of – and more deeply troubled by – the limits of that knowledge. Medicine can go from leeching and releasing bad humours to radiation therapy in less than 150 years and still maintain the fiction that they have all the answers, that they have reached the acme of health care. Lawyers can argue contradictory precedents at $400 per hour, and as long as people pay them to sue others will hire them to defend.

Yes, this is all apropos something, a bigger story. And yes, it does have to do with oak wilt. And I will (finally) get to the point... in the next post!

Bainbridge for Nobel Prize

2011-10-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

I have long thought that Dr. David Bainbridge should be given a Nobel Prize for his work in ecological restoration, sustainability and, of course (and most importantly) promoting acorns as a food crop for the future. In fact it was he who coined the term "balanoculture" to label the acorn eating cultures of the world.
I have been reading his 1986 paper, "Use of Acorns for Food in California: Past, Present, and Future," presented at the Symposium on Multiple-use of California's Hardwoods.

It's pretty much a sentence-by-sentence process, since it is so information dense; each new sentence sends my poor little brain spinning in twelve different directions. I'll be dissecting the paper in a series of upcoming posts.

Here are a few snippets:

"Acorns have been used as food by Homo sapiens for thousands of years virtually everywhere oaks are found. The worldwide destruction of the acorn resource by mismanagement may well have led to the development of annual plant based agriculture and to civilization as we know it today (Bohrer, 1972; Bainbridge, 1985b)"

The two papers referenced are listed as:

Bohrer, V.L. On the Relation of Harvest Methods to Early Agriculture in the Near East. Economic Botany, 16:145-155; 1972

Bainbridge, D.A. The Rise of Agriculture: A New Perspective. Ambio.14(3):148-151

I going to try to get my mitts on these two papers, because the idea fascinates me. I often fall into the trap of viewing our acorn-eating past as Utopia - or more accurately and more specifically as an Eden, and as punishment for our Fall From Grace we were doomed to live by the sweat of our toil and by working the soil year after year after year, despite the fact that everything we need to eat grows on trees.

But here we're being told by a source I respect more than almost any other that in was probably the other way around: we trashed our acorn resource and were forced to grow annual cereal crops to survive.

This might be a distinction without a difference: One way or another we stopped relying on acorns and started beating the snot out of the ground to grow grains. In the end it doesn't really matter how or why it happened, only that it did happen, and only that we knock it off and get back to perennial woody crops like acorns.

It would surprise me not at all to know that mankind wrecked the acorn resource. I have always been searching for the great Why? of acorns - why did we stop eating acorns which are gathered with minimal work, which provide more nutriment than grains, and which can be stored for years? My working theories have focused on control - on how reliance on annual grains allows for divisions and stratifications within society, and allow a small number of people to control the actions of large numbers of underlings by tying them to an annual cycle of toil.

I always love learning more about this - even if it is only to learn for the 7 millionth time how short-sighted man is.

On to a couple more excerpts:

"In Spain and Italy acorns provided 20 percent of the diet of many people just before the turn of the Century (Memmo, 1894)."

Think about that! Not much more than a century ago there were places in Europe where acorns provided 20 percent of the human diet. I find this fact astonishing - the great grandparents of many Americans subsisted largely on acorns, and yet it is completely forgotten as a food source. I also find this fact encouraging - it really shouldn't take much to reinfuse acorns back into the "modern" diet.

"Acorns were perhaps nowhere more important than in California. For many of the native Californians acorns made up half of the diet (Heizer and Elsasser, 1980) and the annual harvest probably exceeded the current Califonia sweet corn harvest of 60,000 tons."

I find draw great strength and inspiration from the thought that I am now sitting and typing on ground once inhabited by people whose diet was 1/2 oak!

"... one of the puzzles of history..."

2011-10-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

It's been too long since I have done a reading from the Holy Scriptures, Tree Crops, A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith.

From the chapter entitled "The Oak as a Forage Crop" (and quoting at a length that I'm sure exceeds "fair use," a consideration which I - and I'm sure the brilliant J Russell would agree - is superseded by the benefit of committing these words to pixels and spreading them across the ether):

The genus of oak trees hold possibility, one might almost say promise, of being one of the greatest of all food and forage producers in the lands of the frost. Why has it not already become a great crop? that is one of the puzzles of history, in view of its remarkable qualities...

... As the pioneer farmers of Pennsylvania pushed aside the flowing stream of oil from their springs so that animals might drink water, so the modern world has pushed aside this good food plant, the oak tree.

There is a strip of hills from New England to Minnesota, from New England to Alabama, from Alabama to Ohio, from Ohio to Missouri, and from Missouri down to Texas. On these hills men have been making their living by growing wheat, corn, clover and grass. Yet I am confident that in every county there are oak trees of such productivity that if made into orchards they would in any decade yield more food for beast and possibly man than has been obtained on the average in any county in any similar period on the hill country of this wide region.

Word first written in 1929.
I often focus on acorns as a human food - and rightly so given the fact that humankind has eaten more acorns than all grain crops combined.
However, given the fact that most soil-killing and fossil fuel-consuming grain crops are grown to feed livestock (whether the animals' digestive systems evolved to eat grains or not), the idea of using acorns as a forage crop takes on new poignancy.

Horizontal Giant Still Going Strong

2011-10-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

My new favorite tree in the whole world: Coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia), San Luis Obispo Cty, California:

(Click to enlarge)

Yes, it is still alive:

(Click to enlarge)

This dude tipped over a long time ago and not only tenaciously clings to life, but continues to thrive - geotropism be damned.

Foresters generally measure d.b.h. - diameter at breast height. They don't normally need to do this while in the prone position.

I'd give a week's pay for an increment boring of this tree.

I'm glad that someone in my family can write

2011-10-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

A little light reading for you... coming soon to a bookstore near you... http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/the-torture-report/
Based on... http://www.thetorturereport.org/blogs/larry-siems

Well done, hermano.

It stinks being the 7th smartest sibling in a family with 6 kids.

Fool Proof Test of Acorn Ripeness

2011-10-06T14:34:00.000-07:00

Today on my lunchtime hike through the coast live oak scrub in the hills behind my home I brilliantly developed a 100% accurate test to determine the moment coast live oak acorns are ripe.
Here's how you know they are ripe: They are gone.

I have been watching green acorns for weeks, watching for the precise moment when they get ripe enough to pick to eat and/or plant. I have discovered that there are precisely three types of coast live oak acorns: Green ones, bug eaten ones, and empty acorn caps.

I might have to just stand next to a tree for a few days and fight off the jays and squirrels. I don't mind; the view of Morro Bay from there is awesome.

New favorite acorn

2011-09-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge)

This photo does a poor job of showing the striations on the caps, but these are just plain beautiful acorns. California black oak (Quercus kelloggii).

As I said in the previous post, one of the visitors centers in Sequoia National Park has a small exhibit noting the importance of acorns in the diet of the indigenous people of the area. That exhibit contained a gorgeous woven basket I'm not kicking myself for not photographing. The basket had a repeating brown zig zag pattern. The interpretive text said that the zig zag pattern represented the outline of the surrounding Sierra foothills. That could well be true, but looking at these acorn caps one could easily imagine an alternative explanation for the pattern. The basket itself is essentially an upside down black oak acorn cap.

(Click to enlarge)

Eastern foresters could make about 7 guesses as to the identity of this leaf - and all would be wrong. More about the underlying text in the photograph later.

When hiking in Kings Canyon we passed a California black oak that must have been nearly 4ft in diameter - no where near the size of the state champ which was more than 7ft dhb as of the 1985 writing of Oaks of North America, but still pretty impressive given the fact that the elevation was well above that which black oak apparently prefers.

It is supposed to be relatively intolerant of shade, but it seemed to me that its preferred method of regeneration is to germinate near the base of pine and fir trees - although this is probably a function of the fact that jays and squirrels are more likely to cache acorns near trees as a marker.

So how do the acorns taste, you ask? I'll let you know as soon as I regain feeling in my tongue. Eye wateringly astringent would be a good description. However. I noticed a couple of things about the tannic bitterness of these acorns as compared to the eastern red/black oak acorns I have eaten. They are very moist, and the oil content seems higher. I'll have to see if there's any data to back that up. Also, the bitterness subsides very quickly. Couple of liters of Mountain Dew and it's gone entirely! Seriously, they don't coat your mouth with bitterness like other black - and many white - oak acorns do.

My guess is that the tannins in these acorns are highly water soluble and easy/fast to leech out. If that's true - and I'm sure it is - it's easy to see how indigenous people (and intelligent European interlopers) came to view California black oak acorns, among other species - as the true staff of life.

They Might Be Giants... But they don't fill your stomach*

2011-09-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

We spent the weekend camping and hiking among the giant sequoias of Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks.

Show offs.

Oaks could grow that big if they weren’t so busy devoting a huge chunk of their growth energy into other things… like feeding the entire forest and – in the past and in the future – entire human populations. With sequoias it’s all about me, me, me. Hey, look at me! I’m gigantic. Never mind that I don’t produce enough mast to feed an elderly vole with digestive complaints for a week. Just stand there and gape in wonder at my hugeness. Bow down before me!

I’m joking, of course. I visited Muir Woods near San Francisco many years ago, but this was my first trip to Sequoia NP and NF – a trip which started with pitching a tent in the pitch black darkness of a state forest Friday night, and peaking out the tent after the moon rose to see the ghostly stumps of 15 foot diameter redwoods felled a century ago.

You go there, you know what you’re going to see, you walk the well marked, well paved paths (alongside, it seemed, half the population of Germany) and you still end up standing there in bewildered awe looking up at these giant trees. In mean, they are really, really big. You know how big you think they are? They are bigger than that. Jeepers and gosh almighty big.

In the 1800’s a cross section of a tree from what is now Grant Grove was sent east to amaze and delight the populace. It had to be cut into sections for transport. Once reassembled out east no one believed that the pieces could possibly have come from a single tree, and it was called the “California Hoax.”

One thing I was pleased to see was the emphasis in the interpretive material – signs and brochures – of the fire scars most of these giants brandish, especially the massive General Grant tree. I hope that these repeated references to the role of fire cause people – at least a few people and at least in some small way – to view these arboreal giants as part of a dynamic, ever-changing environment – an environment that is at once benevolent and violent. It also positively addresses a major pet peeve I have: When wildfires are covered in the news they are usually said to have “destroyed” a certain number of acres. Destroyed? In natural terms fires take life, but they also give it. Fire is both destructive and regenerative, and that usually gets overlooked in the media… until someone in the media realizes, “Hey, there are wildflowers and trees growing again in Yellowstone,” and files a report expressing their wonder and surprise at Nature’s resilience. You mean fire didn’t leave Yellowstone a scorched and blackened dead zone for all eternity? You don’t say.

Even though I loved every minute spent gawking at the sequoias, it is probably very safe to say – and not surprising to regular readers - that I was the only guy in the parks this weekend more interested in the oaks than the redwoods.

I saw and identified (I think) my first California black and canyon live oaks (more on those in upcoming posts). And came up with more questions/thoughts about possible hybrids thereof.

And in one of the visitors centers there was a small display (which I should have photographed but didn’t) about the heavy reliance of indigenous people in the area on acorns as a food source, complete with a photograph of a woman grinding acorns into flour and an absolutely gorgeous woven basket used in gathering and hauling acorns.

It struck me: Here we are, Lilliputian in the land of massive trees, but it was the rugged, often scrubby oaks of the area the provided sustenance to wildlife and humans alike for thousands of years. Spectacularly enormous trees are great, but they don’t put dinner on the table. That requires a tree capable of drawing nutrients from the granite and selflessly (not really, since it’s really all about successful reproduction from the point of view of the oaks) converting those nutrients to convenient, tasty little bundles o’ energy.

* Ha! I wrote the headline after the post for once, so it actually has something to do with the drivel that follows!

Oak gall du jour

2011-09-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

Oak gall from a California live oak (Q. agrifolia) in the hills above my house.

I'm going to try my hand at making oak gall ink soon.

http://www.ehow.com/way_5251227_oak-gall-ink-recipe.html

http://boingboing.net/2007/10/01/howto-make-medieval.html
This site has some interesting factoids, and some advice that might foil my attempts: It says be sure to use galls that the wasps have not yet left (as evidenced by the exit holes) because the tannin content is higher. I'll still give it a try.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1407260/make_your_own_oak_gall_or_iron_gall.html?cat=4

Oak gall ink was the favored ink of Leonardo and Bach. Unfornately, "corrosive to cellulose" is probably not a great property for ink to have. At least not if you are the paper.

High speed oak

2011-09-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

Valley oak (Q. lobata).

Hey, at 60 miles per hour that photo isn't too bad!

Coincidence? I think not.

2011-09-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

The great observation on the Las Pilitas Nursery web site that in many cases (so-called) hybrids of blue oak and California white oak (a.k.a. valley oak) are more plentiful than pure examples of either "species" had me curious, so I looked up the ranges of both "species" in Oaks of North America. Here's what I found.

Range of blue oak (Quercus douglasii)

Range of California white oak (Quercus lobata)

Beside the fact that the latter map was apparently rendered with a felt tip pen on the verge of drying out, the two maps look strikingly similar to me.

Hmmm... more hybrids than pure breds, and the exact same range. Still sure we're talking about two separate "species" here?

Post has nothing to do with title. Again.

2011-09-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

Now why I know why newspaper headlines are written after the articles are done. That last post was titled "Blue Oak Leaves, slightly crispy." I meant to chide myself for leaving the leaves in a hot truck for 30 hours before photographing them, rather than pressing them as I should have. Already leathery in texture, these blue oak leaves feel like potato chips. But don't taste like them (I know because I tried them).

Once again my thoughts (if they can be considered such) took me in a totally different direction. Remind me to re-read the title before I click Publish!

Blue Oak Leaves, slightly crispy

2011-09-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge)

Random leaf samples from the blue oak pictured in the previous post (I could reach these from the road without disturbing the bovines).

While searching for more information on blue oaks and leaf photos with which to compare these, I came across more brilliance from the website of Las Pilitas Nursery. I can't believe I never noticed this before!

Blue oaks (Quercus douglasii) hybridize with many of the other oaks in California and often you're left guessing which it is. Sometimes Blue Oaks (Quercus douglasii) and Valley Oaks (Quercus lobata) get together and you get more hybrids than 'real' trees. Sometimes Blue Oaks (Q. douglasii) and scrub oaks (Quercus berberidifolia) make a mess of little oaks that leave most of us confused and one or two newbie botanists thinking up new species names.

I would be very happy if a group of botanists by consensus combined almost all the oaks into one species, with the subspecies, forms, varieties and hybrids listed under them. THEN, if you were not sure which one you were looking at you could 'go up the tree' one step.

Amen brother (or sister), amen. When a particular hillside has more "hybrids" than true "species," that should be a clue that our current system of taxonomy is not up to the task of accurately describing oaks. Regular Oak Watch readers know I am a proponent of a One Species/Many Varieties approach to oak taxonomy - more of a gradient like the three-sided gradient (sand, clay, silt) used to classify soils.

Obviously, I'm not the first. Or the smartest. Or the most eloquent. Or... Well now I'm really depressed. But the point is even though I'm late to the One Species party, at least I'm there.

You might be asking: Why does it matter? Who cares about the taxonomy and nomenclature surrounding oaks, except for a bunch of acorn heads in their ivory towers?

It matters. It matters because instead of viewing oaks as separate, static "species" that exist only in the realm of "nature," the One Species concepts sees oaks as ever-changing, ever-evolving possibilities - in the same way that a couple of nondescript, virtually inedible grasses ultimately became maize, the oaks we see today could - and I would argue must - become the corn of tomorrow.

Oaks served mankind as a primary staple food source for millennia. And served mankind well. Now corn and its cereal counterparts have allowed us to increase our numbers to the point where woody crops as they currently exist couldn't feed the world without selection and breeding. But corn and its cereal counterparts' effect on the soil which sustains us and fossil fuel consumption have made it imperative that woody crops take their place as soon as possible.

I harp constantly on the genetic elasticity of the Quercus genus - I mean species! - to illustrate how much genetic potential exists within this one remarkable species. It took corn about 6,000 to completely control our land and our stomachs. Oaks could regain their rightful position as the Staff of Life in just a few decades - but only if we stop trying to separate them into different species are start viewing them as One Species within which resides the diversity that will save our soils and our souls.

Blue Oak Sunrise

2011-09-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge)

Sunrise on CA route 166.

The one of the left is blue oak, Quercus douglasii. I think the one on the right is coast live oak (Q. agrifolia) but to know for sure I would have had to scale a barbed wire fence into a cattle holding pen. I wasn't worried about getting hurt or trespassing; I was worried about what I'd step in on the way to a day of sales meetings ;-)

The hybrid that isn't?

2011-09-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

In the Southeastern USA live oak (Q. virginiana) hybridizes with three other oaks, at least according to Oaks of North America: Overcup oak (Q. lyrata), post oak (Q. stellata) and swamp white oak (Q. bicolor).

In one respect these hybrids are not supposed to happen. Live oak is considered, by virtue of being evergreen and using the "modern" convention (at least it was modern as of the 1985 printing of my copy of Oaks) of grouping all evergreen oaks together, to be a Red/Black oak (Erythrobalanus). Its three dance partners listed above, of course, are firmly placed in the White oak group (Leucobalanus).

But these are clearly artificial designations. All of these oaks have acorns that mature in one year, so it makes sense that, at least in that regard, live oak is more of a white than a red.

Now come with me to the west coast. Coast live oak (Q. agrifolia) is the dominant (in a bonsai sort of way) tree in my area. Go a few miles inland and you quickly begin to find California white oak - a.k.a. valley oak (Q. lobata) mixed with coast live oak on the golden hillsides.

Both have acorns that ripen in one year. It is, to say the least, a very romantic setting. Morning fog, sunny afternoons, ocean views, wine country. So of course the local hillsides resound with the pitter patter of roots of little Q. agrifolia x lobata hybrids, right?

Wrong. I can't find any mention of such a hybrid existing. And you'd think it wouldn't be hard to notice: An evergreen oak but with the lobed leaves of a valley oak, or a decidious oak with the bristled, cupped leaves of a coast live. But apparently you don't, or at least no one has.

So yes, the stage is set for Q. x siemsii. I know it's out there, I just need to find it.

Then again it might not be out there. Instead of marrying the girl next door, coast live oak apparently goes gallivanting around the interior with California black oak (Q. kelloggii), a clear Erythrobalanus whose acorns mature in two years. This apparently frequent union results in Q. x ganderi C.B. Wolf or Q. x chasei McMinn, Curly and Moe - depending on where you are and who you talk to. And their parents said it would never last!

It's got me wondering about the whole red oak / white oak division and what it means. My guess: Not much.

Oak Abuse

2011-09-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge - if you have the stomach for it)

Gah.

Paging Dr. Shigo. Paging the spirit of the late father of modern aboriculture Dr. Alex Shigo, you are needed in El Paso de Robles.

Before there aren't any more robles in these pasos.

(Click to enlarge - photoshop the fence - and enlarge)

Now that's more like it. What a beaut. California white oak (Q. lobata).

Rattlesnake Shuffle

2011-08-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

The previous post reminded me of a story. It has nothing to do with oaks, but it had me laughing to myself as I jogged yesterday though the dwarf oaks lining the (rattlesnake infested) hills above my new California home.

For me the most compelling piece of sports footage ever is when Bob Beamon set the world record in the long jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. No, he destroyed the old record*. The raw statistics are astounding. 29 feet, 2 1/2 inches. Up until that time the long jump record had been bested 13 times since 1901 (once every five years), by an average of 2 1/2 inches each time. Beamon broke the existing record by 21 3/4 inches, and his record stood for 23 years.

But as amazing as the numbers are, it is the actual footage of the leap that is the most astounding. And heartbreaking. Beamon runs with the fluidity of a cheetah toward the board and launches himself into the stratosphere where he... just... floats. This was before the hitch kick came into vogue. Today's long jumpers pedal and imaginary bicycle across the sky. Better for distance, but definitely less poetic. Beamon just literally floated. And floated. And forgot to come down. Almost as though his body so enjoyed the feeling of floating in the air that it refused to come down.

When he finally does surrender to gravity and return to Earth, he bounds out of the pit. He knows he nailed it. He knows it was a great jump. He's literally skipping while waiting for the distance to be posted. There's a delay in posting the distance - probably because the judges know that the distance they are coming up with can't possibly be correct. And when the distance is finally posted three things happen in rapid succession: Beamon's eyes get huge, the crowd erupts, and Beamon collapses on the ground in a sobbing heap - a man who knows that he is not physically capable of doing what he just did.

* A fellow competitor later told Beamon that he had "destroyed" the long jump for future competitors.

That record stood until 1991. The great Carl Lewis never broke it. Mike Powell broke it. By 2 inches. Hitch kick and all.

Officially, Mike Powell's record still stands. Unofficially, Powell's record was broken in 2003 in Tucson, AZ. By me. No, I didn't break his record. I destroyed it.

As I said in the previous post I often ran in a dry wash near our Tucson home. For company I often brought a Walkman that was so old it played cassette tapes. Usually though I listened to the radio. When it worked. The Walkman was on the fritz (probably the result of being subjected to about 3 gallons of salt water every time I ran in that scorching heat) and the radio came in and out.

One day the radio had gone silent for so long I completely forgot I had it with me and that I had headphones on. Mid afternoon, approximately 132 degrees in the shade (I'm only guessing, because this was Tucson - there is no shade).

All of a sudden I heard the tssssssstttttt of a rattlesnake's rattle and it was RIGHT NEXT TO ME. At that moment I put both Bob Beamon and Mike Powell to shame. I went airborne - taking the "hitch kick" technique to a whole new level. In fact I was running at top speed while in midair. Judges later recorded my leap at 39ft 6 3/4in. I still think they cheated me out of five more feet.

After I landed, and after my heart started working again, and after I started breathing again (in other words, about 10 minutes after I landed) I heard... static. In my head phones.

I hadn't heard a rattlesnake. I had heard static, suddenly kicking in after radio silence for the previous hour. Static. The local Gambel quail, javelinas and cactus wrens were treated to the sight of a grown man sitting in the sand laughing at what an idiot he is.

No one has ever understood how Bob Beamon was able to crush the long jump record by 21 3/4 inches in 1968. Yes, Mexico City is at altitude, but the altitude was the same for everyone and they didn't jump 29 feet.

But now I know. Bob Beamon thought there was a rattlesnake next to the take off board. He just had the grace and elegance to float through the air, rather than flail in the air like a panic stricken fool.

Then again that flailing probably bought me an extra ten feet in distance.

Anyway, it's good for my heart to be back running in rattlesnake country. And even better for my heart (in a different way) to be in country where acorns were the staple food until not much more than a century ago.

Rattlesnake Oaks

2011-08-31T14:58:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a brisk jog through rattlesnake country to enliven the senses and quicken the pulse. Yesterday I went running in the hills near our new neighborhood - I would say "where the sidewalk ends," but this is Los Osos and there aren't any sidewalks. Or street lights. Or sewers. But that's another story for another day.

We have been told that rattlesnakes are prevalent in that area, and that this year they have been particularly active with several dogs getting bitten. I couldn't resist the chance to explore what from a distance promised to be oak-rich hills, but I was definitely on high alert.

As I gained altitude (makes me sound like a condor when the shuffling pace of a tortoise with asthma is closer to the mark these days) I passed through low scrubby vegetation, into some taller (head high - or more accurately eyeball high - remind me to wear protective eye wear next time) scrubby stuff, then into some assorted low trees. Stop me if this is getting too technical for you.

But that is essentially the level of my current knowledge of this area's vegetation and cover types.

I realized, much to my great joy and sadness, that I am in for new awakening, an epiphany of the sort I haven't felt in nearly 25 years. That was when, as a student in forestry school, I spent a few weeks at the University of Minnesota's research center at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota. In just that short time, after intensive field classes in forest ecology, botany and soils, I came to view the forest with a whole new set of eyes. I never looked at the woods in the same way again.

It's probably very similar to learning to read. At some point as a very small child you become aware that those symbols on the page mean something, and you can recognize and name a few of them, but you have know idea how the whole system works, how those symbols fit together to tell a story. Until you learn to read. Then you can never see the printed page with those "old eyes" ever again.

There's something a bit sad about the process a well, and I have always felt a sense of loss, that the forest - at least the eastern hardwood forest and the northern boreal forest - for me no longer holds the same mystery and wonder for me that they used to. And it was that sense of mystery and wonder that pushed me into forestry in the first place. Bit of an irony, that.

I have always wanted to regain that sense of ignorant wonder - of not understanding, of not being able to read the forest like a book - in some new place.

But this isn't it. All I could think about as I ran was: I need to learn these plants, and how they fit together, and what story they tell. I can't wait to put a name to them, to know them. To see them with new eyes (assuming they don't get poked out by the brush first). And to share what I learn with you. Because the story these plant communities has to tell sustained some of the healthiest, happiest people on Earth for millennia.

OK, that's not ALL I could think about. Mostly, if I'm being honest, I was thinking about rattlesnakes. I lived in Tucson for three years, and used to run in a dry wash. I saw rattlesnakes several times, but the wash was wide, sandy and barren so I could see them from some distance away. The path I ran yesterday cuts a shoulder wide swath with head high "mini cliffs" on both sides of you, so you could come around a bend and be eyeball to eyeball with a rattler. Not that the thought occurred to me at all.

My ascent ended in a grove of 20 foot tall California live oaks, all filled with green unripe acorns. I'll be keeping a close on them as they ripen. I will be gathering, growing and eating these acorns soon (and sending them to anyone who'd like to grow some).

Assuming the rattlesnakes don't get me first.

Las Pilitas Nursery has it right!

2011-08-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

I have quoted this before, but it continues to be by far the best thing I have read on how "new" oak "species" and "varieties" get named. It's on the web site of Las Pilitas Nursery in Santa Margarita, CA. The best part is now I'm only a half away from them, and definitely hope to visit the nursery soon!

Quercus dumosa is the most messed -with tree in the state. The botanists have divided up the species into all sorts of forms, most of which exist on the hillsides of both nurseries. McMinn said it in 1939 “Several varieties of this species have been described, but the characters used in attempting to distingish them fail when specimens collected throughout the range of this polymorphic species are examined.” Amen.

Double amen. Then again, McMinn is also the dude who, in 1949 along with partners in crime Babcock and Righter, "discovered" Quercus x chasei McMinn, Babcock and Righter (Q. agrifolia x kelloggii), a hybrid that had already been "discovered" many miles to the south in 1944 and named Quercus x ganderi C.B. Wolf... so ol' McMinn didn't do much to simplify things. Pot/kettle/black. This is a common theme in oak taxonomy: When someone else tries to split a population into a new species or variety, they are "splitters" out to make a name for him/herself and in the process causes unwarranted complication. When you split a population into a new species or variety yor are bringing specificity and clarity to bear on the situation, and those who disagree with your are "lumpers" who aren't smart enough to discern the subtle differences that are so clear to you.

It seems that every few years a budding botanist blunders out of his or her ivory tower and discovers that there are bushy oaks outside. Now these oaks do not key in the floras easily (keying is wandering through a flora's (a book) selection process that is supposed to be based primarily on reproductive parts of the plant). So, Mister or Ms. hot shot botanist writes a paper describing his or her “new” oak. Every time a 'new' oak is described it leads to more confusion and more 'new' oaks. These oaks below should probably all be considered various forms of Scrub Oak ( Quercus dumosa).
Quercus Xacutidens
Quercus berberidifolia- new name for Q. dumosa, given to new plants that are supposed to only occur in San Diego but are elsewhere. The landscape trade only recognizes old Q. dumosa, so in the name of 'restoration' the gene pool is being replanted with oaks from all over the state.
Quercus cornelius-mulleri (Very much like Q. john tuckeri or Q. xalvordiana. A wonderfully clean beautiful small tree. I actually figured this one out once.)
Quercus dumosa var. elegantula
Quercus durata var. gabrielensis (let's see you separate Q.durata from Q. dumosa by leaf roll, and this form has no leaf roll; maybe it's Q. dumosa?)
Quercus grandidentata (Q. engelmannii X Q. dumosa)
Quercus xhowellii (Q. dumosa X Q. garryana)
Q. john tuckeri (Q. turbinella var. californica) probably was originally a hybrid between Q. douglasii and Q. dumosa
Quercus X kinselae (Q. dumosa X Q. lobata)
Quercus X macdonaldii (Q. dumosa X Q. lobata)
Quercus X townei (Q. dumosa X Q. lobata)
Quercus dumosa var. turbinella
AND, the live oaks have dwarf forms that can also mimic Quercus dumosa.

I absolutely love this passage (especially the "budding botanist blunders..." part). It's dripping enough sarcasm to water Las Pilitas Nursery for a week, and it sums up the situation with oak taxonomy perfectly. Exactly the same could be said for the Southeast, and (in spades) for the Big Bend region of Texas.

Three separate names for Q. dumosa x Q. lobata! Sheesh, I really have my work cut out for me trying to key out the oaks of my (latest) adopted state.

Continuum, people. Oaks falls on a continuum, not into isolated, unrelated groups.
About which much more soon...

It's a Fence Post...

2011-08-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

It's a handy bulletin board!No, it's a fence post and a handy bulletin board!

(Click to enlarge)

I was driving yesterday north of Paso Robles, CA (El Paso de Robles - The Pass of the Oaks) and came across this beauty. California white oak (a.k.a. valley oak), Quercus lobata.

At first glance (not bad for 60 miles per hour - never drive ahead of or behind an oak fanatic) it looked like the wire fence ran through the tree - that the wire had been tacked to the tree in the distant past and the tree had grown to engulf it. I was wrong.

(Click to enlarge)

The fence is much more recent and has been fastened to the tree with lag bolts. So now the tree will start engulfing the wire. No, it won't cause long term damage, but, I mean, c'mon... Would it have killed you to have driven a fence post a few feet away??

Then I noticed the nails. Not just the ones holding the current No Trespassing sign.

(Click to enlarge)

I counted upwards of thirty nails, all pretty recent. Must be the community bulletin board.

Maybe it should be renamed California cork oak.

New Quest

2011-08-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

Quercus x ganderi C.B. Wolf (Q. agrifolia x kelloggii)

For those of you keeping score at home, that's a naturally occurring hybrid of California live oak (a.k.a. coast live oak) and California black oak.
I'm on a quest to find some, now that I am living in coastal California among them.
And for those of you keeping score at home in the same freakish, mega-geek sort of way that I do, Q x ganderi is also a naturally occurring cross between a "species" whose acorns mature in 1 year (agrifolia) and a "species" whose acorns mature in 2 years (kelloggii).
It's a hybrid that's not supposed to happen. But, of course, it does. I once did a spreadsheet with all of the naturally occurring oak hybrids listed in Oaks of North America, looking for instances where a "species" with 1 year maturity acorns crosses with an oak with 2 year maturity acorns. There are several such cases, but nearly all of them are from the Big Bend region of Texas where there is a confusing continuum of scrubby oaks that are considered to be "partly evergreen" and where taxonomists are still arguing about the true maturation time of each "species'" acorns. There are "species" in Big Bend whose native range consists of a few scattered hilltops. Taxonomists early on identified Big Bend as a place where you could find some scrubby oak, call it a species or variety, and slap your name on it (or, as I noted in one case, your girlfriend's name on it), and thus gain botanical immortality for yourself and/or your betrothed.

The exception is Q. x ganderi. It's the only cross between a 1 year and 2 year oak that I have found outside of Big Bend. Which means it goes a long way toward proving my theory that the oaks are truly a single species with thousands of local varieties.

It's also called Quercus x chasei - so once again we see the duel/dueling nomenclature in oaks that means a) two guys identified the same hybrid at different times and different places and gave them different names, b) two guys named two different hybrids/"species" but one guy later decided they are actually the same hybrid/"species," or c) no one knows what they hell they are talking about.

My money's on C.

This is still the best site I have seen for both explaining and mocking the taxonomy of California oaks.

Some sites say if I want to find a Qxganderi/Qxchasei that I'll have to go to San Diego (not exactly a hardship) way to the south of me. Others say they exist in Monterey & Santa Clara Counties, well to the north.

I'm hoping that means they are also nearby.

New favorite place

2011-08-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

The other evening we took a stroll on the boardwalk. Not 'Under the Boardwalk' - as inviting as the Coasters made that sound. This boardwalk carried us through the Elfin Forest of Los Osos, California.

Los Osos, CA happens to be the new home of Oak Watch, having relocated from Northfield, MN just last week. The move puts me smack in the middle of the land of the Obispeno Chumash, one of the latest surviving balanocultures (acorn eating cultures).

The Elfin Forest is a natural bonsai - coast live oaks (Q. agrifolia) that would ordinarily grow to 50ft in height here reach only 10 or 12ft after 200 or more years of growth, stunted by a combination of nutrient poor, sandy soils and salt laden breezes.

Which, of course, raises the question in my mind: How would acorns from these trees grow if planted under less stressful conditions? Would they become the 50ft sprawling giants other live oaks do (in other words are they limited only by site conditions)? Or, did the Elfin Forest site select for success those acorns that were pre-programmed for smallness?

I hope someday to find out.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of posts. A sudden move across the country, a week of frantic packing, a cross country drive in a UHaul, a UHaul/deer collision in Colorado (about which much more later, including heartening news that the Good Samaritan lives on in Grand Junction, CO) and unpacking in a new home tend to take a bite out of blogging time.

But I have landed in an oak lover's paradise, and I intend to take full advantage of it, sharing what I learn with you. Whether you want me to or not.

Sustainable?

2011-08-09T03:05:00.000-07:00

No, I didn't forget the password to my own blog. I've just been on the road an awful lot lately. Probably unique among bloggers (and among 99.9% of residents of the 21st century), almost everything you see here is first written in long hand (although sadly not in oak gall ink - something I intend to remedy). I have a backlog of ink waiting to be turned into pixels.

During a recent visit to our local coop I noticed a new product: Paper plates made from wheat fiber. The label trumpeted the fact that, "No trees were cut down to make these plates," and claimed that this fact made them, "The first sustainable paper plate." As both a forester and a champion of woody agriculture this claim struck me odd at first. Converting a product from a woody perennial crop - which requires minimal soil disturbance when planted, no soil disturbance and minimal inputs for years, and then minimal soil disturbance at harvest - to an cereal crop - which requires soil pulverizing activity on an annual basis - doesn't exactly seem "sustainable" to me.

I understand and appreciate the concept behind the product. In separating the "wheat from the chaff" we have now found a use for the chaff - the by product. And that's usually to the good. No one is out there planting and cultivating wheat just to make (ludicrously overprice, I might add) paper plates.

But I always cringe at claims that cutting down trees is somehow not sustainable. Let those who live in wood houses quell the first chainsaw.

In my mind a product produced by a woody perennial crop - especially oaks - is always better than a product produced by an soil killing, fossil fuel sucking annual grain crop. While it's good to use the byproducts of cereal crops, it would be better if we didn't grow so much of those cereal crops that we have mountains of byproduct in the first place.

80 Proof Acorns

2011-07-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Here's one way to consume acorns!
It's a refreshing beverage! It's a paint stripper! It's a beverage and a paint stripper!

40% alcohol. Sheesh. At 12% or so wine is a little high octane for me these days. I prefer the 6% of hard cider.

I do love the comments on the taste of some of the other liquors listed.

Tolkkotsul (soju) - An herbal medicine-like scent and flavor spreads in a mouth.
Its taste is similar to that of a ginseng liquor but rather milder. Translation: Tastes like NyQuil but rather stronger.

Sinyangsul (soju) - A descent scent of a Korean soil floats in a mouth. Free from soju-related strong odor and tastes palatable. The ad team at Budweiser is going to be kicking themselves that these guys beat them to the next great tag line in adult beverage sales: "Tastes palatable." (Which is an odd claim to make right after saying that a swig of Sinyangsul is like sucking on Korean dirt.)

Pyongyangsul (vodka) - Burning taste. It makes a clear distinction from other “quaffable” liquors. A good first step for those of you trying to kick your turpentine habit. It makes a clear distinction to other "drinkable" liquors you can consume "without physical pain."

As long as acorns are replacing grain crops as the sugar source for conversion to these lighter fluid-like alcohol levels, I'm all for it. I would just need a mixer. A lot of mixer.

Auburn Trees Hanging On

2011-07-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

The oaks at Auburn University's venerated Toomer's Corner are hanging in there, after being (allegedly) poisoned by an (alleged) Alabama fan. Who is (allegedly) a complete nutbag.

In fact it looks like they will even be ready to be draped in toilet paper (a.k.a. "rolled") after Auburn victories this fall. Assuming they are once again the highest bidder for the services of a premier quarterback.

My favorite part of the linked article: "Harvey Updyke Jr. — a 62-year-old ‘Bama fan with children named Bear and Crimson Tyde — was indicted on charges including criminal mischief and desecration of a venerated object. Updyke pleaded not guilty, and his trial isn’t likely to begin before football season."

Bear (of course as in Paul "Bear" Bryant) & Crimson Tyde? That should have been someone's first clue the guy has a screw loose. Even my children Golden and Gopher think so.

We'll keep an eye on the trial. My guess is that someone will ask for a mistrial based on the football affiliations of the jury or the judge. My hope is that football fans who never give oak trees a second thought will, as the result of this case, come to think of them as living, breathing organisms that can be grievously wounded or even killed by the pointless actions of people - intentional or not.

Acornomania

2011-06-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

In the 1630’s Holland’s economy – at that time one of the largest economies in the world – was very nearly dashed on the rocks of a speculative frenzy that created paper fortunes overnight and just as quickly ruined untold lives.

In modern economic terms their economy was riding a bubble, a bubble which burst with astounding speed and ruthless force. What was the cause of the bubble? What could drive the usually stoic, stolid and staid (and all those other st~ words which basically mean “northern European” and “boring”) Dutch mad with greed? What could have caused these devout Calvinists to forget that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven? (Scratch that last one – it’s actually much harder to find anyone who remembers that one).

The answer is tulip bulbs.

At the height of the craziness a single tulip bulb – Semper augustus  sold for 10,000 guilders, the going price at the time for the finest canal houses.

Michael Pollan covers “Tulipomania” (as this episode has become known) in The Botany of Desire, and it is chronicled in more detail elsewhere. There is considerable debate about how big the speculative bubble was, and how great a threat it posed to the Dutch economy at that time. I tend to side with those who believe it posed a dire threat. Makes a better story that way.

We know now that it was all caused by a virus. Tulip petals have two sets of pigments, a base color (usually white or yellow) and then a brighter color. Sometimes a virus attacks the brighter color, revealing streaks of the lighter color pigment beneath. These “color breaks” created color-swirled flowers of breathtaking beauty, and could be reproduced clonally from offshoots of the bulb. Dutch gardeners would spread colored pigment on their soil in hope of inducing color breaks, and employed many of the tools and methods of alchemists in hopes of creating the tulip that would make their fortune – with the same success rate alchemists enjoyed.

Of course when it was later discovered that color breaks are caused by a virus, a) they lost their allure and mystery, and b) tulip breeders immediately set about stomping out the virus. Today tulips with true color breaks are rare but – thankfully – they can still be found. Most of the tulips that drove the frenzy of the 1630s are lost to us, viewable only in paintings of the time.

Pollan’s point in discussing the tulip in The Botany of Desire is to explore how plants “use” human perceptions of beauty to get humans to expand their domain.

My point in discussing the tulip here is to explore human values, and play a game of “what if.”

For what was really at work here? The preferment of a flower capable of expressing the tastes and fashions of the day. Beauty as defined and executed by humans. Beauty strictly for the sake of beauty.

I love flowers as much as the next guy. But, especially in the case of tulips, at the end of the day we are talking about a flower – not flower as an enticement to pollination and therefore reproduction, but flower strictly as a decoration.

Perhaps that’s the exact moment when you know a particular economy or culture has too much money.

But for me it keeps coming back to this: If we took the time and effort that has gone into breeding tulips that engender and reflect ever-changing human ideas of beauty and devoted one-tenth of those resources to breeding oaks. we’d have no soil erosion, we’d use a tiny fraction of the fossil fuels we burn today, and we’d have no hunger. We’d be happier, healthier, and more peaceful.

I realize none that counts for much as compared to the perfect spring flower border, but it’s a start.

Some day. Some day there will be another speculative frenzy. Some dude in Mississippi will pay the equivalent of a Manhattan condo for a single hybrid oak acorn from a parent tree that produces acorns early, often and with buttery sweetness, with an easy-cracking shell.

And he’ll have made a great deal. That will be the day we get our priorities straight.

By the way, I much prefer wild tulips to any of the cultivars that drove Holland mad.

More from Morris

2011-06-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

At the end of Robert Morris' 1927 address to the Northern Nut Growers Association, entitled EDIBLE ACORNS AS A FOOD FOR MAN, LIVESTOCK AND FOWLS Morris summarizes his correspondence with oak enthusiasts and experts of the day. Some highlights (at least for me):

"Mr. Ernest H. Wilson, Keeper of the Arnold Arboretum at Jamaica Plain, Mass., sends me the following notes from 'Sturtevant's Notes on Edible Plants.' (pp. 479-82).

"... Q. alba Linn. White Oak. Northeast America. The dried acorns are macerated in water for food by the natives on the Roanoke. Acorns were dried and boiled for food by the Narragansetts. Oak acorns were mixed with their pottage by the Indians of Massachusetts. Baskets full of parched acorns, hid in the ground, were discovered by the Pilgrims December 7, 1620 (ed: talk about a day that will live in infamy!). White oak acorns were boiled for "oyl" by the natives of New England. The fruit of some trees is quite pleasant to the taste, especially when roasted."

Wow. Wow! There's a lot of cool stuff in this little paragraph. You might recall that I recently read Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, and I remarked on how much damage the native people had done to the landscape in the process of raising corn, and wondered aloud why acorns didn't play a bigger role in the diet of either the indigenous people or the alien settlers - with the exception to one reference to a traveling party stopping for a meal of acorns.

In Philbrick's telling the Pilgrims uncover and steal a cache of corn - not acorns. Now I need to go back and re-read that part to get the chronology right. Native Americans did of course keep caches of corn buried, but they also cached large quantities of acorns - which have a much higher food value and would have been a much greater loss (and therefore a much greater crime on the part of the Pilgrims - religious refugees whose first considered act on this continent was the theft of food).

Something else happened on December 7, 1620. Dorothy Bradford, wife of Plymouth Colony leader William Bradford, fell overboard (the Mayflower was at anchor in Plymouth Bay while a scouting party was ashore pilfering acorns and deciding where to locate the settlement). Officially considered an accident, apparently there's always been some speculation that Dorothy, depressed after a long, harrowing journey during which many friends succumbed to disease, might have committed suicide.

Here's a tip, kids: Early December is probably not the ideal time to show up in New England to establish a colony.

Moving on to the next correspondent: The man who is universally referred to as Mr. H. Ness. (To see previous posts enter Ness in the search bar above.) J. Russell Smith calls him Mr. H. Ness. Moriss calls him Mr. H. Ness. I'm guessing his wife called him Mr. H. Ness.

My money was on a first name of Herman. It's not. It's much better than that. His name was Helge Ness. I think I'd go by "H" as well. Here's what Morris had to say about ol' Helge:

"Mr. H. Ness, horticulturist of the Texas State Experiment Station published an article entitled 'Hybrids of the Live Oak and Overcup Oak" in the Journal of Heredity, Vol. 1X, No. 6, Washington, D. C., October, 1918 and has published subsequent notes making the comment that he has become impressed with the ease with which fertile hybrids may arise between species of oaks (Mr. Darwin, paging Mr. Charles Darwin, please report to Oak Watch for a new definition of species), even though their relationship be apparently quite distinct. A number of second generation trees from the hybrids of Mr. Ness have been obtained and the notes should be added to any bibliography now being assembled bearing on the subject of acorns. Mr. Ness says that, 'Because of the ease with which the hybridization of the live oak can be effected, the high fertility of its hybrids and other virtues already mentioned, to which, very likely, will be added improvement of the timber, there can be no doubt but that the breeding of new forms of oaks as here indicated has great economic and aesthetic possibilities.'"

Amen, Helge, Amen.

You might remember that Helge noticed something when live oaks were planted on the campus of Texas A & M (an area in which there were no other live oaks at that time): The female flowers reach maturity a few years before the male flowers (insert your own joke here) and yet the live oaks started bearing acorns before the male flowers reached maturity... so where the heck was the pollen coming from?

The answer, of course, was oaks of other "species," something Helge proved when he sowed those acorns and grew trees with a wide range of traits from pure live oak to pure overcup or pure post oak - and all combinations in between. He then also realized that many of those hybrids grew extremely fast and produced acorns at a very early age.

In short, Helge saved the world. Which I think should be the title of my book... so don't copy it.

Helge also probably ran afoul of the definition of species - at least as it has been applied to oaks. We generally define a species as, "A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring." By definition if two groups of organisms (live oak & post oak, live oak & overcup oak, etc) can interbreed and produce fertile offspring they are not, in fact, two separate species. The are, at most, two different varieties of the same species.

Oaks. One species. Thousands of varieties. And the ability to feed the world.

Robert Morris 1927 NNGA Address Continued... Finally

2011-06-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I started posting excerpts from the address of Mr. Robert T. Morris to the 1927 annual meeting of the Northern Nut Growers Association (with heartfelt thanks to reader David Olsen for supplying this amazing archival material).

To see the previous posts just enter Morris in the search box above. To resume:

"We know that even from seedling oak trees the crop of acorns exceeds in food value the crop of corn which may be raised by tillage upon good land. When we come to making selection, hybridization and grafting, the history with the oak trees will presumably be almost precisely that which has applied to other fruit and nut trees. Furthermore, some of the trees will produce heavy crops of mast upon rocky (soil) and upon soil that is too poor to grow crops of annual plants with tillage.

"Cattle, horses and fowls will eat acorns that are distasteful to man because of tannin, berberine and other extractives, but there are a number of species of oaks bearing so-called sweet acorns which are all ready for roasting and boiling or for being made into flour for man's uses. Many of the species of oaks which bear bitter acorns are already used by man after artificial preparation which removes the elements interfering with the good taste of the acorns of this sort as well as sweet acorns are made into cakes and porridge.

"A well flavored oil is extracted from several species of acorns and in others the acorn cups alone produce such a high percentage of tannin and of coloring matter that the cups pay for the cost of gathering the harvest of nuts which have their own special value. (Get your tannin for nothing and your nuts for free!)

"In the absence of extended study of acorns for food for man and his farm stock, I had thought best at this meeting to start the ball rolling by writing a number of authorities and obtaining reports which might be assembled. I have learned, however, that Dr. J. Russell Smith has very complete and important notes relating to acorns, in manuscript form. These will appear in a new book entitled Tree Crops, to be published shortly."

And so it was.

Do acorns really contain berberine? I had never heard this before - in part because I had never heard of berberine before.

According to the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (is that an encyclopedia with just one eye?) edited by the wonderfully named Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Acorns, while rich in protein, fat and starches, contain in addition disagreeable elements like berberine or tannins in excess."

Get your berberine for nothing and your food for free? Geez, you learn something new about acorns every day... but are left to wonder even more why I keep driving past field of corn and soybeans on my way to soccer games in the evenings, and not field of oaks.

Next time I'll quote from Morris's correspondence with other 1927 oak enthusiasts. Our old friend Helge makes a cameo appearance.

Solace from Holy Scriptures

2011-06-09T07:14:00.000-07:00

It has be a while since I have quoted from the Holy Scriptures of woody perennial agriculture, a.k.a. Tree Crops, A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith.

I recently decided to branch out and read beyond the "The Oaks As A Forage Crop" and "The Acorns As Human Food" chapters and brush up on persimmon.

I came across two passages that gave me great comfort, for completely different reasons.

Here's the first (keep in mind that Tree Crops was originally published in 1929 and was revised in 1950): "These trees have been subject to all the botanic and entomologic barbarities and fungus attacks of a long, hot humid summer of southeastern Asia. Thus far, my trees have been attacked by no fungus and no insect save the Japanese beetle (to some extent), which fortunately we know how to handle (with DDT)."

Yes, a little squirt of that magic elixer will clear that right up. Although personally I prefer a 2,4,5-T / 2,4-D cocktail instead.

Why does this give me solace? Here's a man I consider to be a towering genius of our age, a man who was so far ahead of his time that by the time his ideas are heeded (out of dire necessity rather than out of wisdom and forethought) he will sadly have been forgotten, advocating the use of a chemical that is the Mr. Yuck poster child of the entire environmental movement.

Smith lived until 1966, the year in which I was born. Silent Spring was published in 1962, and of course there was discussion about the safety of DDT before that. Where would Smith have come down on the issue? Obviously a man of his curiosity and intellect could process new facts and reach new conclusions. However he was also a man who kept an eye on the greater good - or perhaps in the case the greater evil; the damage being done to our land by the farming of cereal row crops. He was also a man who didn't seem to think in black and white absolutes (other than his bedrock belief that destroying or wasting our soil - the true wealth of our nation - was tantamount to treason) and probably would have been comfortable taking the position that the judicious use of DDT to fight periodic insect infestations of tree crops is better environmentally than annually dumping millions of tons of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides needed to grow grains.

In other words, he might easily have ended up on the "wrong" side of the issue, from the standpoint of the politically correct environmental doctrine.

His advocacy of planting exotics - like the Asian persimmon - or cross breeding exotic species with their American cousins would also be anathema to many in today's environtal movement from whom "native only" has become a mantra.

Increasingly my own thoughts are leading me astray from the current environmental orthodoxy. And that is why I find some comfort - and perhaps a kindred spirit (although a kindred spirit with 100x the brain power and perhaps only by projecting my own inner struggles onto him) - in JR Smith.

The solace I derive from the second passage is not nearly as convoluted. Again, here he's talking about Asian persimmons growing on his Virginia farm: "My trees have been through the hot and cold waves of the three devilish spring seasons, 1945, 1946, and 1947. They suffered less than did apples, peaches, and cherries, alongside. Only highbush blueberries did better. I should be quite satisfied to plant an orchard in Virginia or in Maryland, of the best varieties I have, if only I had the luck to be forty-five years old."

I will turn forty-five later this year. It's comforting to know that a man who, at age 76 in 1950 had accomplished more in any given year than I will in my lifetime, would have considered himself to be lucky to be my age - felt like being 45 would have given him enough time to establish an orchard of a new tree crop and select the best varieties.

So it's time to get started. Luckily oaks grow so fast I'll learn a lot in the 60 years I have remaining on this Earth.

Pollan wrong again - but still brilliant

2011-06-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

As I have said before, Michael Pollan is one of my heroes. Through his books The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food he has done as much as anyone to re-connect people to their own personal food chains - and he has done so in an incredibly compelling and entertaining way. He should be Secretary of Agriculture.

But he keeps getting oaks wrong.

Last year, when re-reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, I posted about how Pollan wrote that oaks had "refused the domestic bargain." His point was that acorns haven't done anything to make themselves palatable to humans, who therefore have done nothing to help oaks expand their dominion - in the way that apples, corn or potatoes have struck the (perhaps Faustian) bargain of domestication with humankind.

I'm re-reading The Botany of Desire (which was the first in Pollan's plant/food books), and last night I came across this: "We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species. Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is overstated. It takes two to perform thta particular dance, after all, and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel - which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the estimate is Beatrix Potter's)- that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us. The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans."

I get his overarching point (the guy is such a brilliant thinker and writer it would be hard not too). The section of the book on apples is specifically about sweetness, and how the apple's sweetness enticed people to spread it from the Khazak mountains were it is thought to have originated.

Acorns are not sweet. But they are a much more complete food source than are apples, and have sustained humankind for much longer.

Acorns are not too bitter for humans to eat. Many are edible right off the tree. Others require a minimal amount of leaching (boiling) - a lot less work than what is required to preserve apples in the form of sauce, jam or hard cider (my favorite form of apple).

"Try as they might...???" People have put almost zero effort into "domesticating" the oak tree. In part that's because it provided so for us so wonderfully for so long without "improvement." In part that's because we forgot about oaks when we came under the thrall of corn, wheat, and rice. Were we to devote 1/1,000,000th of the effort into to domesticating oaks that humankind put into domesticating the sorry, virtually inedible plants that become corn and potatoes, oaks could easily be our primary food source.

Again.

In the co-evolutionary give-and-take of domesticating a crop, the oak has more than held up its end of the bargain. It's time for us to hold up ours.

Writing

2011-06-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

I have heard and read some version of this story so many times and in so many places that it can only be apocryphal.

A famous author is invited to speak to a class of aspiring writers. As the students hunch over their notebooks, breathlessly waiting to record every word of wisdom and advice, the author saunters to the rostrum (half drunk in most versions I have heard, a la Hemingway or Faulkner), fixes the audience in his steely stare, and asks, "How many of you want to be writers?"

Eager faces all nod and every hand shoots up to the sky.

"Then why aren't you home writing?"

At which point the author walks out of the room.

I don't know if this ever happened, just like I don't know whether some philosophy major was ever given a final exam that consisted only of the simple question, "Why?" wrote, "Why not?" and turned in his two word blue book to great acclaim.

Apocryphal or not, urban legend or not, the story speaks to me. I have not been writing, quite simply, because I have been selling. And selling. And selling some more. (And by the way, let me take this opportunity to apologize to every customer who has called simply to order some tree tubes and has spent the next half hour talking about oaks - whether they wanted to or not.)

My absence from writing also coincides with the winning streak of Northfield U10 soccer, proving what I have always said: at this age it's all about coaching.

But it's time to get back to writing. I have a huge back log of topics to cover.

Besides, if you can't trust career advice from a drunken, fictional author, whose advice can you trust?

Recession Good For Oaks

2011-05-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge - sorry about the lighting)

Next time you are bemoaning the precipitate drop in the value of your property relative to what you owe on it, keep in mind that the current economic downturn has had one silver lining: Reduced construction activity means less construction damage to oaks.

Some of you might remember I posted photos of this beautiful bur oak a couple of years ago, along with dire predictions of its imminent demise (when it comes to the fate of oaks on construction sites sites I'm not a glass-half-empty kind of guy; I'm a glass-is-totally-empty-and-it-was-filled-with-the-wrong-beverage kind of guy).

I later learned that the elderly couple who sold this parcel to developers did so based on the developers' assurance (ahem) that they would take special care to protect this treasured tree. The developers immediately demonstrated their concern for the tree by laying out and starting to build roads through the root zone in two directions.

I said at the time that once those roads were completed the clock would start ticking on a slow death, a death that would take long enough that developers and property owners would never think to attribute it to construction activity.

That hasn't happened... because the roads haven't happened. What has happened instead is that two fast food joints just up the road have (tragically) shuttered their doors and new construction on this parcel of land stopped completely.

So this oak is spared for now. I'd like to think that the developers are using this respite to bone up on preventing construction damage to heritage oaks. I'd also like to think that white and pink unicorns will prance though my backyard tonight...

... which raises the questions (in my very twisted mind) - do unicorns browse oak seedlings? and if so, will tree tubes protect them?

To Plant An Acorn...

2011-05-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

... is to know, in a funny sort of way, what a bird on her nest feels when waiting for her eggs to hatch.

So many parallels. The same sense of expectancy. The same constant, gnawing worry and doubt: Is it too cold? Too wet? Too dry? Did I tend the "eggs" properly since I gathered them last fall? Is the "nest" sufficient for the task? The same impatience. The same fear of predation. The same dread certainty that you get one crack at this (so to speak) each year.

And in my case, as my children are fond of telling me, the same large, pointed beak. And as I am fond of pointing out in return, they each have half my genes, ticking inside them like a little nasal time bomb.

What traits will transfer to my acorns? Did the large acorned parent beget this trait to the acorns I happened to gather, and that happen to germinate for me? Which acorns might be hybrids, secretly containing half the genetic code of another "species?"

A watched pot never boils. I hope to God that watched acorns germinate... because I'll be watching the heck out them!

Historic Day

2011-05-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a momentous day in our nation's history: I finished planting my little oak nursery, with enough genetic diversity to find the early, consistent acorn producing trees that will help, at least in a tiny way, fulfill J. Russell Smith's vision of A Permanent Agriculture based on woody perennials.

What did you think I was talking about?

Tale Of Two Acorns

2011-04-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

It was the biggest of acorns, it was the smallest of acorns...

(Click to enlarge)

These two acorns are from the same "species" of oak. I love how books like Oaks of North America try to give, for each species, a range of the number of acorns per KG (in the case of one of these it's more like acorn per KG) When the range spans 3 or 4 orders of magnitude it starts to become somewhat unhelpful in identifying or classifying a given species.

I've said before and I'll keep saying it. We've had 6,000 years to turn corn into the planet killing soil wrecker it has become. Just think if we had devoted 1/1,000,000th of that time and energy into selectively breeding oaks for food production! Give me this kind of genetic variation and 6,000 years and I'll give you acorns the size of watermelons that tap dance and whistle Dixie.

Acorn Flour Made

2011-04-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I got the leached acorns dried and ground (in a coffee grinder - worked great although I'm a little concerned it might have dulled the blades a bit) into a fine meal/flour.

Cookies, sadly, will have to wait until tomorrow.

The flour taste great, although I wish I had leached the acorns for a little longer. There's still a slight tannin aftertaste - like a great Shiraz. Also like your tongue is a hide in the process of being tanned.
Again these are sawtooth oak (Q. acutissima) acorns that we're told are very bitter despite being the mast equivalent of crack cocaine for wild turkeys and deer. Euell Gibbons, in Stalking the Wild Asparagus*, talks about boiling his acorns for 2 hours, and those were chestnut oaks (which he calls Quercus muehlenbergii, so either old Euell got his common name or his Latin name goofed up - probably common name since another name for chinkapin oak - the true Q muehlenbergii - is rock chestnut oak), a "sweet" acorn.

That's OK, come cookie baking time I'll compensate by adding a pinch of extra sugar. One time, and for some reason I cannot possibly fathom, I was watching a cooking show with that old Cajun dude Justin Whathisname. He was pouring cooking wine into a measuring cup over pot when he winked at the camera and said, "Whoops, missed dee cup." That's how I am with sugar in cookies.

* Yes, I will return your book soon... I promise!

Acorns Leached

2011-04-21T07:28:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge - but it will still be blurry :)

Last night I boiled the sawtooth acorn kernels. Unlike Euell Gibbons who recommends doing so for two hours, I actually wanted to get to bed at some point, so I boiled them for about 1 hour, swapping the water every 10 minutes or so.

The first two or three times the water turned the color of Lutheran potluck dinner coffee, then more of a latte color, then a very light milky tan.

As I said, I probably should have done it at least a couple more times, but got lazy. Still, the acorns have lost 95% of their original bitterness, and have a creamy, cashew-like flavor - which is to say they taste great.

And Euell was right when he said, "The acorns turned a dark chocolate brown and were without a trace of their former bitterness and astringency."

The plan is to roast some whole in the oven, salted and unsalted, and grind the rest and dry it for flour.

More later.

Acorns Shelled

2011-04-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge)

I spent part of last evening shelling sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima) acorns with my son. My method: Crack the shell with a garlic press and then peel by hand. His preferred method: Smash the acorn with a meat tenderizer, then sort out the fragments. His way looked like more fun (until it came time to clean up, when he disappeared faster than Houdini). On an unrelated note, does anyone know how to remove acorn shell fragments from under thumbnails?

Tonight they will be boiled to leach out the tannins, dried and ground into meal. Tomorrow they will be cookies. Tomorrow night my short term memory will stop deteriorating. Friday morning I will still forget to put out the garbage.

Many Forest Service and other academic/governmental bulletins in the USA state that sawtooth oak acorns are very bitter. Those same bulletins, however, state that the acorns are highly valued by wildlife, especially wild turkeys and whitetail deer. In the meantime, Koreans are clearly eating sawtooth acorns by the truckload. Something doesn't add up.

My suspicion is that this is a bit of arboreal xenophobia; sawtooth oak is an exotic and potentially invasive species. While acknowledging its benefits for wildlife (because not to do so would be to lose all credibility) the authors of these bulletins don't want to encourage the planting and potential naturalization of sawtooth oak.

But that's an issue for another day. The issue for today (or at least tomorrow): cookies!

Morris NNGA Address, Part 2

2011-04-19T15:02:00.000-07:00

To continue where I left off from Robert T. Morris's address in the Northern Nut Growers Association 1929 annual report:

My friend, Dr. B. L. McClellan of Xenia, Ohio, sent on some acorns from Yellow Springs in his state. He said that they were not only highly prized by pigs and fowls but that he had eaten them roasted and boiled and found them to be particularly good. I went out to Yellow Springs (remember, Morris was from New York City) and looked over the oak tree. It was a narrow leafed chestnut oak (Quercus muehlenbergii). (OK, hold the phone here. I know it's a complete shocker to run into an issue of taxonomy and nomenclature in an article on oaks, but chestnut oak is Q. prinus and Q. muehlengergii is of course chinkapin oak - or chinquapin oak depending on your feeling about the letter q. Could it be that Mr. Morris had two species confused? Or, more likely, could it be that at that time the two "species" were considered to be, as they should be, the same species? I need to look into this a little farther.) Other trees of the species grew in the vicinity. There were few chestnuts in that vicinity (and within a few decades there would, of course, be zero chestnuts in the vicinity) and the fruit from this narrow leafed oak took the place of chestnuts for pigs, fowls and boys. (But apparently not for girls - although it's more reflective of that wonderful time when we didn't fracture our prose with slashes - s/he and boy/girl - simply to avoid offense.)

I began to look into the question more deeply... Some of us older members remember perhaps to have seen a hundred thousand wild pigeons sweep into an oak hillside, these to be followed by another hundred thousand and another. We hardly realized the enormous number of tons of acorns that were being picked up by the wild pigeons. Oak trees are adapted to a very wide variety of soils, in fact, I do not know that we hvae any soils that bear trees of any kind which will not grow some of the more than fifty species of oak trees and shrubs which are indigenous to this country. Many kinds can be raised upon the prairies where there are now no trees. The prairies were treeless in the past because of fires rather than because the soil was not adapted to hardwood growth.

Think I'll stop here to cover a couple of interesting (at least to me) points.

1. I presume he's talking about the passenger pigeon, which once formed flocks so huge they blocked out the sun until market hunting brought it to extinction. Those flocks, it seems, are another example of people seeing a natural phenomena or state of being and assuming that it was always the case. Many have instead speculated that those massive flocks of passenger pigeons were anything but natural. Once hunted heavily by Native Americans, those flocks exploded in size when European diseases took a massive toll on Indian populations. It would be interesting to know, in turn, how those unnaturally high populations of passenger pigeons affected oak and chestnut regeneration and the availability of food for other species of wildlife.

2. Morris here demonstrates an understanding that landscapes are not fixed or static - an understanding I find in other writing of that time, from Aldo Leopold to J. Russell Smith, but which seems to have been lost to a great degree today, when all changes in cover type are attributed to global warming. Morris looks out over the vast prairie of the American Midwest and sees not a perma-prairie, but a landscape forged by fire (both natural and, just as often, human-caused), a landscape that could support trees that could in turn feed the nation.

If it was a question of ripping out big bluestem to plant oaks even I would be hard pressed to advocate this idea. But since it's now mostly a question of replacing corn, wheat and soybeans, I think turning the prairie over to trees - oak trees - is a brilliant idea.

People much smarter in 1927 than 2011

2011-04-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

Reader David Olsen has been kind enough to send excerpts of publications of the Northern Nut Growers Association from the 1920's - an address given by J. Russell Smith in 1924 and the annual report from 1927.

To the extent that any of this material was ever under copyright I doubt it is any more, and even if it was this information is so important - if it was true then it is 100 times more true (if indeed it's possible for something to be "more true") today - that I doubt anyone would object to me reprint huge chunks of it in their entirety.

Original text is in bold. My comments are in italics.

Robert T. Morris was a friend and correspondant of J. Russell Smith and is quoted - or at least referenced - in Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture.

EDIBLE ACORNS AS FOOD FOR MAN, LIVESTOCK AND FOWLS
By Robert T. Morris, New York City

Most of us have had a sort of general knowledge about acorns without thought of their potential in the way of future food supply. It was only when my interest happened to become engaged in a special way that the subject began to expand rapidly and I soon found that a whole lifetime could be devoted to this one subject. (You don't say...) The situation was very much like that in which the German professor found himself when he suddenly realized that he had wasted a lifetime on verbs when he should have given all effort to concentration upon the dative case. (I can't think of anything more tragic. Actually I hope that studying acorns isn't anything like that at all. And since I had no idea either...)

The subject of acorns for food supply has remained in the background for the reason that farmers are now producing so much more food than we can use that they do not know what to do with the over-supply. Farmer are trying all sorts of quack methods for relief in order to escape from a situation which they have brought upon themselves. (It is now 84 years later and they still are, although I should say it's a chicken/egg issue: are farmers growing too much grain because of the perverse system of incentives provided by the government, or is the perverse system of incentives in place to rescue farmers who can't stop growing too much grain?) The next move, it seems to me, will not be so much in the way of finding new food supplies but rather the cheapening of those which we already have. (See also: high fructose corn syrup) Cheapening of the ones we already have will occur when the expense of labor and tillage of the soil for the raising of annual crops will diminish and we then turn to subsoil crops which avoid the expense of tillage and labor.

Acorns already belong to tree crops which are utilized largely as food for livestock and fowls and in many parts of the world they constitute a basic food supply for man. It is only recently that the screw point of my interest in acorns became engaged in thread of the subject. (I love that little turn of a phrase... get it?)

To see where the screw point of Robert T. Morris's interest led him, tune in to the next episode of "As The Acorn Turns."

What Is Native? Ongoing, half-baked musings on "native" versus exotic trees

2011-04-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

I grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs, but I have spent much of my “adult” life in two different small upper Midwest towns: Baraboo, WI and Northfield, MN. Baraboo is home to the International Crane Foundation, which absolutely everyone should visit someday. It’s an amazing place which has accomplished amazing things, on land close to Aldo Leopold’s Sand County farm.

Shortly after moving to Baraboo I gave my visiting brother in law a driving tour of the town. As we circled the old-fashioned town square I said,

“Every Thursday on the square we have…”

“Hangin’s?” he interrupted, in an exaggerated drawl.

“No, smart ass, those are Mondays at noon. I was going to say concerts.”

I currently reside in Northfield, MN which is famous (in its own collective mind) as the last place where the James & Younger gang tried – and failed – to rob the bank, six minutes of drama which is faithfully reenacted the first weekend after Labor Day every year.

The two towns are similar in several respects: both are old river mill towns, both have smallmouth bass populations skilled at avoiding my lures. But one similarity is particularly striking: The way locals give directions to disoriented strangers.

“Yah, okay, you take this road to where Betty’s Diner used to be, and you take a right.”

“You know where the Casey’s used to be? Yah, turn left there.”

And the stranger is thinking, You idiot, if I knew enough about this Podunk town to know where Betty’s Diner used to be I wouldn’t be asking you for directions. It occurred to me that we sometimes think of the landscape the way small town locals think of their towns: In terms of what used to be there.

Central Minnesota? Yah, that’s where the paper birches used to be before their range started shifted north in response to Global Warming.

But clinging to what we remember – to the way things used to be – is not a very instructive or helpful way (and can, in fact, be a dangerously limiting way) to understand our natural world, and is especially not a very instructive way to think about the concept of “native” plants.

Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, tells us how his land changed cover type dozens if not hundreds of times over the years, as the forest moved south only to be pushed back north by the prairie.

Is the climate warming? Probably. Is it due, at least in part, to human activity? Quite possibly. But the fact is the climate is always in a state of change, which means by definition it is always either warming or cooling, and the landscape is constantly changing in response.

Add to that the fact that no landscape is static; landscapes follow an inexorable successional march from a ‘pioneer’ landscape to a mature or ‘climax’ landscape, only to experience a major disturbance or change (often fire, often human caused in an attempt to manage and influence the landscape) and start all over again.

So what is native? The answer seemed simple to me 25 years ago in forestry school (a lot of things seemed simple to be 25 years ago). Now I’m not so sure.

What is native? Hawaii has vegetation. (Think about it.)

What is native? My son enjoys looking through and sketching birds in the Sibley Guide which has a section on European “accidentals.” Birds sometimes cover unfathomable distances, disoriented or blown by storms. And when they do they no doubt plant some exotic and invasive seeds on that foreign ground before trying to figure out where they are, how they got there, and where they can get a proper cup of tea or a suitable croissant.

What is native? Despite repeated archaeological finds that tell us humans of thousands of years ago travelled and traded across vast distances, we seem to express surprise each time another such finding is published. Regardless of the merit of his scientific theories, the minute Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra II landed in Barbados it probably deposited totora seeds on the shore. How did totora get to Easter Island? Was it birds (as most scientists theorize) or South American travelers as Heyerdahl conjectured? Either way, at one point it was an invasive.

What is native? The place where I am now sitting was, not that long ago, covered in ice. Actually that was only two weeks ago. But what I meant was that it was covered by a massive glacier year round. Whereas now it's only nine months per year.

OK, I better get back to work. And a bottle of my second favorite tree crop (and John Adams’ favorite), hard cider, is also calling my name on this Friday afternoon.

Oh, and if you’re ever in Northfield, look me up. I’m not far from where the Ole Store used to be.

Acorns Good For Your Brain

2011-04-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

I knew it all along! Eating acorns makes you smarter. Literally. Or at least it could help stave off dimentia.

Interpretive Summary: In this paper, ARS scientist collaborated with scientists at the Rural Development Administration of South Korean government to investigate the effect of dietary supplementation with acorn (Quercus acutissima CARR.) on brain dementia using a mouse model. To assess the effect of acorn, the level of acetylcholine which is a very important neurotransmiter was measured in untreated and acorn treated groups. The results showed that dietary supplementation with acorn gave a slight increase in the acetylcholine level in mice fed acorn diet compared to untreated mice group. These results indicate that acorn (Q. acutissima CARR.) plays an effective role in an attenuating various age related changes such as brain dementia including learning and memory impairments (emphasis mine). This information will enhance our understanding of how diet such as acorn can improve learning and memory function and will facilitate the application of dietary use of acorn as a functional food to improve brain activity in human.

Brain activity in human? I wonder which human they are referring to.

Of course I have eaten more acorns than anyone I know and I still can't remember where I parked my car (usually with the lights on) at the mall, but in my defense I've been like that ever since I can remember. So to speak.

Walden Acorns

2011-04-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

In Walden Henry David Thoreau writes, "According to Evelyn, 'the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor (emphasis mine).'"

A) I guess we, as readers, are supposed to know the Evelyn is John Evelyn

B) I wonder how often I would have run amok of the praetors in my acorn gathering excursions!

A red oak is a red oak is a red oak...?

2011-04-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

I took advantage of the gorgeous weather in the middle part of the day (this being Minnesota and three hours later it is, of course, no longer gorgeous) to do some raking. One of the many ironies here at Oak Watch is that while our yard is very heavily treed, we don't have any oaks... other than my little nursery growing potted trees. (BTW, I was wildly and unexpectedly successful in my negotiations with my daughter to use part of "her" garden to grow my oaks this year. I get 1/4 of it. The shady part. Which is much more than I expected!)

Why was I raking in spring? It sure wasn't for the pleasure of inflaming my mold allergies (that was just an added bonus; we don't get into pollen season for 4-6 weeks yet, and I'll give you one guess as to which tree's pollen I'm most allergic to). It's because our street is home to several northern red oaks. Red oaks that finally get around to dropping their leaves a) the day after I rake in autumn, and b) the day before the first snow of the year. And judging by the sheer volume of oak leaves in my yard every spring when the snow melts, it would seem that every oak on the street is located directly upwind from us (upwind in this case being north, west, and south).

(Click to enlarge)

A taxonomist would probably tell you that all of the oaks on my street are northern red oak, Quercus rubra. I picked these three leaves out of the same leave pile. The middle one, I'm sure, is from a tree I have written about before that I'm convinced is a Q. rubra x Q. palustris (pin oak) hybrid.

No great overriding point here except a sunny day and a turn at the rake gave me another opportunity to muse about oak taxonomy, variation, and hybridization... and how, in my humble opinion (who am I kidding? my opinion has never, ever been humble) 2 out of every 3 oaks you see is a hybrid (and they hybridized with the 3rd oak you see).

The background, by the way, is a red oak floor I installed myself. I thought it appropos.

Arkansas oak update

2011-04-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

A forester in Arkansas has been doing me the favor of trying to track down the Arkansas oak (Q. arkansana) in Howard County, Ark. that held the title as National Champion until it was usurped in 1997 by a Covington County, MS tree of dubious identity (an Oak Watch correspondent on the scene believes the MS tree is simply a wider leafed water oak variant).

Turns out the Howard County tree is no longer with us. However, a different Arkansas oak, this one located in Saline County, Ark. is now under consideration as at least the new Ark. state champ, and perhaps national champ. Measurements are being finalized.

I couldn't resist searching on Saline County Arkansas + oak trees, and found this:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/40019238. To quote heavily:

"The Saline County group of the First Arkansas Infantry Volunteers in the War Between the States was organized at Benton, in April 1861. The company congegrated at the home of Johann Wilhelm Shoppach, on North Main Street, under a virgin oak tree, where they were presented with a Confederate flag, which had been made by the women of the Shoppach family. From there, 'midst the blessings of their friends and the weeping of their families, they marched on to Little Rock so rapidly that they had the distinction of being the first company of volunteers to reach the designated rendezvous.

"The Company was named Company E, First Arkansas Infantry Volunteers, and in the organization, James F. Fagan was elected Captain and commanding officer. When the company became part of a regiment, Fagan was commissioned a Colonel; and it was under his command that the group journeyed to Virginia, reaching there in time to engage in the first serious conflict of the war - the First Battle of Bull Run, fought July 21, 1861.

"After this Confederate victory, the Arkansas Company was sent to a spot about ten miles west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, where they were encamped on Acquia Creek, a tributary of the Rappahannock River, to keep the Yankee gun boats from ascending the streams and to prevent Federal Burnside and his men from crossing westward."

I'm having trouble seeing through the subtle, unbiased prose to ascertain the sympathies of the writer.

It is clear, however, that Saline County gave mightily to the war effort, and that the war took a huge toll on the area and its best and brightest young men; 36 died at Shiloh alone.

Makes me wish that the Arkansas oak growing in rememerance of their sacrifice truly does become the rightful national champ. Even if I still don't believe Q. arkansana is truly a species.

And in case you thought I missed it: Virgin oak tree? Does that its acorns immaculate??

It's a bit embarrassing...

2011-04-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

... when your entire professional career is devoted to marketing tree tubes for protecting seedling trees, only to realize that after removing the tree tubes in order to photograph 3 English oaks last fall, I forgot to replace them before winter set in... and found out yesterday that over the winter rabbits had chewed two of them off completely and nipped the terminal bud of the third.

Good grief. Thank goodness my customers are a lot smarter than I am.

They should resprout from a lower bud or a "dormant bud" in the bark, or from the roots.

I am in high level negotiations (with my daughter) to use half of "her" garden space for a mini oak nursery this spring. Of course I own the garden. And of course I have no chance of winning those negotiations.

Friday Afternoon Fun

2011-04-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

Northfield MN is the home of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. The primary vehicles are Suburu Outbacks and Volvos, and their bumper stickers provide a complete history of democratic presidential tickets dating to the late 70's. I have often wondered if these bumper stickers are factory installed to save time.

I was just out running a few errands and was surprised to see the car in front of me at a stop sign had a bumper sticker promoting GlobalClimateScam.com.

The car was a Prius.

It just struck me funny... but then again I'm a little punchy after a busy week!

Daimyo oak

2011-04-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I do a Google search on some anthropomorphic feeling/action + oaks just to see what I come up with. I've done happy oaks, sad oaks, funny oaks etc. What I find is often the inspiration for a post. Some of which actually get written and posted.

Today it was dancing + oaks. It led directly to, surprisingly enough, Dancing Oaks Nursery in Oregon. What a great name! They specialize in unique plants from around the world. What does this mean in terms of oak offerings?

Emperor oak, Q. dentata (aka Daimyo oak) - A medium sized oak with massive leaves that turn russet/orange in fall and are persistent in winter. Asian. Awesome. I'd kill for some acorns (hint, hint).

And a cutleaf version of Emperor oak. I must grow one someday. Yes I'm in zone 4. I take that as a challenge.

Darlington oak?

2011-04-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

In a (fairly) recent post I talked about how a tree in Covington Cty, MS had usurped a tree in Howard Cty, AR as the biggest Arkansas oak (Q. arkansana). I found this somewhat noteworthy/amusing because a) the range of Arkansas oak consists of a few widely scattered dots across the South, and most range maps I have seen don't show any of those dots occurring in Mississippi, and b) I have grave doubts as to whether Arkansas oak is truly a species - even to the very limited extent any oak species can be considered a true species.

As they say in the journalism trade, this story is still developing. A forester in Howard Cty, AR has very kindly agreed to seek out the tree that held the title of champion until 1997, take photos and collect leave/twig/acorn samples for me. Another forester friend in MS who believes the Covington Cty tree might be misidentified is looking into this further, and will help compare the samples.

It will be interesting to see how two trees from hundreds of miles apart, both classified by people who - by virtue of the fact that the population is sparse, spotty and by all indications in decline - have seen very few Arkansas oaks, compare.

But none of that is what this post is about.

I was looking at the registry of Champion Trees of Mississippi to try to learn more about the who & how of the Covington Cty Arkansas oak nomination when two things caught my eye:

1) The MS state registry includes 24 species of oak. 24! Here in Minnesota we have 7 species, and that includes those chinkapins no one has seen in more than a century. Let's call it 6.

2) The MS state registry has a listing for Darlington oak, Q. hemisphaerica. Darlington oak? I don't pretend to be an expert on southern oaks, but I had never even heard of Darlington oak. It's not listed in Oaks of North America, the highly flawed but mostly complete reference I generally turn to.

So I went here to learn more. I will lift the taxonomy section in whole:

TAXONOMY :

The scientific names of Darlington oak and laurel oak are Quercus hemisphaerica Bartram ex Willd. and Quercus laurifolia Michx. [4,8,40,43,49,50]

The historical nomenclature of these oaks is complicated. In the past, most authorities, including Little [24], treated them as a single species but differed on the appropriate scientific name [43]. More recent authorities [4,8,40,43,49,50] recognize two species, Q. hemisphaerica and Q. laurifolia, based on anatomical differences and vast differences in site preferences. Laurel oak (Q. laurifolia) grows in wetlands. Darlington oak (Q. hemisphaerica) grows in uplands; it has acute leaf tips and flowers 2 weeks later than laurel oak in the same area [8,12,27]. In many cases, the literature treats Darlington and laurel oaks as one species. Information from authors that recognize and discuss Darlington oak and laurel oak as a separate species is included and noted as such.

Darlington and laurel oak are placed within the subgenus Erythrobalanus, or black (red) oak group. Laurel oak is difficult to identify and is often confused with willow oak (Q. phellos) and water oak (Q. nigra) [40]. It
has been suggested that laurel oak is a hybrid between these two species, but that may not be the case because willow oak is absent from southeastern Georgia and peninsular Florida where laurel oak is abundant
[27].

Laurel oak hybridizes with the following species [24,27]:
x Q. falcata (southern red oak): Q. X. beaumontiana Sarg.
x Q. incana (bluejack oak): Q. X. atlantica Ashe
x Q. laevis (turkey oak): Q. X. mellichampii Trel.
x Q. marilandica (blackjack oak): Q. X. diversiloba Tharp ex A. Camus

Glad we could straighten that out! So Darlington oak is a kinda sorta maybe/maybe not species depending on who you talk to and even then bears several Latin binomials.

I am beginning to see why - and feel a lot less jealous about - the Southern states having so many more oaks than we do in Minnesota: They don't. They have a few species and just call them each about a dozen different things. I think it's a plot by Southern foresters to make northern foresters feel stupid (it's working).

When my head was starting to ache I called an oak expert in Mississippi for clarification, which he did in the same way that the Mississippi River becomes clearer as it flows from me to him... which is to say like mud. But that's good. The muddiness of oak taxonony is something we both understand, so for me what he had to say made perfect sense.

When I mentioned Darlington oak his response was, "Oh yeah, that's another one of those water oaks." Another one of those water oaks (Q. nigra)? How many are there? Depends on who you talk to. Water oak, laurel oak, swamp laurel oak, Darlington oak and probably Arkansas oak all fit that category with many overlapping traits - many of which are probably more a reflection of site characteristics than the inherent genetics of the trees themselves.

He then said, as usual, something completely brilliant: Throughout the South there are localized clusters of oaks of a particular species that exhibit a set of variant traits (longer acorns, later/early leaf out or leaf drop, wider or narrow spatulate leaves, etc.). Taxonomists are keen to either label this localized variant as a distinct variety of a particular species, or even as a separate species in and of itself. When another taxonomist finds a localized cluster of trees 200 miles away that exhibit the exact same slight variations, they name it something else yet again. So instead of one species with a wide set of local variations we now have, depending on who you talk to, 3 distinct species, 2 distinct species and 1 variety, 1 distict species and 2 varieties, of any number of hybrids. Then the taxonomists spend their carrers arguing about it.

That is work I would seriously enjoy.

Here's the truly interesting thing (to me at least): The MS state champion Darlington oak was nominated by Mr. B. E. Brown - the same guy who nominated the Arkansas oak in Covington County. Could it be that Mr. Brown is seeing local variants of water oak and classifying them as a more narrowly defined "species?"

Stay tuned.

We now resume our regularly scheduled nonsense

2011-03-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

Hey lookee here, I have a blog! Sorry for the extended hiatus. Here's a tip kids, you might want to write this down: When you promise the world (or the dozen or so people in the world who care what you write, which for me is the same thing) that you are going to do a series of posts detailing one of your deepest inner conflicts, be sure to do it during your absolute busiest time of year - when you're talking to so many customers that your cell phone makes that wet suction cup sound at the end of the day when you finally peel it off your ear.

But my list of half-baked thoughts and half-completed essays is growing too long to ignore, so I will have to make the time. Not to complete them, since that will never happen. Just to post them as they are, which is bad enough.

To step back, here is what I'm hoping to accomplish. I grew up in the Minneapolis western suburb of New Hope, which was outer ring when I was born, and decidedly inner ring by the time I "grew up" and moved away. I watched surburban development lay low the primarily oak forests I knew as a kid; the deforesting work the bulldozers started was finished - usually unwittingly - by construction damage and oak wilt.

At the height of this western suburban expansion I worked summers at a local nursery & garden center, and did some freelance landscaping as well. I saw first hand what was being planted to replace the native trees & shrubs that had been lost: Non-natives like 'Crimson King' Norway Maples, potentillas, spireas and a (small) handful of others. Planted and then surrounded by plastic landscape fabric covered in tons of crushed red limestone. (Which I bagged at the nursery, and which they - stupidly - allowed me to load in customer's pick up trucks with a Bobcat. Note to everyone who purchased bulk crush rock from that nursery in the mid 1980's: Sorry about your paint job.)

I am old enough to have sold buckthorn and purple loosestrife, two exotics that have become invasives on an epic scale.

People did plant one native: Green ash. Seedless green ash. A LOT of seedless green ash. With emerald ash borer here in MN, that won't be working out so well.

I enrolled in the Urban Forestry program at the University of Minnesota to accomplish two things: Learn how to protect existing oak trees from construction damage, and champion the replacement of vegetation lost to construction with native species.

I was a Native Plant person.

I am not any more. I support and believe in the attempts to restore native landscapes. But the scope of my thinking has grown to the point where a strictly native view of planting doesn't make sense to me any longer.

Our landscape, for those of you who haven't noticed, is not a "native" landscape any longer, and never again will be. My biggest concern is the jillions of acres planted in corn and the effects that has on our use of fossils fuels, the devastating effects that has on our soil, and the equally devastating effects that has on our health.

I want to see that corn replaced with woody tree crops, especially oaks. I want us to get back - yes, back, since it was our staple food for happy millenia upon happy millenia - to eating acorns. To make that vision viable given today's populaton, that means planting hybrid oaks. That means selectively bred non-native oaks.

The oaks of California supported an indigenous population of an estimated 300,000 people. There are a few more people there now, and a lot fewer oaks.

My view of what is native have changed. Native when? Native where? I have started thinking more in geologic time rather than "real time," (maybe that's because my age - and my 10k times - can now be tracked with geologic time) and taking a longer view of what is considered native, and how earlier humans interacted with the landscape in a way that "artificially" created what we have come to view as "native."

I have seen the Homo sapiens-centric tendency to view the landscape as "fixed" in time, and to view any changes in that landscape as "bad."

The enormous species elasticity in oaks has taught me that the "species" part of planting "native species" is equally open to debate as the "native" part, and is not in any way fixed like we were led to believe.

But I have also learned about and read about the devastating effects of moving plant material around the globe (after Plant Pathology lectures on chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease I wanted to shut myself in a dark room and weep, and never wanted to move another plant more than 100 yards from its "native" spot for fear of triggering the next epidemic).

So there's my dilemma - native or non-native - viewed through the prism of oaks.

Here's my plan: 2 posts per day, 1 on this topic and 1 on the usual oak related silliness.
I will fail miserably. Guilt (a birthright I'll never shed) will ensue. But I'll do my best.

Thanks for reading.

Shallow Thoughts on Deep Topics...

2011-03-11T15:33:00.000-08:00

... are, as regular readers know, the specialty of the house here at Oak Watch!

I am old enough to have worried about the ice age. No, not the woolly mammoth sabertooth tiger ice age, Mr. Smarty Pants. I mean the next ice age.

As a kid in the 1970's I saw a program on TV with scientists expressing concern about how decreasing temperatures indicated that we might be heading for the next ice age. I must have expressed some concern of my own, because I remember my older brother telling me not to worry, since the ice age would be thousands of years away and I'd long since be dead by then. I think this was meant to reassure me. It didn't. Instead I now had two things to worry about: freezing to death and pondering, for the first time, my own mortality.

Climatologists have it easy. Since we are always either warming up after one ice age or cooling down on the way to the next one they have a 50% chance of being right. And, of course, as my brother so kindly pointed out, we'll all be dead by the time anyone knows for sure.

Better yet, call it Climate Change and be right 100% of the time. What a racket!

My point, and I do have one other than to simply poke fun at people who are ten times smarter than me, is to begin to set a context for a series of upcoming posts about an issue about which I have deeply held and contradictory beliefs: native plants, and specifically native oaks.

This series on climate change and native plants is really a race against time: Can I commit all my chicken scratch ideas into coherent (well, semi-coherent) posts before I am no longer able to read my writing and remember what I was thinking at the time? Or will global solutions get sacrificed on the alter of bad penmanship? Stay tuned!

To remind myself, I do intend to cover, among other things, the great oak migrations, Thor Heyerdahl, paper birch, the problem with global warming and corn versus oak.

It's a topic that pits the entire reason I got into forestry in the first place - to preserve and restore the native forests I grew up in but which were lost in a wave of suburban development - with what I hope to accomplish with the rest of my career - to restore the oak as a staple food source for humankind, rather than soil-killers like corn and soybeans.

The fun starts Monday. So do my posts.

How to build a balcony

2011-03-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

Templeton, CA. Now this is really cool. (Click to enlarge)

Oak in the morning fog

2011-03-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

Paso Robles, CA. I need to get an "I brake for oaks" bumper sticker. I love the morning fog that rolls over this area every morning. And so, I am guessing, do the oak trees.

James Dean Not Killed By Oak Tree

2011-03-08T22:19:00.000-08:00

Back in college or shortly thereafter, I decided to hold my own personal James Dean film festival. I watched all of his movies in one day. The most enduring image of that day is the scene in East of Eden when he's flat on his stomache in a field watching bean plants grow. I remember hearing someone - the director? - once say that Dean came up with that scene idea on his own. The excitement and expectancy with with Dean watches the tiny plants reminds me of me watching oaks grow in my tree tubes, with two differences: My oaks grow faster, and I look exactly like James Dean... after some horribly disfiguring industrial accident.

Please excuse the unintentially tasteless segue, but today I drove past the Jack Ranch Cafe on CA route 46/41... better known as the James Dean Memorial. My work often takes me to this part of the world - between Bakersfield and Paso Robles - and I have driven by the site numerous times but never stopped. There is a big stainless steel memorial encircling a trees. For years I have naively assumed that a) the tree was an oak, and b) Dean must have wrapped is Posche Spyder around it. (By the way, I'm not a "car guy" but I have to admit I'd give a week's pay to take that Porsche for a spin sometime!) Wrong on both counts. Dean and his passenger collided head on with a Cal Poly student. At that time the junction of 46 and 41 was located at that site (today it is a mile or two to further east); the young driver was heading east and took the fork to head NW toward Fresno on 41. He never saw Dean coming from the west. Dean assumed the other driver did see him, and didn't take evasive action until too late. The young man survived, as did Dean's passenger in friend (not-so-ironically dying in a car wreck in Germany after several failed suicide attempts). Dean died perhaps 10 minutes after the crash.

Since the hillsides are covered with gorgeous oaks the nourished the Chumash and other indigenous people for eons, I never looked closely enough at the memorial site tree: It is an Ailanthus altissima, Tree of Heaven, not an oak.

Fittingly the crash site is, quite literally, East of Eden - for the Indians must have viewed the oaks of Paso Robles (crossing full of oak trees) as Eden in the same way that J. Russell Smith thought of Eden, a place of natural bounty, where nature provides nourishment without labor and toil. I have linked to this Smith article about a bajillion times, but if you have never read it, please do.

Truffles, Oaks and Wealth

2011-03-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/us/04truffles.html

Hey, if the fool's gold of truffle riches gets people planting more oak trees, I'm all for it.

I am sure that this is the first time that a venerable culinary tradition from Europe or Asia has come to America only to become a get rich quick scheme followed by a lawsuit among the early adapters with unrealistic dreams of riches.

Wait, you mean it's not the first time this has happened? Ah. OK, I'll tell you how this story ends: Dreams of $800/lb profits will quickly be tempered by the reality of supply and demand; as more truffles are produced the price will come down. A few folks will make a modest living growing them, and the quick money schemers will fall by the wayside... a process that will happen right about the time the lawsuit is settled. See also: Mushrooms, shitake.

Mr. Garland has the right idea: Be the guy who sells the trees. It worked for John Chapman. Of course that's assuming that the people who order the trees actually then take delivery of them.

Thankfully I'm not really seeing this trend among acorn fed pork producers.
http://www.newheritagefarms.com/home
http://www.laquercia.us/home/
http://www.beckerlaneorganic.com/
http://woolypigs.com/_others.html

In my dealings with acorn fed pork producers I am not finding folks interested in quick riches, just in producing real. Good. Food.

Birds and Bees of Oaks

2011-03-02T11:27:00.000-08:00

As the father of a 17 month old – nearly nine years after we last had a 17 month old! – we have found ourselves in settings with other parents of babies for the first time in a long time. I had forgotten how annoying that can be.

There are many types of parents. There is a type of parent I like to call the “question as oblique boast” parent. You know the type. A group of parents will be discussing the development of their kids and someone will say, “Well, I’m really worried about little Algernon. We used to do these Junior Einstein Pre-Calc Flashcards every day before yoga and violin and he mastered them very quickly. But now he’s really struggling with the differential equations I tape up around the house. Is that normal for an 18 month old?”

Gag me.

Kids develop at their own pace. Our little one is in no rush to speak, but already exhibits what I can only describe as a wry sense of humor. And a left-handed two seam fastball that I refer to as “my retirement plan.”

I have been working on a spreadsheet matching up all of the different oak hybrids covered in Oaks of North America – and I will eventually be adding more. I’m looking for anomalies – white oaks that cross with red oaks, an oak with acorns that mature in one year crossing with a two year acorn oak, etc. Hey, it keeps me off the streets.

The first step in that process is simply wading through the nomenclature… What’s the currently accepted designator for the white oak sub-genus, Leucobalanus or Lepidobalanus? Is the red oak sub-genus still Erythrobalanus or is Lobatae now the accepted term? Where do live oaks – many of which exhibit characteristics of both whites and reds – fit? Are they still lumped with reds? On what basis? And that’s before we get into the changes and disagreements in Latin binomials for several species. So that’s been fun.

Then you get into the issue of what does “acorns mature in one year” or “acorns mature in two years” really mean? I’m learning it’s not as straightforward as you’d suspect, kind of like how so many things depend on what your definition of “is” is. In oak reproduction – as with all reproduction – timing is everything. And the biological mandate to reproduce – or else – causes some kooky behavior that blurs traditional boundaries.

Where am I going with all of this? As usual – and in similar fashion to my driving - two directions, neither of them particularly well defined or thought out. First, I’m testing my contention that oaks are essentially one species with a great deal of intraspecies diversity, as opposed to hundreds of species that routinely hybridize. And that they will always find a way to reproduce, taxonomic distinctions be damned.

Second, I think – no, I know – that within this diversity and reproductive elasticity lays the ability for oaks to sustain and nourish us, while safeguarding our most precious asset, our soil. The distance from the hybrid oak in a Mississippi bottomland to a food source for the world is a whole lot shorter than the distance from a couple of scraggly (and botanically unrelated, as defined by taxonomists) grasses to the soil-killing and people-fattening maize plant they became.

So yes, many subsequent posts will be about the birds and the bees – in some cases literally – of oak reproduction. Sort of like health class for oaks. But unlike my daughter’s middle school health teacher, I don’t require a permission slip from home for you to attend. And also unlike her health class, I hope no one passes out or throws up.

Arkansas, Mississippi Vie for Bragging Rights to Largest Speciman of Fraudulent Species

2011-02-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

I've written about Arkansas oak (Q. arkansana) before, a "species" with a suspiciously spotty range that looks like someone dripped a few ink blots from a leaky fountain pen across the southeast, skipping entire states in the process.

Of this spotty and dispersed range Oaks of North America says, "Arkansas oak is believed to be a relic of an ancient population which at some time in the past occurred over a much wider range than at present." That, of course, is the charitable view of the situation. The uncharitable view (e.g. mine) is that Arkansas oak is more likely a variety of another species, and that there is likely more variation between those widely dispersed pockets of Arkansas oak than there is between those pockets and the local populations of the species of which it is a variety.

My copy of Oaks of North America is copyrighted 1985. At that time the National Champion Arkansas oak listed in the National Registry of Big Trees was located in Howard County, Arkansas:
138 inches circumference (approximately - I'm converting from metric and rounding)
62 feet tall
65 feet avg crown spread
NRBT score = Circumference (in) + Height (ft) + (Avg crown spread (ft) / 4)
= Score of 216.5

The other day good friend in Mississippi sent these photos:

(Click to enlarge)

Covington County, MS now claims the national champion Arkasas oak, nominated in 1997. This is indeed the tree currently listed on the National Registry of Big Trees. The scare as of 1997 was 253, and is now listed as 276.

There are a few interesting aspects to this. The first is that while some range maps show Arkansas oak occurring in Mississippi, many others do not. Of course if Arkansas oak is truly a species in its own right, and if it once had a much wider distribution, and if it now is in decline leaving only remnant pockets across its former range... then it seems completely plausible that some of these shrinking pockets would be in Mississippi. In fact it seems somewhat implausible that there wouldn't be a few pockets there.

And, of course, this particular tree could have been planted there. But that assumes either that someone quite a long time ago knowingly gathered acorns from one of those teeny-tiny populations of Arkansas oak and ultimately planted the sapling in Covington Cty MS, or that it happened simply by accident with the person assuming the acorns were of another species. But if they thought they were planting a more common species, what are the odds that the seeds came from one of those tiny pockets of Arkansas oaks in another state?

To further pile assumptions upon assumptions to form a teetering tower of speculation, all of the above assumes that a) Arkansas oak is indeed a distinct species, and b) that this particular tree is indeed an Arkansas oak.

The friend who sent the photos, and who knows about a jillion times more about oaks than I do, wrote: "(This tree) Looks just like a water oak but the spoon, paddle, or spatulate shaped leaves are "spoonier". Ie the bottom of the leaves are more flared. Not in a million years would I have said " golly gee look at that Arkansas oak" if it didn't have a labeled sign in front of it. Looks like a water oak with SLIGHT variation to me."

The last thing I want to do is start a border battle among SEC conference states about trees. It's not even something to joke about given the recent (alleged) poisoning of the oaks at Toomer's Corner in Auburn by a (indisputably) crazed (alleged) Alabama fan.

To me it just illustrates again the elastic and subjective nature of oak taxonomy.

I'm trying to contact some foresters in Howard County, Arkansas to learn if the tree that held the crown of largest Arkansas oak up until 1997 is still alive, and get its current measurements. Then what I really want to do is to get twig, leaf and acorn samples from both trees, and from some surrounding water oaks in both locations. I have a feeling that these two trees will have a lot more in common with their local Q. nigra brethren than they have with each other!

Cannibalistic Quercus Runs Amok In Mississippi Woods: Film at Five

2011-02-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

It's hard to say which is cooler - the photographs or the explanation that came with them. Let's start with the photos (taken by and shown with the permission of and in gratitude to Mr. Jeremy Blake):

(Click to enlarge... please!)

What you're looking at here is one oak - one very large oak - which grew to completely engulf another, smaller oak. Here's the kicker: The smaller, engulfed oak is still alive!

That photo gives a great sense of scale and a clearer sense of what happened. This photo would flat out make Ansel Adams jealous:

(Click to enlarge, print and frame)

But as great as these photos are, even better to an oak geek like me is the explanation that came with them. The easy way to explain this scene would be to say that a cherrybark oak (Q. pagoda or Q. falcata var. pagodifolia depending on who you trust - and since I don't trust any oak taxonomists I don't call it either) swallowed a white oak (Q. alba).

But that's not how Quercophiles like us would describe it! Writes Dr. Brad R. Lieb of the photo (and I hope he'll forgive my paraphrasing in places):

"I think (it's a cherrybark); if not just a southern red; the leaves appeared to be kind of small, but it is such a big overgrown, overmature old tree and not a vigorous big leafed youngun so that might be it. I think it's pagodafolia, yes. And "george" being hugged to death, appears to be an alba/michauxii/chinkapin cluster (emphasis mine), hard to tell with all the leaves off. I've just never seen "engulfment" or whatever it's called, to that degree."

I was going to say that Brad "gets it" - with "it" being the elastic continuum nature of oak classification - but I am sure that would be doing him a great disservice. I am sure that he "got it" long before I ever did. The more I correspond with oak enthusiasts the more I realize that I'm pretty late to that particular party. (The key, now that we have all found each other, is to truly turn it into a party!)

I love how he doesn't just blithely classify the big red "engulfer" as either southern red oak or cherrybark oak (to the extent that there is truly a well defined difference between the two); instead he takes into account the age and condition of the tree, and is content with a certain amount of ambiguity.

I love even more his description of the "engulfee" not simply as white oak, but as falling within the white/swamp chestnut/chinkapin cluster - with a mix of Latin and common names that actually clarifies his meaning and belies a deep understanding of what he's trying to communicate. I love the idea of thinking of oaks as falling within a cluster along a continuum.

But even more than the photo, even more than the deeply insightful description, I've been amusing myself thinking of the best oak geek yellow journalism headlines I would write to describe the carnage!

RED ON WHITE VIOLENCE ON THE RISE

WHEN ERYTHROBALANS GO BAD

IT'S AN OAK EAT OAK WORLD

LEUCOPHOBIC INFANTICIDE - WILL YOUR SAPLING BE NEXT?

To answer the obvious question, the answer is yes. Yes, I do have a D for dork stamped on my forehead. Then again, if you're reading this, you probably do to!

So what headline would you write?

A good walk unspoiled

2011-02-18T06:45:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain famously referred to golf as, "A good walk spoiled." I couldn't agree more. I tend to think of a golf course as, "A good forest spoiled." I haven't played golf in nearly 20 years, a fact for which golf courses everywhere are thankful, but which golf ball manufacturers lament.

To me, nothing is more boring than someone else's old golf stories. So I won't tell you someone else's old golf stores. I will tell you a couple of my old golf stories.

My younger brother is a much better player than I was, which isn't surprising seeing as how he's much more talented than me in almost every respect. We often played at a little par 3 muni course in the Mpls suburb of New Hope where we grew up. The 7th or 8th is a short hole, just a pitching wedge over a pond and a sand trap to a slightly elevated green. My brother hit a beautifully lofted shot that landed on the green and just rolled off the back edge. I completely sculled my shot - instead of a high, arcing shot I sent a screaming line drive heading right for the middle of the pond. The ball skipped on the surface of the water, still traveling at the speed of sound and heading for the sand trap, where instead of getting buried it hit the far lip of the trap and popped high up into the air. Still going way too fast it was going to go sailing over the green - until it hit the flag stick and came to a stop 3 feet from the hole. We both followed the shot with stunned disbelief, then we looked at each other. I nonchalantly said, "I'll be putting after you take your chip shot." At which point he - quite correctly - tried to wrap his pitching wedge around my neck.

Another time we coaxed my dad into playing with us while on vacation up north. As usual I had sliced my tee shot into the woods. Instead of wisely chipping the ball back onto the fairway I decided to try to thread a 3 iron through a tiny gap between two trees. I know what you're thinking: if I was the kind of golfer who could make that shot, I wouldn't be in the woods in the first place. Oh ye of little faith! I absolutely crushed that 3 iron, best one I ever hit. It rocketed off my club face and headed right for that tiny gap... until it hooked slightly (I still contend it was pushed by a sudden gust of wind which I had not taken into account when doing my precise calculations). It drilled the tree on the left - an oak of course - with a perfect 'Glock!' sound and went screaming out over the fairway, like a heat seaking missile, headed straight for my dad. Headed straight for my dad's head, to be exact. I have never seen the old man move so fast as when dove to the ground to avoid ritual decapitation.

Having had a great deal of experience in this area of study (I could never hit a fairway but of course I could hit a 3" caliper tree at 200 yards without even trying), I can state unequivocally that golf balls richochet off of oak trees much farther than they do with any other tree species.

The best thing about not being a golfer is that walks can just be walks. Yesterday I took a long walk over my lunch hour. It was a foggy, melty day here in Northfield. A week of thawing has diminished our snow drifts to a mere 5 feet in height, but have been good for the soul; yes, we'll get more snow and brutal weather, but a thaw like this breaks winter's death grip on the mind, and reminds us that no matter what else winter throws at us this year, it will end. Eventually. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training, and tree planting season is coming soon.

I'm lucky to live in a place where - despite the absence (or, sadly, maybe because of the absence) of a city forester - many oaks were planted as boulevard trees to replace the elms lost in the late 1970s. The presence of oaks in such variety gives my mind just enough to chew on and ponder while I wander... How come some of the swamp whites have persistent leaves, and others don't? And what does Oaks of North America have to say on the subject? (Answer: Nothing - doesn't mention persistence under swamp white oak.)... Do I still think that favorite tree down the block is a Q. rubra x palustris hybrid? (Yes, I do.)... What would the massive northern red oak on St. Olaf Ave have looked like in its prime, before losing a big chunk of its crown to lightening? What is its diameter - 46 inches at least? (Note to self for the 50th time - bring a dbh tape on your next walk.)

Pondering oaks is a whole lot more relaxing and enjoyable than pelting them with golf balls, and a much better way to spend a walk. Which reminds me of the time I hit an errant 7 iron into the swimming pool & patio area of a nursering home...

Yes, I can write about something other than oaks...

2011-02-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

... as long as it's still about a member of the Fagacaea family, my admiration for those who grow them, and my hope to help in any way I can.

Welcome Little One

2011-02-17T11:55:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the world DGP5. I hope the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.

May you grow as strong, tall and fast as the oaks your papa grows,
and may you live in a world that values them as much as he does.

Other than that, may you inherit your mother's looks and brains!

To Kill An Oak Tree

2011-02-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

The historic trees of Auburn University's Toomer's Corner have been murdered, probably by a pathetic, misguided football fan. Read it and weep for the stupidity in our culture.

Then read this to know that sanity still prevails in many quarters, among the quiet majority. Even among 'Bama fans.

When (Balano)Cultures Collide

2011-02-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

Great story, wrong tree.

I have been meaning to write this post for months. The person who introduced me to the story and who knew I planned to write about it was probably starting to wonder if I'd ever get around to it. (Now that I finally have he can skip straight from anticipation to disappointment with the result.)

For background material I am working primarily from a Wiki page, which is always a bit iffy, but is even more so in the case because the entry on this topic is written with the tortured syntax and creative comma use of a 6th grade book report (actually that's an insult to 6th grade book reporters everywhere, including in my house)... so my apologies for any inaccuracies. But here goes...

In about 1798-1800 a boy named Sem-Yeto was born into the Suisunes tribe, near Suisun Bay, California. He would grow into a giant of a man - 6'7" tall by all accounts - and would live through times of tectonic changes for his people - and appalling tragedy.
In 1810, two months after most of the adult males of his tribe were wiped out in a raid by Moraga, ten or twelve year old Sem-Yeto was baptized at the San Francisco Mission and was re-christened Francisco Solano. We don't know if he was taken as a prisoner in the raid, or if the survivors of the raid brought him to the mission to live. The raid had demoralized the tribe and many chose to move to the mission in surrender. However, the surviving members of the tribe didn't move to the mission permanently until a year after Solano's baptism, giving credence to the theory that he had indeed been taken captive in the raid.

In 1823 he moved to present day Sonoma to help build the Mission San Francisco de Solano, the final Spanish mission north of San Francisco. Many of his fellow Suisunes joined him, a move which brought them closer to their homeland. By this time Sem-Yeto was known as Chief Solano. He was not a chief in the true hereditary sense, but he became a leader of his decimated people.

In 1835 General Mariano Guadulupe Vallejo was dispatched to secularize the Sonoma Mission, disperse the mission's properties (mostly to himself), and maintain military control over the area. Solano became Vallejo's ally in the effort to pacify the tribes of the area; in some cases he led raids in cooperation with the Spanish, but more often his role was that of an emissary between the Spanish and the native people in hopes of maintaining peace.
Born into a time of war and turbulence, having lost dozens of loved ones to a seemingly unbeatable foe, possibly having been taken hostage, and attaining a position of responsibility for the welfare of his people, I can only imagine the crushing weight Sem-Yeto had to carry, and the difficult decisions and trade offs he was forced to make in their interest.

Sem-Yeto faced the tragic no-win decisions faced by so many Native American leaders before and since. The arrival of these strangers from overseas brought diseases which ravaged indigenous populations, shook their traditional beliefs and shifted the fragile balances of power betweening neighboring tribes. Their arrival also brought new technologies that offered the promise of an easier life, but the curse of the loss of cultural identity and ancient tradition that formed the basis of their self image.

One aspect of the Suisunes' cultural identity, of course, was his people's reliance on acorns for nourishment. Converting indigenous people from an acorn-based diet - a balanoculture - to reliance on farmed grain crops was a means of pacifying them. People who are forced to live in one place and constantly tend their fields are a whole lot easier to keep an eye on and control than people who roam freely over the land to exploit the seasonal bounty of different habitats.

And so it still is today.

And of course, the arrival of the Spanish brought a new religion, impressive in its pagentry and ritual splendor and no doubt enormously appealing with its promise of eternal life.

A small pox outbreak in 1837 decimated the Indian population north of San Francisco. Solano, one of the few Native Americans to be vaccinated, survived the epidemic. He was one of only two Native Americans to be given a land grant by Vallejo - four square leagues. One source says that as he neared death he sold the land to Vallejo for $1,000. In the end the land ended up in the possession of Archibald A. Ritchie and J.H. Fine - forever out of indigenous hands.

Last fall I was visiting a reader, friend, and producer of gourmet acorn-fed pork in Solano County and he told me a bit of the story and mentioned that Sem-Yeto had been buried beneath a massive oak tree on the campus of Solano Community College. I followed his directions and saw this magnificent tree, a valley oak (I think - I'm still learning my California oaks):

(click to enlarge)

Incredible. Beneath the tree is a plaque:

Here's a closer look:

(Click to enlarge & read)

Oops. A little more research when I got back home revealed to me that this is not Sem-Yeto's burial site at all, but that of one of his brethren. There is a different marker somewhere else on campus:

(Click to enlarge)

This history, however, claims the exact location of Sem-Yeto's grave remains unknown. I will have to visit again the next time I'm in that area... and like Paul Harvey I'll give you The Rest of the Story.

Holy Toledo!

2011-02-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

I just noticed that Oak Watch has two new followers... Woohoo! Thank you to one and all. You don't know how much I appreciate you.

Tharp oak update

2011-02-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

I found this site which verifies that Tharp oak (a hybrid of Emory oak of the white oak group and chisos/graceful/slender oak of the red oak group) do indeed hybridize naturally where there ranges overlap.

Visalia Oaks

2011-02-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

(click to enlarge)

I spent the last three days at the largest ag expo in the world. I met an unbelievable array of people, from the guy who, with no sense of irony, encouraged - well, berated with the spittle-laced sincerity of the slightly mad - me to uphold and "reclaim" the Constitution* by joining an Egypt-style popular uprising to overthrow President Obama (To which I answered, "Or, another thought is you could wait two years until our next free and fair election and cast your vote - as per the Constitution." Apparently this heretical thought classified me as a traitor. Oh well.), to a cool dude who studied botany at Cambridge under a guy who coined the term "hybrid swarm," and endulged my lengthy monologue on how perfectly the term can be applied to oaks.

I'll leave it to you to decide which zealot has the firmer grip on his sanity.

I drove past this field on my way back to the hotel. I am always heartened when I travel in California and see oaks that were spared in the conversion to ag crops. I'm looking east, to the Sierra in the distance through the smog.

* At one point in my "conversation" with the gentleman who wanted me to storm the White House (at least figuratively speaking, via chain emails and letters) he asked me if I have read the Constitution and, without waiting for my reply, he turned his back to me. I thought perhaps he was going to walk away in mid sentence. Then I realized that the Constitution was printed on the back of his t-shirt. He expected me to stand there reading his back. He stood there so long he clearly thought I was still there reading his back with rapt attention. That was three hours ago.

I hope he's not still standing there.

The Little Oak That Shouldn't

2011-02-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

We are told that North American oaks can be divided into two sections: Red/black, whose acorns mature in 2 years, and white oak, whose acorns mature in 1 year. And we are told that never the twain shall meet.

We are also told, in Oaks of North America, that live oaks - evergreen oaks - can have characteristics from both groups, but are grouped with in red/black section.

Nice, clean and tidy, right? How, then, do we explain Q. x tharpii (Tharp's oak)?

Before I go any farther, I should explain my latest project. Here's how a real oak geek spends his time: I have been going through Oaks of North America and recording every hybrid oak given and which section the two parent trees come from. Geez, it sounds even more pathetic when I write it than it seemed when I was actually doing it.

Tharp's oak is Quercus emoryi X Quercus graciliformis - Emory oak crossed with an oak variously known as chisos oak, slender oak or graceful oak - meaning that Q. graciliformis has one common name for every individual in its 2 square block range.

Emory oak: Deciduous. White oak. Acorns mature in one year.

Chisos/slender/graceful oak: Partly evergreen (I guess that makes it "mostly deciduous"). Does that make it partly live oak? Acorns mature in two years.

I have always said that there is one oak species with hundreds of varieties (making me the ulimate "lumper"), but lately I have been willing to concede that perhaps the sections of oak might form 4 species whose boundaries are not crossed in the wild.

I am back to the whole one species thing.

Largest Oak In California

2011-02-09T05:22:00.000-08:00

... Meantime I need to figure out where this is: http://wikimapia.org/5786745/largest-oak-tree-in-California

We Now Return To Our Regularly Schedule Blog...

2011-02-09T05:20:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the hiatus of the last couple of weeks. One irony of what I do is that the time of year when I have the most to say is also my craziest, busiest time of year for work. Blog post ideas have been building up in my wee little brain to the point of overflowing (of course my brain is more like a shot glass than a tankard) so I either need to commit them to pixels or would forget them to make room for others.

So stay tuned. The usual disjointed, half-considered, contradictory and hypicritical oak-related tripe you've grown to love will start to flow once again by tonight.

Thanks for your patronage!

Nutrition Facts?

2011-01-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm still planning on preparing those Korean acorn noodles I received in the mail (and no, contrary to the vicious rumors flying around, I'm not still trying to figure out how to first boil the water).

Partly I'm trying to summon the courage to eat from a package with a slight tear and that expired Feb 23, 2009. But don't worry, I never let expiration dates come between me and packaged food before, I'm not about to start now. Plus, acorns are eternal.

In the meantime I took a look at the nutrition facts on the package. Per serving - and they list a serving a whopping 7 ounces:
2g Total Fat (0g Sat or Trans)
Carbohydrate 103g
Protein 15g

All of this compares very closely to Creamette pasta as listed on their web site. Then I came to:

Sodium 560mg... huh?

Then I realized the nutrition information includes the flavor packet that comes with it for making acorn noodle soup. The main ingredients in the flavor packet are: Salt, MSG, Garlic and Salt.

Which makes it right up my alley, nutrition-wise; I'm the guy who refers to a 16oz pretzel bag as the "handy single serving size." But it will be a tough sell for the rest of my much more nutritionally-aware family. (On that note, I am, without question, the only person in the history of planet Earth to ever shout at the dinner table: "No one gets any more tofu until you finish all of your french fries!")

Based on the acorn starch and acorn noodle packages I have, the Koreans either have acorns with much lower nutritional content than those we have in North America (And I, for one, consider fat to be an essential nutrient. So does my - and every other mammal's - body.), or they are particularly adept at taking one of the most complete and nutritious food sources in the world and bringing it down to the level of a mere cereal grain. I need to look into this more.

In the meantime I love the final instruction on the acorn noodle soup package: "Combine noodles with the soup and garnish with boiled beef..." Now that's my kind of garnish - beats the heck out of parsley!

Manna From Heaven

2011-01-24T08:28:00.000-08:00

Of course the phrase manna from heaven has an oak-rooted origin, but actually that's another story for another day.

For purposes of this post the phrase manna from heaven is the answer to the question, "What do you call it when one of your heroes sends you Korean acorn noodles in the mail?" It's better than Christmas. It's... well... that manna thing.

And it works out great, because boiling noodles is the one and only thing I can do in a kitchen! There's no easier way to be an accidental balanophage (too rushed for time to link - look it up ;-) than having noodles show up ready to be boiled.

The question now is: What sauce goes best with acorn noodles? I'm open to suggestions!

The Beauty of Kells

2011-01-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

Friday night has become pizza and movie night around our house, primarily so that our children realize what that ugly box with the glass screen is for (since they don't see its hypnotizing glow any other time).

This past weekend was The Secret of Kells, a gorgeously animated movie telling the story of the creation of the Book of Kells during a time of darkness and constant danger in Ireland. Not to go all two thumbs up Siskel and Ebert on you here, but if you have upper grade school or middle school aged kids, they should see this...

... but first they (and you - and I, since I had only a hazy understanding of it) should know the back story of the book.

It was, of course, done largely with oak gall ink. I have linked to this wiki page several times before. I thought as a complete change of pace that I might actually read it this time. I have written before about how one minor problem with oak gall ink - the high quality ink of choice for important documents from da Vinci to Bach - is that over time it eats the very surface upon which it is written.

According to wiki: "The acidity of iron gall ink is well known but it must also be observed that the case for the acidity of iron gall ink is somewhat overstated. There are several thousands of manuscripts, some of them well over 1,000 years old, with iron gall ink on them that have no damage or degradation whatsoever from the iron gall ink." Apparently degradation is much less of a problem with vellum than with paper, which helps explain the generally good condition of The Book of Kells - especially considering everything it has been through.

Imagine the times! 9th century Ireland. Vikings, borne across the sea with terrifying speed in oak ships (whose equal would not be seen again until the 19th century) that seem to literally swim across the waves, are raiding the coastal areas including the rich abbey at Iona, dispersing monks to monasteries in Ireland and Scotland. Dedicated monks painstakingly concocting oak gall ink, stretching vellum, and sitting in the scriptorium by flickering candle or oil lamp light to create works of art awe inspiring beauty, designed to bring light - to illuminate - a world that seemed bathed in darkness in fear... all the while feeling - knowing - that the next Norse attack could come at any time.

The Book of Kells is what happens when belief and hope flow through gifted and dedicated hands to simple natural media of incredible permanence. Although personally I believe fairies were also involved somehow.

How Range Maps Get Drawn

2011-01-20T03:08:00.000-08:00

** Updated proof read version, this time in actual English for your reading pleasure **

I'm feeling vindicated and gypped at the same time.

Every range map I have seen for chinkapin oak (Q. muhlenbergii Engelm.) shows it just barely reaching into the southeastern corner of Minnesota. From time to time I have joked that we have six native oaks in Minnesota (white, swamp white, bur, red, black and northern pin), seven if you count "those two chinkapins growing in Houston County."

I didn't realize how correct I was!

I was reading Welby R. Smith's amazing and gorgeous Tree and Shrubs of Minnesota (guess which section I went to first - my two favorite words both start with Q, Quercus and quixotic). Under 'Natural History' for chinkapin oak:

Native chinkapin oak has been found only once in Minnesota. The discovery was made by the early botanist W. A. Wheeler on July 15, 1899, in Section 19, Crooked Creek Township, Houston County. Wheeler described two small trees in some detail: one was 9ft (2.8m) tall, the other 10ft (3.1m) tall. He documented the discovery with authenticated herbarium samples.

The site is on a dry southwest-facing hillside at an elevation of 850ft... At the time of the discovery the habitat was apparently open and prairie like... The site has since grown into a substantial forest, a common fate for savannas deprived of wildfire. It is now dominated by several species of oak (only chinkapin is missing)...

No one knows for sure what happened to the chinkapin oaks, but they have not been seen since the original discovery. Some say they were cut for fence posts or trampled by cattle, but more likely they were overgrown or crowded out when the habitat succeeded from savanna to forest.

In the general description under fruit (acorn) it says: "Maturing August-September of the first year (dates imperfectly known for Minnesota)."

Imperfectly known? I should say so, considering the entire documented presence of chinkapin oak in Minnesota consists of two small trees which were probably too young to bear acorns and haven't been seen since July of 1899.

I feel vindicated in that my little joke was more accurate than I ever could have thought; not only are there officially two chinkapin oaks in Minnesota, those two chinkapins no longer exist. But they seem to have earned Minnesota a permanent spot on the range map for chinkapin oak.

I feel gypped because despite my joke about 2 trees I always assumed there was a least a viable small population of chinkapin oaks in SE Minnesota to justify the shading of the range maps, and that someday on a hike or bike ride in Houston County (which is a beautiful area by the way - Mississippi River bluff country) I would see some. The cool thing now is that if I do it will be big botanical news - first sighting in more than a century - and I'll probably get a mention in the next edition of Smith's book!

Winter Photosynthesis?

2011-01-19T13:48:00.000-08:00

Reader/commenter (and therefore hero!) Eric had a thought provoking comment after my sickeningly anthropomorphic post on what red and bur oaks think and feel during winter. Eric writes/wonders:

"According to Phil Rutter (ed: Founder, American Chestnut Foundation and owner Badgersett Research Corporation), chestnuts and hazelnuts do a measurable amount of photosynthesis during the winter months using chlorophyll in the bark. I wonder, since oaks are related to chestnuts and hazelnuts (ed: All members of family Fagaceae along with beeches) - do they also photosynthesize during the winter months? And all those fractal branches would help expose more surface to sunlight and reflected light..."

I feel silly for not thinking about/pondering the same thing. I read the passage in American Chestnut: The Life, Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, by Susan Freinkel where Rutter says of chestnuts: "if you scrape half a millimeter under the bark it's green as grass. It's making sugar all winter long."

It's a great discussion topic! One would think that a genus that includes many evergreen species (and some, as we have learned to our confusion, that are "half evergreen" and "partly evergreen") would have some mechanisms in place to get something out of every last drop of sunlight no matter what time of year.

1. What do you readers know about winter (winter of course meaning different things in different locations) photosynthesis beneath the bark of oak trees? If you have trouble using the comments section feel free to email me at siemschristian (at) gmail (dot) com.

2. I'll do a little investigating myself, checking oaks of various species at different temperatures (today's temp quickly approaching absolute zero) and report my findings

3. Who knows, I might even crack a book to see what I can learn on the subject!

Thanks, Eric for a great subject to explore, and thanks as always for reading.

Arguing Evolution Under The Oaks

2011-01-19T07:40:00.000-08:00

The other day I walked past my daughter who was (as usual - and very much unlike me at that - or this - age) immersed in a book. I looked at the title and asked her, "What's a 'Scopes Monkey' and why did they put one on trial... for stealing bananas?" Though not yet a teenager she has already perfected the withering look that so eloquently says - without saying a word - "Papa you're such a door knob and having half your genes is a burden I struggle to overcome every day."

The trial of John Scopes for violating a recently passed Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution in its schools was a media sensation. In the sweltering heat of that summer of 1925 in tiny Dayton, TN the issue of faith versus science was debated before a national audience. Scopes himself was virtually an afterthought, a bit player on a stage that featured celebrated characters like William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darraw and H. L. Mencken.

In reading through her books and printouts on the Scopes Trial I have been struck by four things.

First, how completely manufactured the whole thing was, how staged. After the Tennessee legislature passed the anti-evolution bill, the recently-formed ACLU placed ads asking someone to violate the law so that the ACLU could challenge it, offering to provide for that person's defense. Then a bunch of dudes sitting at the drug store in Dayton, TN over coffee cooked up a brilliant scheme: Biggest philosophical issue of the day + High profile legal battle = Tourism! If there's going to be an evolution trial, why not here in little ol' Dayton? Think of the money to be made.

So young John Scopes was recruited to break the law and get arrested to stand trial. Bryan volunteers to travel to Dayton to argue, as only he can, for the prosecution, and on hearing this news Darrow immediately volunteers his services to the ACLU for the defense. Mencken - and about a jillion other reporters - descend on Dayton to cover the battle.

The thought of how CNN would cover the spectacle nowadays is physically nauseating.

Second, after a few days of holding the trial in the county courthouse and carting out a continual procession of fainting spectators, the judge decided to hold the remainder of the trial outdoors in the shade of nearby oak trees (you knew there was an oak angle coming, didn't you?). There is a delicious irony to holding a trial which was obstensibly to determine simply if a young teacher had broken a well defined law (in his closing remarks Darrow asked that Scopes be found guilty just so the case could be appealed to a higher court) but was actually about the much larger issue of religion versus science, in the shade of oak trees. Oak trees which are continuously evolving all around us to adapt to continously changing environmental and climatic conditions, forming new species, fusing old species into new ones, mutating.

Third, the irony of holding the Scopes Trial in the shade of oaks is even larger when you think about the facts that 1) what was actually being discussed was interpretation of the Book of Genesis as "Gospel truth" (sorry) versus oral history, when 2) as the brilliant J. Russell Smith has shown us Genesis stands as an almost perfect oral history of man's transition away from a life of peace and plenty eating the fruits of trees provided for him, to a life of sweat and toil coaxing annual grain crops from the Earth. Genesis stands as an oral history of an absolute truth.

Finally I have been struck by how a man's views and legacy can be simplified and trashed in an instant. William Jennings Bryan has been characterized, in large part due to the film Inherit the Wind, as a closed-minded buffoon who was made to look silly on the stand by Darrow's brilliant cross examination. The truth is, as always, considerably more complicated. And much more interesting.

Part of Bryan's objection to the teaching of evolution in schools was his deep concern about the implications of Social Darwinism, which in his view allowed one group of people to see itself as the pinnacle of evolution while believing other groups of people to be inferior. In fact, the very text book that Scopes taught from promoted the idea that caucasions were more evolved than other races of humans. Bryan understood, and to his eternal credit argued, that this concept could be used to justify wars and unimaginable mistreatment of fellow humans. As world events would very soon demonstrate with barbarous clarity and on an imaginable scope, he was correct to be concerned.

Bryan died five days after the trial ended.

Tough Call

2011-01-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

I can’t decide which I like more.

The northern red oaks and northern pin oaks, who say, “Screw you winter, you can take my chlorophyll but I’m going to keep my dry leathery leaves to rustle in your winds in stubborn defiance of your doleful silence.”

Or the bur oaks who say, “Fine winter, you can take my leaves - they were shredded, battered and pocked with galls after a summer of feeding countless insects and fungi and it was their time to go – but I’m going to use your whiteness as the perfect, stark white backdrop for my ancient labyrinthine branches, my massive skeleton which lies hidden all summer beneath a skin of leaves.”

Let’s call it a tie.

And that’s about all the poetic I care to wax about winter. Bring on spring. Please. It started way too early, has already lasted too long, and I have acorns I'm dying to plant.

Just Say It

2011-01-12T11:55:00.000-08:00

One of my personal heroes, completely unrelated to forestry (other than the fact that the lumber needed for wooden bats which might not be the time-honored white ash for much longer) is Bill James. James completely revolutionized the way people understand the game of baseball, simply by writing long enough and well enough about the stupidity surrounding so much of baseball's collective "wisdom." As an example, James once wrote how mind numbingly stupid it is to rank baseball offenses based on batting average rather than on runs scored. Isn't the goal to score the most runs? This blindingly obvious observation led to today's understanding and appreciation of on base and slugging percentages as the more accurate pieces of data from which to analyze a player's impact on his team's ability to score runs. Only took 140 years of playing baseball to get there. I think it's all the chewing tobacco.

In my own little way I have been writing about tree tubes for more than 21 years. Hopefully I have learned something from Bill James. Just say it. And: the blindingly obvious is always worth stating emphatically since it's probably being ignored.

My hope - my dream - is to have to be a small part of revolutionizing the way we plant trees (e.g. so that they actually live and go on to live long lives) in this country.

It's not much of a dream compared to making the blindingly obvious observation that the sacrifice bunt is the most self-defeating idea ever, but it's something... that I can hang my cap on.

Happy Oak Apple Day... 5 months early

2011-01-11T14:10:00.000-08:00

Imagine celebrating - or at least commemorating - the 300+ year old re-establishment of your monarchy by wearing oak galls (aka oak apples) or sprigs of oak leaves!

Imagine also that "...in the 1960s it was the custom on Oak Apple Day that the chairs used by staff during school assembly were lined with nettles and brambles. The staff were then expected to sit on them without protest during assembly. At the end of assembly the pupils were granted a half-day holiday."

Both of which go to prove two things:

We're not as far from our pagan/druid heritage as some would have us think.

The British are really, really weird.

50 Oak Watch bonus points (whose value is truly beyond measure) to the reader/friend who reminds us all of Oak Apple Day on May 29.

100 points to everyone who wears an oak gall.

Simple Pleasures

2011-01-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was out walking the dog over lunch today, walked under the pin oak down the street (that I'm now convinced is a Q. palustris x rubra hybrid since it has the incredible branch architecture of a pin oak but doesn't get chlorotic from high pH soils like most pin oaks taken out of their range and planted up here on the tundra), and I stopped dead in my tracks.

To listen to the tsssssshhhhh of the sleety snow flakes ricocheting off the persistent, brown leaves on their way to the ground.

Here's a photo of that tree at a warmer time:

What a tree!

Chinkapin's story

2011-01-07T14:29:00.000-08:00

I always say that every individual oak tree has a story to tell us. Same goes for species, and for once I won't use the obnoxious quotation marks I always use when associating the term species with oaks.

The more I learn about chinkapin oak (Quercus muehlenbergii) the more fascinated I become, and the more I want to know its unique story as a species.

Miller and Lamb's Oaks of North America is divided very neatly into two sections, one for east of the 100th meridian, and one for west of the 100th meridian.

(Little reminder, more for me than for you, of where the 100th meridian is located.)
It can be divided neatly along the 100th meridian because of the simple fact that no oak occurs on both sides of that line, except one: Chinkapin oak. Predominantly an eastern oak, its range slices diagonally into central Texas and then... nothing. No more chinkapin oaks for hundreds of miles heading west, until you find isolated islands of them in Trans-Pecos Texas, southeastern New Mexico, and northeastern Mexico.

Samuel Lamb writes in the introduction to the "Oaks West of the 100th Meridian" section of Oaks of North America: "The breadth of the Great Plains has been a barrier to the spread of plant species for a long time. When the sea subsided from the large area of the Midwest, the tree species from the East and the West were not able to migrate across the wide expanses, so the eastern species remained in the East and the western species remained in the West. The same general rule applied to oaks, except for chinkapin oak, Quercus muehlenbergii. This oak must have ranged across the plains, as there is still a remnant population in west Texas and in New Mexico."

So at one point in the mists of time the range of chinkapin oak extended contiguously through Texas into New Mexico and Mexico, and then receded due to climatic changes, leaving remnant populations where the local climatic conditions - rainfall, elevation, aspect, soils - were favorable, or at least favorable enough, for a few pockets of chinkapin oaks to remain. For now.

I plan to spend a lot more time looking at the unique case of the chinkapin, but I think it's probably only "unique" in that it's happening now, but is simple a repitition of a pattern that has played out countless times throughout the history... of history.

I wonder if anyone has bred any of the remnant chinkapins west of the 100th with their eastern brethren?

According to Lamb, in the "western extension" of its range only one hybrid with chinkapin oak is listed - Quercus x (no name given) (Q. muehlenbergii x gambelii). No name given? Usually dudes are dying to get their name, or as we have seen, their girlfriend's name, on the latest hybrid.

Well I can solve that. It is now Quercus x siemsii.

So that's that problem solved.

All I Don't Want For Christmas Is A Really Bad Puzzle

2011-01-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

In their early days tree tubes were known as Tuley Tubes, in honor of inventor Graham Tuley of the British Forestry Commission.
Now, a few weeks late for Christmas, for the complete tree geek on your shopping list you can now order a jigsaw puzzle of a bad photograph of a field of Tuley Tubes, presumably somewhere in Great Britain. Surprisingly shoppers on that web site give the item 1 star out of 5.

OK, I admit it: I really want one.

Every Tree Is A Snow Flake

2011-01-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

These days no one pays more attention to the characteristics of individual trees -- particularly when they drop acorns/fruit, how much they drop, and how big are the acorns/fruit they drop -- than hunters and sportsmen.

And probably the most observant of these is the guy who, sick and tired of the military style camo available at the time, brought a bag full of leaves, sticks and dirt into a fabric factory and said, "I want a fabric that looks like this."

That man is Toxey Haas of Mossy Oak. Toxey has an amazing eye for identifying -- and, more to the point, remembering the durn location of* -- hyrbrid oaks and particular oaks with unique characteristics. I absolutely love his saying: "Every tree is a snowflake." Toxey gets it. There are species (or, as in the case of oaks, "species") and then within those species, and especially with oaks, there is immense intra-species variation. In the case of oaks I contend that that intra-species variation generally exceeds inter-species variation; that in other words our species delineations for oaks are so narrow as to be virtually meaningless and useless. It is within this immense intra-species variation where so much potential lies. Within "bur" oaks you have trees that drop acorns in August, and 50 feet away ones that drop in early November. You have "bur" oaks that drop acorns smaller than marbles, and "bur" oaks that drop these behemoths. (By the way I love the name: Mastadon Oak! Mast as in acorns, mastadon as in huge. This is exactly the type of marketing we need to bring to the cause of planting oaks!) You get shumard oaks that drop late, and ones that consistently, year after year, drop early.

No two wild grown trees are exactly alike. And within that variation lies the potential for oaks to feed a hungry world and safeguard our eroding soil.

It will take nurseries like Nativ out there identifying trees with remarkable traits, schlepping through the woods every fall to gather acorns (How can you tell a hybrid oak nurseryman? By the number of rashes and bites he has at the end of the day!), and eventually, breeding those special trees with others. Others can gather acorns in lawns and in parks. Hybrid and specialty oak growers must gather acorns for a specific tree at a specific time. No matter what.

This is the best explanation of why these Specialty Oaks cost more than bed run seedlings. I hope more and more people recognize and are willing to pay the difference. I believe they are.

And of course, as a purveyor and peddler of plastic tree tubes, this warms my heart.

So if you live anywhere within the hardiness zones Nativ Nurseries' trees will grow, I highly recommend ordering some. And even if you live outside the hardiness zones for their trees, plant some. Within the vastness of intra-species variation of oaks I have become convinced that there's a lot more cold hardiness in the gene pool of southern oaks than we think.

* Location, location, location is everything. It's one thing to identify a special tree. It's another thing entirely to be able to find it again. I am a very rich man. I just can't remember where to find the source of my immense wealth. Twenty three years ago, while driving near Itasca State Park in Minnesota, I saw a quaking aspen in full autumn color. Only this one wasn't golden like the eight bajillion aspens around it. It was bright red/orange. It was stunning. It was gorgeous. And I have no earthly idea where the hell it is. The market potential for that tree is staggering. So if you're driving near Itasca State Park this autumn, drive carefully. Don't look for "my" tree, because I don't want you to find it. Just keep an eye out for a desperate looking guy driving on the shoulder with his head out the window staring up at the trees. That will be me. Again.

What's In A Name?

2011-01-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

An oak with a charming common name.

Now take a look at the three herbarium samples and tell me if, on a dendrology test, you'd ever believe these samples were the same species.

By the way it looks like the USDA lists 206 "species" of oak in the USA, but they include hybrids.
Then again, they'd have to.

Great minds...

2011-01-05T09:12:00.000-08:00

... think I'm a moron.

But every now and then I have a thought. I've taken to reading a few "species" per evening in Oaks of North America by Miller & Lamb. Sometimes I even finish a page or two before falling asleep in mid-sentence and dropping the book on my face. Not because it's not interesting - could there be a more fascinating topic? - but because I'm getting old and tired... and was probably up at the crack of dawn with an infant.

Whenever I see an oak with a range that looks like it was shot from a poorly patterned shotgun I think: That "species" must have occupied a much larger contiguous range at one point, and is now in steep decline.

Arkansas oak (Q. arkansana Sarg.) is one such oak. This range map shows it spanning seven states, but according to Oaks of North America the range consists of a four county clump in Arkansas and one county pin pricks in Louisiana, Alabama (5 dots), Georgia (2 dots) and Florida (3 dots). Miller writes: "Arkansas oak is believed to be a relic of an ancient population which at some time in the past occurred over a much wider range than at present." This site lists it as a threatened species. Interestingly the site says, "Fewer than five localities of this woodland species are known to exist." It then lists seven states in which it occurs; some of them are adjacent so conceivably some stands of Arkansas oaks stradle state lines.

We're watching momentous changes in forest composition, right before our eyes. Sad, but utterly remarkable at the same time.

Hey southern guys & gals, has anyone ever seen an Arkansas oak? Can someone get acorns?

Getting It Right On Growth

2011-01-04T06:02:00.000-08:00

If this site does nothing else I hope it is one small voice among many working to overcome the stigma of slow growth literature and ignorance has given oak trees - because it is that false reputation for slow growth that prevents many people from planting oaks.

So when I see someone trying to overcome that trend I want to trumpet their efforts.

Yesterday I received an catalog in the mail for Chief River Nursery in Wisconsin. Their descriptions of their oaks were a breath of fresh air:
Bur oak - "Fast-growing (about 1' per year)" - I think they're selling it short, but I love the fast-growing moniker!
Red oak - "Fastest growing of the oaks about 2' per year." - Again I think they're giving short shrift to red oak's growth potential, but it's refreshing to see the term fast growing repeatedly associated with oaks!
Swamp white oak - "Fast growing oak..."

Well done, Chief River Nursery!
Now I'm anxious to start planting oaks again this spring... only 4 more months of winter to go. Grrrr.

Coolest House Ever

2011-01-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

I tried a search on "tallest oak tree" and came across this instead.

My son has been asking for a tree house. He must never see these photos!

Awesome.

A Stupid Resolution

2011-01-03T03:05:00.000-08:00

When people speak of making New Year's resolutions I'm always reminded of my freshman year of college and a dude named Dave. I spent my freshman year at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. This was when I thought I was going to be a historian or a literature major, before I opted for a glamorous and highly lucrative career in forestry and a transfer back home to the University of Minnesota.

Shortly after returning to school from Christmas break there was a dance held at the cafeteria, featuring some band up from Boston and Ever Clear punch. I'm not sure what genius decided this would be a great idea. "Hey, I know! Let's have a dance in a packed 90 degree cafeteria to get everyone hot and thirsty, and then let's serve Kool Aid spiked with lighter fluid!"

What ensued will probably go down in history as the shortest dance ever. One of the early casualties was Dave, a six foot five inch bean pole who had been a quiet, bookish guy for the first semester. It was odd to see him completely smashed. A buddy from the dorm floor named Ric and I half walked, half carried Dave across campus back to his dorm room. Dave kept mumbling/slurring over and over, "I made a resholution. But I made a resholution." It seemed like a mantra laced with deep regret. Finally Ric said, "It's OK Dave, everyone breaks their resolutions once or twice. Don't worry about it." To which Dave stopped, seemed to sober up in an instant, and said with great dignity, "No, I made a resolution to drink more. I thought I'd get more chicks that way."

Ric looked at me, rolled his eyes and said, "And how's that working out for you?" We spent the next hour getting water and aspirin down his throat, while meanwhile comforting Dave with platitudes like, "If you just be yourself there are plenty of girls who would like to be with you." And other lies like that.

I try not to make resolutions, because I know there are aspects of my basic nature that I'll never be able to change. But this year I am making a couple.

First, I need to bake and cook with acorns more. That is, after all, what this blog is all about, and I've become Exhibit A in why humankind moved away from a healthier, more peace-inducing food source in favor of the planet-killing and war-inducing convenience of grains.

The other is to spend more time exploring two themes/concepts: A new approach to classifying oaks, and concept of synchronicity in acorn production. I'm always griping about the way oak species and hybrids (and don't worry, I'll continue to do so), but anyone who complains that much should also start to offer alternatives.

I'm also fascinated by some research I've read lately and some correspondence with readers & friends about how and why oaks over vast areas "know" to produce large crops only periodically, and the implications of this for oak becoming (re-becoming) a major food source.

Not sure if those topics are thrilling enough to keep you tuned into Oak Watch this year. But for me at least they are a lot healthier than a resolution to get drunk more often!

Almost there - just 4 more to go!

2010-12-30T13:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.mast-producing-trees.org/2010/02/mast-producing-trees-in-agroforestry-systems/
The oak tree planting pledge drive over at our friends Mast Tree Network is in its final 2 days, and just needs 4 more people to commit to planting an oak to get it over the top... so stop by and commit!

I believe (although I'm not positive) you can commit now and plant later, like, say, when the permafrost has melted.

Let's see if we can't get to the goal... OK?

Oak Gall Envy

2010-12-30T06:59:00.000-08:00

I'm fascinated by oak leaf galls, and have put several photos of various types on this blog.

I came across this page with an incredible assortment of oak leaf galls found in Monterey County California.
Awesome!