Firewood

Weather: Last Sunday we had snow at the exact temperature where water freezes. It was nearly invisible, but had the cadence of snow. When it fell on bared land it disappeared. When it landed on snow, it blended in. Yesterday it was just enough warmer that it was obviously rain, even if it turned into flakes at times.

When I planted trees and shrubs around the house I did so to create sun screens for other, more tender plants. I didn’t realize I was also creating winter protection. The leaves keep roots and crowns protected as the snow disappears. Even the wild grasses have a similar strategy: the dead blades protect a few greens ones in the center that keep the roots nourished in the cold.

Last useful rain: 1/28. Week’s low: 27 degrees F. Week’s high: 54 degrees F in the shade. Snow on the ground since 12/26.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, snow-in-summer, pink evening primroses, vinca; everything else is under snow.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves

What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Breaks in snow that probably came from rabbit

Weekly update: When the animals disappeared from the forests, they were replaced by humans who burned wood to cook and stay warm. Before anyone could buy a chain saw, that meant scouring the woods for dead trees and ignitable underbrush. Everything had to be cut to size by an axe.

That probably reduced the fuel load in nearby forests enough to keep wild fires under control in most seasons.

Fewer people today rely on wood alone. When I moved here, we only had propane for heat. Three of my neighbors used wood stoves for heat. When we got natural gas, they continued to use their stoves. My one neighbor was out many mornings with an axe splitting the cut-to-length logs he had delivered.

Time passes, and people get older. One man died and the descendants who live in his house use only the natural gas. The wife of the second neighbor died, and I think his current one is from town. They no longer used wood, but gas.

The third neighbor now has his wood delivered already split. Since his wife retired, I think they use it as a supplement rather than a primary source. People need more heat when they are home all day, which means more ashes to remove.

As wood turned from a necessity to a life-style, people became fussier. They weren’t willing to accept any type of wood, and expected it to be split into evenly sized pieces. That meant the underbrush no longer was being harvested.

Most years men who had access to wood, filled their pickup beds and parked in local parking lots along the main road from Santa Fé to Taos. I don’t know their sources. The national forests issue permits for fire wood with the proviso it not be sold. The Santa Fé office charges ten dollars for a green cord, and twenty for five cords of dead wood.

A couple years ago, the primary lot used by street vendors was taken over by a gas station, and the men moved to other locations. Friday I went looking to see where they were, and I couldn’t find any.

I thought they might have gone north toward the big boxes where I’d seen men selling potatoes and chicos in the past, but there were none. Much of that land is now for sale, and the owners may be discouraging the peddlers.

My one neighbor still gets his wood, but he probably uses the same source every year and has his telephone number.

The poor who rely on wood probably still scrounge where they can. The past few years the electric utility has been cutting trees that threatened its wires. I don’t what terms they offered for removing the wood, but in many places they simply left it on the ground.

One person in the village piled the wood along the road to create a barrier. When I drove by recently, all the wood had disappeared. I assume someone, somewhere is using it to keep warm.

Notes on photographs: Taken 19 January 2019.
1. The snow in the path on the west side of the house continued to turn into slick ice.

2. Globe willow leaves (Salix matsudana umbraculifera) captured by dead Mexican hat (Ratibida columnaris) stems.

3. A few green blades in a clump of needle grass (Stipa comata).

End notes: USDA, Forest Service, Santa Fé website.

Stag Heads

Weather: Four mornings this week the thermometer on my front porch showed temperatures below 32 degrees; it was warmer in the village near the river; some rain yesterday.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, sweet pea, chrysanthemums. Leaves on catalpas, grapes, and Maximilian sunflower turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Goat’s head, chamisa, broom senecio, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and purple asters.

In my yard: Winecup mallow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower. Leaves on sand cherry and leadwort turning burgundy; rose of Sharon, ladybell, peony and coneflowers leaves going yellow.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches mining the Maximilian sunflower heads, cabbage butterflies, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Trees of life appear in the Quran and in Revelations, on Indian textiles and Egyptian papyrus. The symbolic representations may have been diffused through trade and other exchanges, but the underlying recognition of trees as a life form different from that of humans was passed from generation to generation by people dependent on plants.

Oliver Rackham thinks that first-hand knowledge began to fade when the enlightenment redefined trees as having life spans like people. Scientists assumed a single set of laws governed creation. They generalized from what was understood. Men began to think of young trees, mature ones, ones with dead limbs that were old and needed to be felled before they died and did damage.

To Rackham, a tree is an self-perpetuating organism composed of roots and leaves connected by the cambium that transfers nutrients between the two through the xylem and the phloem.

In its early years a sapling produces branches to support a canopy at whatever speed the climate and soil allow. Unlike children of poverty, the worse the conditions, the longer a tree’s youth.

When it reaches its optimal height, a tree becomes mature. Every year it abandons the previous year’s wood and begins a new ring. As the girths of the trunk and branches increase, they create greater and greater demands on the chlorophyll factories in the leaf cells. The circumference of cells around the dead wood increase, but the range of the canopy and roots do not.

Eventually, the demands become unsupportable. Roots abandon branches. Bark and sapwood decay, fungi move in. Animals nest in hollows. The tree retrenches. From the roots it creates a new canopy of a size that meets it needs without undue stress. It continues until conditions arise again that make retrenchment necessary.

Trees don’t die. They reinvent themselves every year.

He notes the persistence of bare stag heads above canopies is not universal. Even in England their existence varies by region, not ownership or land use. They rarely are found in old woods. Instead, they live in parks and hedges where they are kept for their beauty or shade.

He also admitted they don’t occur every year, which would be the case if his perpetual motion vision were valid. He thought many stag heads he saw in England were survivors of the droughts of 1911 and 1921. He also thought there were more after the hot, dry summers of the 1990s.

It may not be height that’s the limiting factor, but roots. They can only go so deep before the soil conditions change. Once they reach that layer, they can no longer support the canopy’s natural inclination to expand. Height is the visual signifier for depth.

Tops are damaged by frost, ice, wind, and insects. When that happens, roots send messages and resources to repair the canopy. New leaves and twigs appear from dormant buds.

Roots have problems with drought. When less water comes up, fewer leaves can survive. When leaves can’t be restored, trees wall off unproductive branches.

The retrenchment pattern is the same in all woody plants, but some species perpetuate themselves better than others. Rackham believes the best in England are oaks, sweet chestnuts, ashes, and limes. But, maybe that is not a species imperative, but man’s. Trees categorized as junk are more likely to be cleared.

In this part of New Mexico, stag heads appear in cottonwoods and tamarix, Russian olives and Siberian elms. They don’t endure. Men raised to be good farmers clear dead wood. Good shepherds of the land believe they are helping when they remove exotic species.

People still burn wood to keep warm. Wherever wood is used for fuel, dead branches are harvested. They’re already dry and combustible. Rackham’s parks were the preserves of wealthy men who didn’t worry about trifles like heat.

When coal replaced wood, trees no longer were seen as a resource. Stag heads could survive because there was no incentive for removing them. It was only when congested areas developed where trees had grown that people feared the consequences of storms that broke branches and ripped trees from the ground. An urge to what Rackham calls tidiness took command.

Behind the survival of stag heads, Rackham noted a certain aesthetic preference for the "beauty and mystery of ancient trees," which he dated to the Shakespearean age. It may lie still deeper in the remnants of beliefs held by the Celts with their Druids, by the Norse conquerors with Yggdrasil, the world tree, or even by the followers of the German Georges.

Against those with an awareness of different modes of existence, there always has been the contempt of the simplifiers. Romans destroyed oak forests to suppress rebellion. Bureaucrats, be they insurance agents or utility company maintenance crews chiefs, have no patience with differences that demand understanding. They set rules for how may feet must be cleared, and don’t worry about species.

Trees are cultural constructs, even in the wild. But, within the boundaries of human perception, they live a life apart, a life recorded in the ancient symbols of immortality.

Notes:
Rackham, Oliver. The History of the Countryside (1986).

_____. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976, 1990 revised edition).

_____. Woodlands (2006).

Photographs:
1. Stag heads growing in row of volunteers along a ditch in the village. The ditch, which goes along the edge of city-owned land, is the local equivalent to an English hedgerow. Siberian elms grow between the cottonwoods at lower heights; trees of heaven have been sprouting below.

2. Egyptian tree of life, water color on papyrus, produced for tourist trade in the 1980s. The birds represent the stages of life. From the bottom right corner, going counterclockwise, they are infancy, childhood, and youth. The bird with the spreading wings is an adult. The one facing the other direction is old age. Death is always to the west.

3. Tamarix on edge of flood plain near village arroyo, 14 September 2014. Yellow flowers are áñil del muerto.

4. Pennsylvania Dutch tree of life, water color on paper. My mother did this around 1953. I don’t know if she used a stencil or copied a magazine picture. The Germans also used tulips as symbols of immortality. The reds may be stylized tulips above green hearts.

5. Russian olive near river north of town, 16 October 2014. Yellow leaves are cottonwoods near the Río Grande.

6. Wood pile on main road, 16 October 2014. A small tree or large limb has been hewn, and wood of many diameters cut to length. It might have been a stag head, a small tree that died, or one that sprouted in the wrong place.

7. Neighbor’s woodpile, 16 October 2014. Large pieces of wood have been split into uniform thicknesses and cut to similar lengths.

8. Siberian elm near tamarix above by village arroyo, 14 September 2014.

9. Realistic tree, oil on canvas, by Ruth Penzotti Henderson, late 1950s. Her grandparents were German and Italian immigrants, the last through south America.

Felling Trees

Weather: Rain twice this week while Douglas weakened off the western coast of México.

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, Dr Huey and hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, silver lace vine, lilies, daylily, hollyhock, datura, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, alfalfa, sweet pea, yellow yarrow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, tumble mustard, velvetweed, purple mat flower, pink and white bindweed, showy milkweed, Hopi tea, goat’s beard, plains paper flowers.

In my yard, looking east: Maltese cross, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s beard, baby’s breath, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bell.

Looking south: Betty Prior, Fairy and rugosa roses.

Looking west: Johnson’s Blue geranium, catmint, blue flax, white mullein, Shasta daisy.

Looking north: Coral beard tongue, butterfly milkweed, golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis.

In the open, along the drive: California poppy, larkspur, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Pansies, snapdragon, sweet alyssum, blue salvia, moss rose, French marigold.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, small birds, grasshoppers, small black ants, wasps.

Weekly update: Removing dead cottonwoods is difficult and necessary. The roots are shallow, and the trees prone to blow over, crushing whatever is in their path.

It’s also expensive. When I called a local tree cutting firm several years ago about removing a six-inch diameter black locust, the person answering the phone said the minimum cost was $500. Imagine the multiplier for a six-foot bole.

It was easier a hundred years ago.

Techniques haven’t changed much. When I was a child, I learned the basics, probably from a camp craft book. You made a notch on the side you wanted it to fall. You made another cut on the opposite side, and got out of the way.

It sounded easy. How-to videos tell you the same today. Chain saw advertisements reinforce the belief anyone can do it.

And, in the past, anyone could.

What has changed isn’t the tools or techniques, it’s the intimacy that comes from dependence. In the eons when people depended on wood for heat and cooking fuel, children learned the ways of trees. Picking the path and making the notch required some knowledge of the way trees behaved. It wasn’t simple geometry.

Then, people removed trees near their homes, then went farther afield for fire wood. There was little danger in felling trees, if one stayed out of their path.

Today, many large cottonwoods live in captivity. With changing land values, large tracts have been subdivided and newer houses built close to old trees. When you pass a commercial tree cutter, it has a man lift so men can remove branches from the top, then cut the trunk in small segments.

Recently, someone in the village has been cutting down a cottonwood. The road is narrow and the work hidden behind a fence. From what little I could see, I believe they hired a lift and tried to follow the same procedure.

I think a piece fell on a branch of an apple tree. It may only have been a branch, not a limb. The apple limb broke and rolled the cottonwood down its slope onto a coyote fence.

I don’t know if it reached into the road. By the time I saw it it had been cut back. Cascading objects follow the laws of physics.

The second problem when you fell a cottonwood is what do you do with it. The uses for wood are limited. Local builders use logs for vigas and decorative posts, small wood for latillas. They buy everything else.

A hundred years ago saw mills existed to convert stumps to boards. Commercial operations in Michigan, where I grew up, had three stages. In lumber camps, trees were cut and branches removed. Stripped logs were moved by small carts with high axils, big wheels, which were pulled by animals.

The processed logs were hauled to rail sidings where they were loaded onto cars that took them to a mill. Roy Dodge says one operation sent 20 loads an hour. The rail lines were temporary narrow gauge with engines built especially for the work in Lima, Ohio.

Sawmills were located near transportation. In Michigan, they were on one of the Great Lakes where ships would take boards to market cheaply. Elsewhere, rivers were used for the first journey, railroads for the second.

People who burn wood today are choosey. Even my neighbors, who depend of wood stoves, know, if worse comes to worse, they can use an electric space heater. Both men are in their late 70s, too old to go into the forest to fell trees on their own. They have wood delivered. One has it delivered to size, and his son and grandson stack it. The other buys small logs which he splits with an axe as he needs them.

A hundred years ago, men followed a multi-year cycle. They cut wood, then let it dry for several years before they burned it. Each year they created a new pile, and used the oldest.

Now, the labor involved in converting a large cottonwood into fire wood is greater than the price one can charge. Many have heard the wood burns hot and fast, and, if it’s not cured properly, smells. Santa Fé buyers are snobs who skim the surface of local folk life. They want the image without the inconvenience. They only want the best.

Commercial tree cutters simply shred whatever they cut. When I had a cherry taken down, I asked if they were able to sell the wood. The answer was no. A few years ago they could sell some to a woodworker who made spoons, but it hadn’t heard from him in a while. The cherry went the way of all other trees, turned into mulch.

I assume there is a limit to the capacity of portable chippers. Men tend to leave the large boles. Without the top wood, they’re no longer as likely to blow over. If they do, they’re shorter. I have no idea why anyone would want the standing remains, unless the price was prohibitive or the tree cutter simply refused to remove it because it was too large to chip.

One stumbles on the remains everywhere.

Things were different a hundred years ago. Logging has always been dangerous, but then there was the respect that arises from a worthy challenger. Men had themselves photographed with their largest trees. The pictures are a bit like those of fishermen. At one level, they show humans conquering nature. However, the fish or tree, not the humans is in the foreground. Man is always dwarfed.

Notes:
Dodge, R. L. Michigan Ghost Towns, 3 volumes (1970, 1971, 1973).

US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2012, 65 died in the logging industry; the injury rate was 4.3 per hundred employees. The rates were much higher a hundred years ago, especially in the mills. Fire was also a more serious hazard then.

Photographs: Historic photographs from The Disston Crucible, February 1917; Disston manufactured the band saw blades used in mills.

1. Dead cottonwood in a stand by the Rio Grande; everything useful has been stripped, and the large bole left to decay. 13 February 2012.

2. Cottonwood branch fell across a wire fence near the road last fall. The original house is set far back from the road where large cottonwoods grow. The road frontage was platted and houses built. The land in back was kept for possible farm use. This looks like the remains of a dead tree left uncut. 2 November 2013.

3. Damaged apple tree. You can see the branch in front that’s been cut and the one farther back that’s been ripped from the trunk. 5 July 2014.

4. Cottonwood branch on the coyote fence at the edge of the village road. 15 June 2014.

5. The cottonwood log was 10' long and 6' across at the small end. The Baker Lumber Company of Turrell, Arkansas, cut 3,300 board feet.

6. Cottonwood trunk left along an acequia, 26 March 2014.

7. Cottonwood trunk left near the river, 22 May 2012.

8. One reason people climbed onto big trees for photographs was to show the scale.

9. Cottonwood base left along the river, Cundiyo, 14 February 1912. Anything useful has been removed.

Ash

Weather: With the rain and generally overcast days, I haven’t been watering much; last rain 9/13/12; 12:21 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, silver lace vine, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, African marigolds, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primroses, snakeweed, native sunflowers, áñil de muerto, Tahoka daisies, heath, purple and golden hairy asters.

In my yard, looking east: Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and miniature roses, crimson rambler morning glory.

Looking west: Calamintha, leadplant, David phlox.

Looking north: California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia; brought the petunias indoors.

Animal sightings: Blue bird, small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Earlier this summer, my neighbor finally gave up on his globe willows that had been damaged by sun scald, and brought in a back hoe. Then, he told me, he bought some ash trees because he missed his shade.

I know the reason he bought them - they were left over from some construction project and at the end of the spring season, the local store who had procured them was selling them cheap to recoup its investment. They even delivered the things with their root balls wrapped in burlap and a good six foot across.

I assume they are green ash, although landscapers sometimes choose more exotic species. None are native to Rio Arriba county. Fraxinus pennsylvanica has escaped in Colorado. Farther north and to the east it likes wet areas.

In the past the ash was grown for fire wood. It’s European cousin, the common ash, will burn quickly and cleanly, even when green. Farmers there and in early Virginia cut the trees so they would regenerate from the stumps.

The combination of combustibility and regeneration gave Fraxinus excelsior mythic status: when hit by lightening ash trees burst into flame and then regrow. In the Icelandic Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded man was created from a tree wrenched from the earth, and that woman came from an elm. As the symbol of creation, yule logs were burned in the ceremonies that celebrated the return of the sun after the winter solstice.

The other reason the trees were coppiced is all ashes make good tool handles. White ash, which grows east of the Mississippi, may be used today for ball bats and cabinet facings, but in the west the Havasupai, Omaha, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux, Winnebago and Ojibwa used green ash for bows and arrow shafts.

Whether because of its use in hunting or its general utility, wood from green ash trees was used to make sacred poles by the Omaha and Sioux. The Cheyenne used the ash to build the sun dance ceremony lodge, while the Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, Cheyenne, Lakota and Dakota used the wood for pipe stems.

I don’t know if the ashes are a good choice: the members of the olive family are late to leaf, early to drop, and currently being attacked by pathogens. On the other hand, they can survive bad air and high winds and still grow a hundred feet tall. In Europe, they once believed the common ash acted as a lightening protector, taking hits intended for their homes. If that were an ash genus trait, that alone would be worth the price in late summer when storms aimlessly prowl the area.

Notes:
Gucker, Corey L. “Fraxinus pennsylvanica,” 2005, in United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including J. W. Blankinship, Native Economic Plants of Montana (1905); Dilwyn J, Rogers, Lakota Names and Traditional Uses of Native Plants by Sicangu (Brule) People in the Rosebud Area, South Dakota (1980); Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region (1919); Jeffrey A. Hart, “The Ethnobotany of the Northern Cheyenne Indians of Montana” (1981); Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (1932); and Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, Havasupai Habitat (1985).

Photographs: My neighbor’s trees, soon after they were planted, 23 June 2012; small fruit tree, possibly a peach, in the rear.

Sagebrush

Weather: Monday’s snow landed on the snow still here from a week ago; Tuesday’s rain didn’t wash everything away; temperatures have been too cold since to melt much; 9:43 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, rose stems, hollyhock, winecup, vinca, sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, strap-leaf aster leaves.

Still green plants, like gypsum phacelia, seem to peak through snow first, perhaps because they generate heat from below that adds to effects of the sun above.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla; branches on coyote willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on red hot poker, coral bells, small-leaved soapwort, pink evening primrose.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, yellow alyssum, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green: Branches on weeping willow; arborvitae beginning to bronze.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; buds on Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: The day before Thanksgiving, I wandered out toward one of the badland formations for a closer look at junipers I’d seen for years from my back porch. I found them growing in an allée bordering a wide stretch of ground bared by flowing water.

Having gotten that far, I thought why not start up the water path towards the sedimentary cliffs themselves. Bunch grasses were dark and dormant, but Gypsum phacelia was green everywhere.


Then I saw something I’d never seen before in this area, a very low sagebrush. Soon after, the alkaline loving phacelia disappeared, and more sagebrushes sprawled about, exploiting, if not directing, the movement of water.

These plants had the shorter, wider three-lobed leaves and branching habit of the wyomingensis subspecies of Artemisia tridentata found in this state in Rio Arriba and Taos counties.

The other big sagebrush subspecies, tridentata, with longer, narrower three-toothed leaves and a central trunk, is also found in Rio Arriba and Taos counties, but also in San Juan county to the west. It doesn’t grow in Santa Fe or Los Alamos counties, but in Sandoval and McKinley to the west. It isn’t around Albuquerque, but in Valencia and Torrance counties to the south.

While I associate sagebrushes with the Taos plateau, Frederic Clements warns their dominance is recent, the likely consequence of overgrazing the original grasslands in the late nineteenth century.

Like the badlands, where remains of ancient horses and camels have been found, the Artemisia genus appeared sometime in the Miocene when grasses were emerging. Clements believes the two have had an antiphonal relationship since, with grasses appearing in wet periods and sagebrushes dominating when the climate dried.

In historic times, he thinks the range of sagebrush was limited to desert areas where its roots penetrated deeper than those of the more common grasses. Most of the native groups who used the plant, mainly for medicine, live in the dryer northwestern part of the state, the Hopi, Zuñi, Navajo and Apache.

Tewa speakers used the dark woody branches as fuel when nothing better was available, say “on the journey from San Juan to Taos.” They used the leaves, which they could have brought back, to treat indigestion, flatulence, coughs and congestion.


The gray leaves have a bitter taste which discourages many animals from eating them, except during famine times. The nitrogen containing monoterpene oils that make them medicinally useful attack the digesting bacteria in animals’ stomachs. When sheep or cattle were abusing a stand of grass, sagebrush had a competitive advantage.

About the only wild animal who can digest the composite is the pronghorn, whose ancestors emerged in the post-Miocene when “the lower valleys appear to have been primarily clothed in spruce parklands, marshy meadows, or sagebrush (Artemisia) steppe with subalpine conifers and shrubs dominating the coarser sites.” The modern animal evolved when tree and grass savannas were alternating with shrub steppes during the warm periods between glacial advances.

William Dick-Peddie suggests the mechanics of domination are those of erosion. When grasses are eaten to stubs, water flows over the land, rather than into it. Juniper sprouts in depressions where water collects, while sagebrush nestles in the slightly elevated spots between.


I have no idea from whence came the seeds of the shrubs I saw or if they had taking advantage of the past season’s drought. Seed can last at least nine years under the right conditions, but it first has to be in the area. I haven’t ventured past the cliffs yet to see what grows beyond, so I don’t know if there’s some indigenous source or if the tiny brown seeds were tracked in by hikers or ATV tires.

I waited twenty years to visit the junipers and badlands. No matter how intense my curiosity now, I have no choice but to wait until the snow clears enough so I can see where I’m walking.

Notes:Brown, David E. “An Evolutionary History of Pronghorn Habitat and Its Effect on Taxonomic Differentiation,” Pronghorn Workshop, 2006.

Clements, Frederic E. Dynamics of Vegetation, collected papers edited by B. W. Allred and Edith S. Clements, 1949.

Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Tilley, Derek J., Dan Ogle, Loren St. John, and Brock Benson. “Big Sagebrush,” USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service plant guide.

United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. New Mexico county distribution maps for Artemisia tridentata subspecies.

Photographs: All were taken near the local badlands, 23 November 2011. Gypsum phacelia in lower left hand corner of second picture.

Tree of Heaven

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, iris, moss phlox, donkey tail spurge; lawns and hay fields beginning to green near road where water flows from ditches.

Beyond the walls and fences: Choke cherry, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless cryptantha, hoary cress, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, purple mat flower, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grass; buds on Virginia creeper; milkweed and ragweed coming up.

In my yard: Sour cherry, spirea, Siberian pea tree, lilacs, tulips, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, blue flax; buds on snowball, peonies and Bath pinks; tomatillos coming up.

Bedding plants: Pansy, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird and bumble bee on Siberian pea; smaller bees around lilac; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain early Monday and Tuesday mornings, followed by cooler nights and more winds; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There’s something worse than a Siberian elm. Trees of heaven not only produce viable seeds and resprout when pruned like elms, but they also sucker from their roots into copses and exude chemicals that keep other plants from their territory.

The team writing the environmental impact statement for widening the road from Española to Los Alamos on the other side of the river found Alianthus altissima growing around Santa Clara creek and recommended it be eradicated as a class B pest. Siberian elms are only class C nuisances and so not proscribed by the state. They can, however, be destroyed during construction without penalty.

Trees of heaven have gotten started along one of the village ditches at the northern end where water from the Santa Cruz enters the acequias. In one area, they’re competing with Siberian elms between the ditch and the pavement. This past winter both were cut back to keep the narrow road clear, but neither was fazed. One is bright green with new leaves. With last week’s warm weather, the other was beginning to leaf at its branch tips.

Ch’un shu is known in China as the spring tree because it’s one of the last to break dormancy, and thus signifies the end of winter famine. According to Shiu Ying Hu, it was primarily used for cooking fuel. However, the dried bark removed from felled trees could also be sold in markets for medicinal purposes as ch’un-po-pi.

The tree entered the western world under false pretenses. A French Jesuit priest, Pierre d'Incarville, thought he was sending back seeds of the tree the Chinese used to make lacquer. When they germinated in Paris, the saplings were mistaken for sumac, because the long leaves broken into pairs of smaller leaflets were similar.

William Prince introduced it commercially in this country as Sicilian Tanner’s Sumac, after Archibald Thompson sent him plants under that name from his West End nursery outside London. Once Prince realized the confusion and offered it as Chinese Ailanthus in the 1820's, the tree began to sell so well his Flushing nursery had problems meeting the demand because he only had male trees. They’re more floriferous than the females and the taller form was considered more aesthetically pleasing.

The market had already been created in Paris where American visitors saw Grand Vernis du Japon growing along the boulevards, especially on the left bank in the fifth arrondissement of Montparnasse. In those years of early industrial life, when coal was burned to produce steam and heat homes, the air was polluted with soot that killed many species. Insects attacked others. The fact the five-petaled male flowers smelled didn’t matter when horses were used for transport.

By the 1840's, Andrew Jackson Downing, the primary popularizer of romantic landscapes in this country, noted the Celestial Tree was “much planted in the streets and public squares” of New York and Philadelphia and that it was especially picturesque on lawns where “the foliage catches the light well, and contrasts strikingly with that of round-leaved trees.”

The tree grows rapidly its first years, concentrating its efforts on height. After about five years it begins to branch. After ten to twenty years, the females produce seeds. Then, home owners discover the problems with seeds, suckers and the smells they released when gardeners try to remove them. By 1851, Downing had turned against the grey barked tree and was recommending “graceful elms and salubrious maples” for street use.

However, a hundred years later Rosalie Doolittle was still telling Albuquerque gardeners that, despite its “reputation for being untidy,” a tree of heaven was “really attractive when the sprays of pods turn brilliant red and yellow as falls approaches.” Even a few years ago Baker Morrow advised New Mexicans the much maligned tree “can make a very pleasant shade or street tree in the right setting.”

They’re correct the tree is attractive when allowed to grow naturally into a wide, low canopy. Both males and females are covered with yellow-green flowers at their branch tips in late spring. Then, in late summer, pink seed heads appear above the leaves, resembling mimosa from a distance.

In Santa Fe, I’ve seen trees growing in courtyards shading working class homes built in the 1950's. Although they tolerate a wide variety of soils, the strong tap roots prefer the lime rich soil of the area. Unfortunately, they need more water than the arid west provides, a minimum of 14" a year, and so they send out suckers to the water conserving yard walls and foundations. Seeds, and possibly discarded suckers, found their way into the nearby ditch, neglected since it was no longer used for irrigation.

Here, trees of heaven not only are growing along the ditches and road sides, but it looks like the member of the tropical simaroubace family has been planted deliberately by a few people, probably from free suckers. In one place down the road, a mature tree shading a double-wide deflected a flying seed, and now has a Siberian elm sapling amongst its suckers.

Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1953, revised 1967.

Downing, Andrew Jackson. A Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1841.

_____. “How to Popularize the Taste for Planting,” The Horiculturalist 7:297-301:1852, quoted by Behula Shah in “The Checkered Career of Alianthus altissima,” Arnoldia 53(3):21-27:1997.

Gannett Fleming West, Inc. NM 30 Improvement Project, Environmental Assessment, January 2011.

Hu, Shiu Ying. “Alianthus,” Arnoldia 39(2):29-50:1979 .

Morrow, Baker H. Best Plants for New Mexico Gardens and Landscapes, 1995.

Murrill, William A. Shade Trees, 1902; on use in Paris.

Prince, W. R. “Introduction of Lombardy Poplar,” The Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser 3:80:1861; on his father’s activities.

Photograph: Tree of heaven leafing along a ditch near the village already colonized by bright green Siberian elms, 24 April 2011.