Category: Trees

A tornado not heading to Oz

Loblolly pine fallen by tornado
A victim of nature’s wrath

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up. “There’s a cyclone coming …” he said. Thus, began Dorothy’s voyage over the Kansas prairie with her dog, Toto, carried by a tornado. The first warnings were the wail of the wind and bowing grass.

The blood and sinew memory of panic soon fades after danger passes. After escaping to a safe haven, we tell the story blithely. Hence, I am writing while feelings remain fresh.

I was walking my dog in the afternoon. The air was calm and the clouds creamy-white apart from a sulking grey curtain over the horizon. Ben wanted to go further than planned but we turned back at the first spots of rain. By the time we were 400 yards from home I heard a tremendous roar behind, like a steam engine chasing us. I didn’t look round but pressed forward faster, expecting only to be drenched.

When debris started flying at a rate never seen before, we ran towards the path through our woodlot that takes us home. Later, I regretted we didn’t stop for refuge under a neighbor’s verandah because the violence grew and grew. The path was covered in debris and branches laden with leaves flailed as if animated by pulses of high voltage. We heard loud crashes behind, on each side, and even overhead. To halt under a tree seemed suicidal; to press forward felt perilous.

When we reached home, Lucinda held the door open eyes round as marbles and her quaking voice inaudible from the din outside. The phone I left on the table during our walk showed an emergency announcement to take cover immediately. Later we heard people had seen a funnel cloud. I could tell them where it had touched down.

When the wind abated, I went outside to check the damage. Large trees had fallen in a narrow swath almost surgically. Only a few yards from the giants, delicate plants were unaffected, although the ground was strewn with broken boughs, sticks and leaves. I found a tree lying across the path where it had been felled seconds after we passed.

A tornado transported Dorothy and Toto to the Land of Oz, but Ben and I missed going to another place.

Time flows down Powhatan Creek

Powhatan Creek Bald Cypress
Venerable Bald Cypress growing in Powhatan Creek

Time flows down Powhatan Creek

As I lowered my kayak into the creek, I knew the water wasn’t the same as before, nor am I the same man. Hardly an original thought. People have pondered the river as a metaphor of time for umpteen centuries, probably even before Heraclitus.

I paddled as far upstream on Powhatan Creek as a rising tide allowed my draught to avoid obstructions in water the color of brown tea from the swamp’s infusion of tannin.

Letting imagination drift in headwaters cast me back to before the infant colony of Virginia when Native Americans chose waterways to navigate the coastal plain. As the creek narrowed, I passed under overarching branches, swamp rose and blooming cardinal flowers beloved of hummingbirds. Water rose ankle deep over the feet of Tupelo and Chestnut Oak trees. Bald Cypresses, the iconic trees of southern swamps, still bared their ‘knees’ as ramparts against hurricanes.

After resting my paddle to enjoy stillness, an Orchard Oriole sang and a Pileated Woodpecker laughed. A Green Heron stalked the margins and a Prothonotary Warbler flitted across the stream, perhaps the last golden flash of the season. Turtles hauled onto logs to sun themselves in dappled sunlight and beavers left evidence of their presence on gnawed tree stumps.

I found a place to turn for taking the current as the tide changed, conveying youthful water downstream where it empties into Sandy Bay and washes around Jamestown Island before dying in the mighty James River. When the creek widens to meander between mudflats I know I have reached early middle age. Beds of pickerel weed and arrow weed dangle seed pods and wild rice reach above the green blanket for birds to glean, no longer plucked by the Powhatan tribe.

After paddling for a mile, I greet an old friend where kayakers from the James River Association stopped to stare. No one knows the age of the gigantic Bald Cypress standing on its own little island. Resurrection Fern clothes some boughs, an epiphyte that can revive from countless cycles of dehydration. I feel a fragile, mortal creature beside this mother tree and her foster fern.

The cypress was already elderly when Pocahontas and Captain John Smith paddled here over 400 years ago. Famously strong and slow growing, the rot resistance of this species makes it prime lumber. Outstanding in every way, male or female and the only one of its kind to shed fall leaves, its green mantle turns russet before winter when it stands among other bald trees whose lives retreat inside the wood like beavers hibernating in their lodge until spring calls.

We shall never know how many seasons and what history the tree has witnessed. A storm long ago tore off a side from its massive bole, losing the rings that recorded its antiquity. Perhaps it is the oldest in the eastern USA, though the official record is held by a Bald Cypress in the Black River of North Carolina, a spritely youth when Daniel prophesied, and still waits for the Apocalyse.

When I join midstream the retreating tide carries me through a changing landscape. Vegetation that thrived at the start of my journey cannot tolerate saltier mudflats. But far from barren, cord grass and fiddler crabs abound, frogs croak and an osprey plunge for a bass. I love drifting in these middle reaches, wishing they had no end.

Next Post: Songbirds Taste Sweet

Why So Many Hollow Trees?

According to legend, Robin Hood and his Merry Men hid from their pursuers in a hollow tree in Sherwood Forest during the harsh reign of King John (1199-1219). The tree still stands, albeit courtesy of props and wires, and called the Major Oak. Another veteran had hollowed out enough by the 18th century to provide room for seating 20 people with a plank floor and door. Thought to be over 1,000 years old, the Bowthorpe Oak survives in Lincolnshire. Across the Atlantic ocean in the same century, Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell were the first white pioneers to settle in the Greenbrier Valley of WV. When they fell out over a religious argument, Sewell separated to make a home in a hollow sycamore tree (later he was killed by Indians).

Southern red oak
Hollowed Southern red oak

A financial loss to lumber companies, hollow trees win our curiosity, even affection, as natural works of art and have inspired storytellers. Albert Bigelow wrote the children’s book, The Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book (1898), which introduced as major characters Coon, Possum and Old Black Crow who struggled to live together amicably in the same tree.

My curiosity has been stirred by trees in our yard. If the angle of a side branch creates a cup for water and debris to accumulate or if a limb is torn down by a storm or sawn off doesn’t heal over, the rot starts as specialized fungi invade the heartwood to digest cellulose and lignin. They are followed by beetle and insect grubs that nibble channels and chambers, and they in turn become the menu for woodpeckers (7 species here) that carve out larger holes for nests. A growing menagerie includes invertebrate (called saproxylic), bird, bat, racoon, and even human occupiers.

Red maple
Hollow filled in a red maple

Trees that are not stressed by storms to breaking point can reach great ages from the strength of their shell of living sapwood, but they are often felled in parks for public safety. I minimize rot and hope to save mine by filling hollows with polyurethane foam, and apply a thin coat of tar to blend with the bole and provide waterproofing. Regrettably, some of the critters I like are thereby made homeless, or would be if I didn’t make nestboxes (next post)

A Swedish study of oak trees (Quercus robur) found <1% had hollows at under 100 years old, rising to 50% at 200 to 300 years, and all were affected at greater than 400. I recall few hollow trees in England and Scotland, except for rare veterans. Yet, here in Virginia I see them everywhere, and often in relatively young trees. A local dendrologist (academic tree expert) told me it is impossible to tell the age of the oldest trees because the inner rings of heartwood always rot out, although hardly a single specimen is more than 200 years old.

Why are hollows more prevalent here than in northern Europe? If a greater abundance of fungi and bugs exists in our warm and moist climate, trees with a natural insect repellent ought to be better protected. I asked a friend in Melbourne about Australian gum trees because eucalyptus oil is a powerful repellent (I spray it to deter insects and ticks). She replied, “I’ve seen lots of old dead trees with high up hollows where birds and possums nest, and quite a few living giants with a hollow at the base (such that a person can stand inside them, how the trees remain  standing is a miracle), and plenty of fallen trees/logs with hollows in them.” There dies a beautiful hypothesis. But I have another.

The same Swedish researchers noticed the fastest growing trees were most vulnerable, much more than oaks which age slowly and seldom have hollows until past middle age, like the famous “great trees” listed by the Woodland Trust. Trees grow faster in the mid-Atlantic climate, which probably means that less lignin, a hydrophobic, cross-linked polymer, fills spaces in cell walls. I’d be glad to hear a better explanation.

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