Tree Walkng for state champs at Virginia Tech

   It was cold -- a great day for a tree walk? Not really, though the good news was our leader, Jeff Kirwan and a few other ladies, were quite knowledgeable about the trees we were going to see. And we met in a gray parking lot. On Virginia Tech campus.
    Virginia State University and Polytechnic Institute -- a land grant college, with actually a lot of land-- 2600 acres -- is a good place for studying animal husbandry, self driving cars, water testing and nature at thee Hahn Horticultural Center. And on this big campus you find a variety of trees, from white pine to red hickory to a tree dedicated to comic Stephen Colbert!
   Wearing my furry black winter coat and red hat, I went off with several others, starting out in the duck pond area off of Duck Pond Road/Drive. After a handful of steps Jeff brought us slightly uphill, eyeing the president's home in the distance, to a few knotted old trees, what he called state champs. I believe one was a maple. There was also a white willow, on the east side of the duck pond, as we crossed a little foot bridge, also a champ. I think this was the one where it was so wide we couldn't tell its age.
   On the campus proper we headed down the west side of the Drill Field. I was really surprised when he pointed out there was "one" tree left from when the Drill Field wasn't an open area at all, but an arboretum. It is a "burr oak" with  huge acorn cups, a sign near it saying it was planted in 1895, I believe. That's an old and grand tree! Fellow naturalist Beth U. instinctively starting yanking off the English ivy around. It's sad they tore out so many trees for a field.
   With state champs they measure the height and circumference and possibly the rings too. Jeff, a former student, was there when a grand old tree fell in what is "Stadium Woods" behind Lane Stadium, where the football games are played. The rings were measured on the fallen tree and it was 300 years old! No wonder they want to save this woods of white and black oaks! This unique urban woods needs to be preserved. And it is also where a great oak with the sign "Colbert Oak" is nailed to it, as a means to entice comic Stephen Colbert to come. At least, they hope he will come visit, is my understanding.
    In the Hahn Horticultural garden we spied a few interesting, new to me trees, like the triofolate orange, the Alaskan yellow cedar and the kind of hanging down limber pine, also state champs. We traversed part of the garden I hadn't seen before, with a lot of brown wooden planks around a small goldfish pond and curving trails going back out toward the road and parking lots. The weather warmed up; our coats were open, and it was time to get something to eat.
    All in all, it was informative and a few hours of good exercise. Every town should have a "tree walk" like this.

Warm Temps, Ground hogs and Life (Star Wars Reference)

   

                   

                                                 Blooms on the quince tree.



 When Star War VII's "Kylo Ren" chases Daisy Ridley's character into the snowy woods, he ignores the dark silhouettes of the surrounding trees. The trees stand perfectly still (why, wouldn't they, they're trees) in their dormant, powered down state, nature's smart way of protecting them against the bitter cold. But what about winters "without" all that cold and snow?  
    At a recent Master naturalists' meeting, Judy K. pointed out a tree of hers, a quince, was blooming weeks in advance, in late fall -- not in springtime, like it should. What the heck is going on here? When it's almost 70 degrees on the East coast for Christmas, a time when people normally are huddled inside and expect bitter cold wind and snow, it's pretty confusing. Imagine how confusing that can be for the trees themselves. Some trees in the New River Valley (VA.) that had dropped their fall leaves began growing new ones right away or blooming, like silver maple and Judy's quince tree with its reddish flowers. And after they bloom, folks, that's it for the season, no apples, no more  funny helicopter samara seeds (for the maple trees, at least). Thank you, El-Nino!
    I was lucky my daffodils were deep enough they didn't start pushing up their leaves. It's nice to have flowers in the spring, something to look forward to and ruminate upon after dealing with a cold, stark, dreary landscape for many months (January and February, specifically). Phenology is the study of the timing of recurring biological events, and lately, the timing has been somewhat off.
    But it's interesting that Virginia Tech physiology specialist John Seiler says trees native to the region have a mechanism in place that kicks in, even in this crazily warm weather. They have to have so many "chilling hours" before they break out into bloom in warming weather. My dogwood and cherry trees definitely stayed "put" without bursting into color this year. And now that the cold in January is back and dormant they should stay dormant.
    The ground hogs haven't come out yet; that tradition/legend is about whether the ground hog (called a "woodchuck" up north) sees his/her shadow or not. It's said the first prediction about how early spring would come was in the 1886 "Punxsutawney (PA.) Spirit" newspaper. It predicted that if the ground hog -- Punxsutawney Phil -- didn't see his shadow, there would be an early spring. Europeans had thought badgers and hedgehogs could foretell the future and brought that concept to America. (I really loved Bill Murray's movie "Ground hog Day," by the way. Sometimes I wish I could do over a day or experience, like bad hair days, when I accidentally walk into the men's room, when an editor isn't interested in my writing, etc.)
    Like the trees, not matter the weather, time marches on for them. Whether you're Kylo Ren or a stuck in one place tree, hopefully you can deal with unexpected changes and "weather" them well.
    

About trees, tree bud i. d. in winter

                                Soon tree buds will open, like this saucer magnolia with the furry buds.

    Spring will be upon us soon, but last week I saw robins in the snow...
                               Snow Robins

     Robins in the snow
     As the white around us grows,
     Hopping on their merry way,
     On this wintry March day.
     Fighting off the starlings
     Who weren't exactly darling,
     Blue jays getting into the act,
     Jumping on snow to pack
     it down and compete for the food.

    About Trees ---
    Did you know that the red maple is one of the most plentiful here in southwest Virginia forests ("ubiquitous" is the word)? 
     I went with a group of "budding" Master naturalists on this unique walk, up a bank away from a parking lot at Pandapas Pond, the parking lot just barely melted enough for my Chevy to find a spot I could get out of. We chatted casually till one of the organizers, Dianna B, made her appearance, as I asked my fellow naturalist friend about if her daughters had built a snowman during the last week. (She complained that they hadn't had school in the last 13 days, and when her husband was teaching a college class she had to somehow work on her computer at home with a 6 and 9 year old -- good luck.)
    So  how the heck do you identify a tree in the woods, in the middle (or end) of winter? No foliage, no flowers, and they mostly look gray, right? Our guide, Virginia Tech forester John Peterson, was very specific and pulled down a number of very small branches and twigs with buds for our group to look over. Did you  know that the red maple actually "has" red buds? And later, in fall, its green, jagged edged leaves will turn a bright red as well. But the sugar maples have them beat in the color dept. in fall. Their leaves vary, even on the same tree, from yellow, to yellow-orange, to red and deep red-orange. Really pretty, in my view. But Peterson said the sugar maples were fussy about soil type and weren't as readily seen in the Appalachian woods as the red maples.
    Like the photo above, we also found a "furry" budded tree, the cucumber magnolia. I'm not sure where the cucumber name comes from, but it certainly has soft to the touch buds.
Other trees common to the woods in this region include various pines, like Virginia pine, Table Mountain pine, and white pine, and hemlock, another evergreen. Oh, and pitch pine too. They are very close in appearance and it takes knowledge of certain characteristics (like the size of the needles, the type of bark, the shape of the particular cone) to get them right. Not rocket science, but may take a little memorization. And we did this standing in an inch of snow much of the afternoon. Good thing I wore a hat so that I didn't catch a chill!

What is by my door

     Near our front door, just besides our somewhat prolific red bush (now fading out), is a compound leaf of what looks like a "mini- tree", that's come out of nowhere. This means it could be the volunteer, invasive "Tree of Heaven". But it has leaves with serrated edges, which the Tree of Heaven doesn't have. It seems to be, more likely, mountain ash or maybe a type of sumac.