The last great harvest of white pine in New England was, roughly, from 1890 to 1925. The loggers cut not only the pines but any hardwoods that had sprung up in the openings in the pine woods; they cut clean, in logging language—took all the usable trees. But they left a fire-inviting tangle of slash and trimmings; and where fires swept, the hills were soon eroded down to bedrock and the woods were slow in coming back. Elsewhere, hardwood sprout thickets sprang up in a few years. Hardwoods sprout from their stumps. Of the native conifers, only pitch pine will renew itself from the stump; once a white pine or hemlock is cut, the roots die and that tree is gone forever. But many of the hardwood stump lands became sprout thickets, then new hardwood forests, with oak, maple, beech, ash, hickory, birch.
The terms “hardwood” and “softwood” are confusing. They are lumbermen’s terms, now taken over by foresters despite their ambiguity. To the lumberman, any cone-bearing tree, pine, spruce, hemlock, etc., is a softwood. Broad-leafed trees, oak, maple, beech, hickory, even poplar and birch, are all hardwoods. The distinction is arbitrary. Yellow pine, for instance, though it is as hard as maple, is a softwood. And birch and poplar, each as soft as white pine, are hardwoods. To me, this doesn’t make sense; but argument over it is futile.
Oak, beech, sugar maple, and white birch like a heavy, fertile soil. But I notice that all of them make out on my own mountainside, which in many places has thin soil and is persistently rocky. I know, however, that they do best in places where there was a thick earlier growth of gray birch and quick-growth underbrush that built up a thick mat of leafmold with their leaves and fallen branches. In the thinnest-soil places the gray birches still predominate, building up that mat of leafmold. They are weedy, quick-growth trees that come down by the dozen in Winter storms, rot in a season or two, and sprout generously from the root. Ten years of gray-birch growth will create enough soil to nurture oaks and maples, so they have an important place in the evolution of any woodland.
The primitive oak forest—oak and chestnut, really, and even including a good deal of beech; they are all of the same botanical family—originally covered the whole coast of Massachusetts and most of Rhode Island and Connecticut and extended from there south and west. North of the oak-chestnut woodlands was the hemlock-white pine area, which had large groves of northern hardwoods, mostly birch and maple, scattered through it; this area extended into southern Maine and covered the southern half of New Hampshire and Vermont. North from there the woods were primarily spruce and northern hardwoods. To a degree, those areas persist today, with a good deal of overlapping. Hemlock, for example, grows abundantly in southern Connecticut where there is protection from severe wind and blazing Summer sun. And where the soil is somewhat fertile and moist, especially on north slopes facing swamps, the spruce-hardwood type of woods will often be found in southern Vermont and New Hampshire and even in Massachusetts, normally the hemlock-white pine area.
The really old oak forests have all been destroyed, primarily because their area happened to be that part of the Northeast which was first settled and became most densely populated. Actually, in terms of geological environment, the oak forests shouldn’t have been here in the Northeast to begin with. The climate is too cold and too damp. The oaks belong in the more temperate Appalachians. But apparently they migrated northward several thousand years ago, just after the last great ice sheet melted, when the climate was warmer than it has been in recent centuries. Somehow the oaks came to New England, throve, and made a slow adaptation to weather changes as they came. If, as some believe, we are now in a long-range warming trend again, perhaps the oaks that have persisted here will move still farther northward in the next few centuries.
The hardwood forest seldom makes as dense a canopy as the conifers do, and because the hardwoods shed their leaves in the Fall they allow six or seven months of sunlight to reach the forest floor. So most hardwood forests have a growth of underbrush and even a considerable population of lesser trees. My own woods are pretty well mixed as a result of repeated cutting in the past, but even there I find a familiar pattern, a pattern that persists in most of the hardwood forests I know, especially in the maple or birch woods. For instance, there is sassafras, of the pungent root and twig, and sleek-barked hornbeam and weedy chokecherry with an occasional big bird cherry. There is a scattering of oak and shagbark hickory. Here and there are white ash, usually in clumps and shooting up to claim their share of the sunlight. And flowering dogwood persists, never much of a tree but wonderfully beautiful in May with white blossoms that make the lower woodland look as though it were full of white butterflies.
Among the bushes I usually find hazel and laurel and spicebush and various viburnums. And the hardwood forest floor, with its dappling sunlight and deep mull of leafmold, is almost always rich with such wildflowers as hepatica, bloodroot, columbine, wild geranium, Jack-in-the-pulpit, anemone, moccasin flower. Partridgeberry grows there, even in deep shade, and occasionally I still find trailing arbutus, though I would not tell anyone except my wife where to find it, and I whisper it to her.
But this is true only of mixed hardwood forests or of woods primarily of maple or birch. I have never seen a real forest of ash or hickory, for instance, or of elm for that matter. Those trees seem never to colonize extensively, as maples, birch, and oaks sometimes do. They grow in groves or in clumps or individually, seldom covering more than an acre or two with their own seedlings.
When you find an oak woods you will find limited undergrowth and few of the lesser trees. Not far from where I live is a patch of oak woods only about twenty acres in extent where not another tree grows except out at the margin, where there is a fringe of young ash and maple. The reason is rather simple. Oak leaves are tough, leathery, and full of tannin. They decay slowly. Earthworms, which soon reduce the softer, sweeter leaves of most other hardwoods to leafmold, dislike oak leaves. So the oak leaves form a thick, fibrous layer on the floor of the oak woods where other trees cannot get a roothold and even few bushes except blueberries thrive. Relatively few flowers can grow in the oak-leaf mat, either. In oak woods I find among the Spring flowers only goldthread, starflower, some partridgeberry, and, most common of all, big patches of Canada Mayflower, which some call wild lily of the valley. These flowers can tolerate the acid soil of the oak leaves and manage to find a roothold in the tough mat.
On some of the mountainsides and other uplands of the Northeast you will find large patches of blueberry bushes. If you look back in local records almost invariably you will find that those blueberry patches were, a generation or two ago, oak woods. When the oaks were cut, usually for lumber or charcoal, the blueberries already had a foothold, and with the trees gone the berries throve. Dig into the soil and you may find it toughly matted with the fibers of those old oak leaves, which still haven’t completely rotted away.
To find the real wealth of Spring flowers in the woodland, go to maple or birch woods or mixed woods such as mine. In such a place the softer leaves have leavened those of the occasional oak and the processes of decay and earthworm energy have built a deep, fertile mull. Typical of such places is a spot on my own hillside where there are several clumps of white birch, half a dozen sugar maples, a big shagbark hickory, and a small grove of white ash at the margin. A brook, hurrying down the hillside in its own gully, spreads a small fan of misty falls among the ash trees, then leisures off across the open pasture beyond.
That woodland patch has deep leafmold, is on a slope facing the southeast, and gets moisture from the brook and its mist. The sun is broken only by bare branches from mid-October till mid-May. The combination of sunlight and rotting leaf litter warms the soil early, and when I go there in early April I find hepatica in full bloom and anemones waving on their hair-thin stems. By mid-April the bloodroot leaves appear and the first lanceheads of Jack-in-the-pulpit are in sight. Before May arrives I find violets in bloom there, wild ginger leaves thrusting up. Nearby are the light green leaves of the lovely little showy orchis, looking deceptiv
ely like Canada Mayflower leaves except that the orchis leaves are thicker and have no stems. The orchis, by the way, comes to bloom when my apple trees first open blossom, never varying that schedule more than a day or two.
All these flowers appear early, hurry into leaf, and blossom. They get their season’s work done before the tree leaves have spread a full canopy. And only a few of them continue in leaf long after they are in full shade. You can mark a patch of Jack-in-the-pulpit in May, go back in July and find almost no trace of it. You won’t recognize those Jacks again until late September, when the closely clumped berries, hidden in the undergrowth of grass all Summer, have turned an eye-catching lacquer-red. Bloodroot and wild ginger simply vanish by the end of June; they retreat into the root, as do the anemones, which I seldom find after June.
Identification of trees is not really difficult if you use your eyes, your common sense, and a good handbook. Some of the willows still baffle me, but I get some consolation in knowing that they baffle others, too; willows, like sunfish, crossbreed and produce hybrids by the dozen. When I find a big willow with dark brown bark and narrow, rather dull leaves I mark it down as a black willow; when I see a somewhat smaller willow with broader leaves that have a distinct shine I tag it as a shining or glossy willow; and when I see a shrubby willow with smooth, greenish bark I know it is one of the pussy willows, especially if it grows at the edge of a bog. All willows like wet places and all have silvery catkins, but the catkins of the pussy willow are bigger than those of the others. The really big pussy willows that you can get at the florist’s in early Spring are produced on cultivated, hybrid trees or bushes; the wild ones are seldom more than half that big.
Aspens, poplars, and cottonwoods belong to the poplar family and are all called “popples” in New England. All have rather thick, heart-shaped leaves with long, limber stems; they whisper as the leaves catch every passing breeze and flutter against each other. Aspens and poplars usually grow with tall, tapering central trunks and without major branching; cottonwoods branch freely and fork from the main stem. The beginner may confuse aspens and poplars with birches. They all belong to the same big botanical family, but there are distinct differences in their bark. The beginner also tends to mistake the lesser gray birch and the big white birch, which look much alike especially when young. But the gray birch’s bark has a dirty white look and the white birch’s bark is a clean white. And gray birches are always small trees, seldom as much as eight inches through, whereas the white birch is a big, magnificent tree, sometimes three feet in trunk diameter. Whether you can tell them apart as young trees or not, if you find a white-bark birch more than a foot through you can be sure it isn’t a gray birch.
There are also other birches, including the black or cherry birch, which has reddish-brown bark much like that on a tame cherry tree and leaves like a cherry. I often pluck a twig of it to chew; the twigs and roots contain the essence used to flavor old-time birch beer. I find black birch on the hillside, almost never on a riverbank. Down along the water, with their roots in wet soil, I find the two biggest birches of all, red or river birch and yellow or swamp birch. They too have leaves like a cherry tree, lance-shaped. Red birch has cinnamon-red bark and the smooth bark of yellow birch is tinged with yellow and tends to peel in ragged strips.
Who does not know the common maple leaf? The two most common maples of the Northeast are the sugar maple and the red or swamp maple. They look much alike in Summer and Winter but are readily told apart in Spring and Fall. The sugar maple’s color is yellow—its flowers are greenish-yellow in April, and in October its leaves usually turn rich, golden yellow. The swamp maple’s color is red—its flowers are a deep wine-red, and in the Fall its leaves turn equally red; they provide the vivid flame of color that runs across the countryside, that glorious contrast to the gold of the sugar maple. Swamp maples like wet soil; sugar maples prefer dry soil. But one can’t be dogmatic, especially about the red maple. One Summer day a few years ago I was up on my own mountainside with a friend who is inclined to make pronouncements. We came to a good-size maple that I said was a red maple. He said: “It can’t be. Not growing up here.” I was sure it was, but I let him argue while I searched the grass beneath it. In a few minutes I showed him a small handful of winged maple seeds that had been overlooked by squirrels and chipmunks. Every seed was tinged with red, as red maple seeds always are; sugar maple seeds ripen to a yellowish tan. I showed them to my friend, who still held out until he had found a few of those red seeds for himself.
Two lesser maples of the uplands interest me because their common names, moosewood and elkwood, are reminiscent of pioneer days when moose and elk still roamed New England. Neither of these is more than a large shrub, seldom twenty-five feet high. Moosewood, sometimes called striped maple, has smooth bark striped light and dark gray up and down the trunk. It bears greenish-yellow blossoms and keys that dangle in a tassel on long stems. Elkwood, or mountain maple, has uniform dark gray bark, flowers late with tiny white blossoms in erect spikes, and bears the smallest of all maple keys. I find moosewood in the shade on high, rocky places, and I always find elkwood in a misty, rocky ravine where a brook’s spray cools the air.
One other maple, though common almost everywhere in the United States, fools many beginners. There is one just down my road, close by a clump of black and white ash trees. Not long ago a newcomer to the country, proud of his newly achieved ability to tell one species of ash from another, pointed to that tree and puzzled: “What kind of ash is that?” I had to tell him it wasn’t an ash at all but a maple, an ash-leaf maple more commonly known as a box elder. His confusion was understandable, for the compound leaves, three or five to a stem, look like deeply notched ash leaves, lance-shaped and not at all like the familiar maple leaf. But the tree bears its seed in the typical maple keys, which cling to it all Summer and well into the Winter. Box-elder sap, by the way, makes a special syrup and the whitest of all maple sugar, but the yield is low and practically nobody makes it any more. Syrup and sugar can also be made from birch sap and ash sap, but it is dark in color, rather bitter in taste. It once was made and used in backwoods medicine.
There are fifty-odd oaks native to North America and most of them can be found somewhere in the East. Fewer than half of them occur in the woods I know best, and I doubt that the amateur, unless he makes a special study of oaks, will ever identify as many as twenty-five species. The typical lobed oak leaf is one index but by no means infallible, since several rather common oaks have leaves like those of the beech or chestnut. But any tree that bears acorns, no matter what the shape of its leaves, is an oak. Even the evergreen live oaks of Florida and California bear acorns. So do the willow oaks of the South, though their leaves may be mistaken for the long, slim leaves of the glossy willow.
Nearly all oaks fall into two major divisions which the beginner can easily recognize, white oaks and black oaks. Those in the broad white-oak division have leaves with rounded lobes and their acorns mature and fall every Autumn. Those in the black-oak division have sharp-tipped leaf lobes and their acorns, which require two years to mature, cling to the branches all Winter.
When we first came to this farm I found several beech-leafed oaks on my mountainside and thought I had chestnut oaks, which are rather rare in this area. Then I found a few of their acorns, which were small, round, and not too bitter to the taste. Chestnut-oak acorns are almost twice as big, egg-shaped, and puckery with tannin. Then I learned that the chinquapin oak, for some strange reason, grows in this part of the Housatonic valley though it is rare elsewhere in New England. Mine were chinquapins, even more unusual than the chestnut oaks I thought I had. Which proves that you can’t draw hard and fast rules about where you will find a particular tree. The one rule-of-thumb those chinquapins followed was that they like damp soil—they were growing near a seep spring.
The elms are traditionally New England trees, but I have seen elm-lined streams in Iowa, elm-bordered streets in Kansas, and elm groves in Illinois. The
re are three species here in the Northeast, and I have all of them here on my place—the familiar American elm of classic wineglass shape, the slippery elm of stream banks and lowland areas, and the rock elm of stony hillsides. I sometimes wonder where the Baltimore orioles would hang their nests if we had no more elms. It seems to me that two of every three oriole nests I have ever seen were slung high in the limber tips of tall elm trees.
Botanically speaking, the pine family includes spruces, hemlocks, firs, and cedars as well as pines—which in a sense excuses those who call all evergreens “pines.” But in nontechnical language a pine is a cone-bearing evergreen whose needles—with one exception, the single-leaf pine, which grows only in the deserts of the Southwest—occur in clusters of two or more. Spruce, hemlock, and fir needles grow singly, and the cedars have overlapping scalelike leaves instead of needles.
The white pine is king of them all in my lexicon, though in the North the crown goes to the spruce and in the West it goes to the fir, with the hemlock rated at least as crown prince. The white pine is the grand tree of the Northeast, beautiful, stately, and eminently useful. Its needles grow in clusters of five, making it unmistakable. They are four or five inches long, soft and flexible to the touch. The cones are long and slim, sometimes eight inches long, and hang downward. The seeds ripen and fall the first season, but the empty cones sometimes remain on the tree all Winter.
The pitch pine’s needles are as long as those of the white pine, but they come in clusters of three and are stiff to the touch. This is the only eastern pine with a growth of needles along its main stem. The egg-shaped cones are seldom more than three inches long, are prickly, occur in clusters, and cling to the branches for years. When I see a ragged-looking pine loaded with old cones I set it down as a pitch pine before I even count the needles in a cluster.