Sunday, February 24, 2019

Globe Willow


Weather: Snow Friday night left six inches on some wood surfaces. It even collected on the narrow edges of the vertical board fence. During the day, the snow melted from tree branches, then it got very cold last night.

Last useful snow: 2/23. Week’s low: 7 degrees F. Week’s high: 47 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens; everything else under snow

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

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

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Tasks: A friend told me about a friend of his who was Italian. A few weeks ago the friend of a friend was out with a pick axe making holes in the frozen ground to plant garlic. The weather may have been inhospitable, but his internal clock that defined when one planted had been activated.

Animal sightings: Some birds gathered on the rafters of my back porch Saturday afternoon before flying off.


Weekly update: Trees have characteristic shapes that are created partly by the species DNA and partly by the environment. I mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019 that no tree in northern Michigan has branches lower than a deer can reach.

Here, my junipers extend to the ground as do my neighbors’ arborvitae. The deciduous trees shape themselves.

The globe willow is the most conspicuous. I had to have the tree trimmers cut dead wood from it so the dead stems wouldn’t threaten my eyes when I walked by them. Most of the wood came from the base on the south, west, and north sides.

I think the problem is sun scald which is caused when trees warm up during the day then get cool enough in the night to freeze the sap that was softened by the sun. One of my neighbors had two large trees killed by that action.

I noticed the area under the globe willow is always the first part of my drive to lose its snow. It may be less snow falls under its branches, and the thinner veneer is quicker to go. It also may be the tree itself warms the ground. It may be dormant, but it still is breathing. The warmer ground then melts the snow, which then heats the tree and leads to problems with the sap.

My cottonwood apparently has been doing the same thing. I asked the trimmers to remove the branches that were hitting the fence and any dead wood they could reach. They removed several layers of low branches which had turned into a copse of underbrush.

I noticed the same thing happened with the Russian olive. A few years ago it had problems with the drought and the lower branches were the first to die. I didn’t had them removed, mainly because I forgot about them. They too have created a copse, only one that’s thorny.

These natural nests of deadwood, of course, can ignite in low fires. They probably are one of the things removed by controlled burns. And, they also are probably one of the traits that distinguish New Mexico forests and their management from those in Michigan or Florida.


Notes on photographs: All pictures taken 23 February 2019.
1. Vertical board fence at 6:30 am.

2. Area near the globe willow (Salix matsudana umbraculifera) at 6:30 am when everything was covered with snow.

3. Area under the globe willow at 3 pm when then only snow that had melted was under the tree on the south side.

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Logging Tools


Weather: It rained much of the night Thursday. I tried working Friday on setting the base course of bricks for a short wall to stop the drift of dirt near by gate. I could get an shovel through the outer edge of the bank, but when I moved back about six inches I hit white ice. I know people somehow manage to dig in the winter, but I’m not up to using a pick axe.

Last useful rain: 2/14. Week’s low: 10 degrees F. Week’s high: 60 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca, alfilerillo, snapdragon, cheat grass; garlic chives are sprouting under the leaf cover.

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

What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: I found a small bird’s nest high in the catalpa. A neighbor’s cat used to lay on the boughs of the tree, and nothing touched the sand cherries below. That was some years ago, and last summer the fruit disappeared.


Weekly update: Thursday I had a local company cut down two trees, and remove deadwood and protruding branches from other trees. The head of the crew pointed to the branch to be cut, and the one logger cut it. Another picked up the trimmings and carried them to the fourth who put them through the chipper.

They used a chain saw for branches they could approach, and loppers on small branches. They often began with a horizontal chain saw mounted on a pole that could reach under the branches to get to dead wood. They also used it to reach branches that were beyond reach. The long handle eliminated the need to climb a ladder.

The tools had gasoline engines. In the hands of an idiot, the saws can create fire hazards with spilled fuel and sparks.

This equipment was very different from what was available a hundred years ago when loggers used steam-powered saws. Those saws burned wood for fuel, and were always a potential source for fire. The belts could maim.

Decades before that, farmers clearing land used axes and fire.

In Eaton County, Michigan, just north of where I grew up, families settled before the railroad was built. Unlike men along the Atlantic coast, who could sell the better trees they cut to sea-faring vessels, there was no market for the wood.

Bigelow Williams remembered:

"when a clearing was to be made, the chopper cut a row of trees so that their bodies fell in a straight line. Then similar rows were cut parallel to it and a few rods distant from each other, when the trees between these rows were cut so as to fall across the first rows, thus making immense hedges of fallen trees."

The cutting was done in mid-winter, and left to dry. By "August that they would burn quite readily, and wherever one tree fell across another it would almost inevitably burn off. When after a few days the fire went out and the coals cooled off, several men came with a yoke of cattle, a long chain and handspikes and piled the logs up, and where they had not been burned short enough to be handled, they were cut in two with an ax, and these log piles were then set on fire and burned."

The trees included black walnuts and ashes. Once transportation was available, these same trees that were used as fence posts, were dug out and sold to make cabinets and veneer for musical instruments.

Looking back, people lament the loss of good wood and shudder at the use of fire, but from 1840 looking forward there was only dense forest and no buyers. It was only after farms were established that railroads saw an economic opportunity in crossing the county and the wood could be sold.


Notes on photographs:
1. Birds nest high in the catalpa, 15 February 2019.

2. I had a cherry cut down that had not born fruit in ten years. The rootstock had shouldered aside the scion, and I suspected the pollen was sterile since few bees came around. All I could find out about the rootstock is that it was bred from "different Prunus forms." [2] When I looked at the stump, there was not a sign of the red heartwood one expects. 15 February 2019.

3. Six years ago I had a sour cherry cut down because the rootstock had taken over, produced inedible fruit, and gotten taller than the eaves. The stock most likely was Mazzard. Its stump looked like cherry wood. 25 March 2013.

End notes:
1. Wolcott Bigelow Williams. The Past and Present of Eaton County, Michigan. Lansing: Michigan Historical Publishing Association, 1906. 6–7.

2. H. Jänes and A. Pae. "Evaluation of Nine Sweet Cherry Clonal Rootstocks and One Seedling Rootstock." Agronomy Research 2:23–27:2004. 23.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Woodland Habits


Weather: The snow is gone from most places, but cold mornings returned on Friday. The ground still gets a little soft in the afternoon, but it refreezes at night. When I tried to dig someplace I could only penetrate half an inch.

Last useful snow: 1/22. Week’s low: 8 degrees F. Week’s high: 68 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca; new growth on alfilerillo and a snapdragon; cheat grass up

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

What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Saw footprints of the cat in soft mud before the cold returned. It sank a good quarter inch.


Weekly update: People who comment on the Peshtigo fire often dismiss it as caused by human carelessness. That judgement reflects the indoctrination we got as children from Smokey the Bear. It doesn’t comprehend the realities of living with wood as a fuel and gale force winds.

When I went to summer camp in Barry County, Michigan, in the 1950s we had few fires, and everything we did was hedged with restrictions. Once a week we broke into groups of 20 or 30 and went to designated areas to cook our dinners.

The cook areas were rimmed with rocks, and everything was cleared around the areas. We had to gather dead wood from the area for cooking. By the end of the summer, when five groups had scrounged for dead wood every Wednesday for eight weeks, there wasn’t much left.


We also had a ceremonial fire once a week that was even smaller. A teepee of kindling was built inside a small square of logs set on one another like a log cabin. In the early years it was set on the sandy beach. In later years it was moved to the pine area where a square brick fireplace a few feet high had been built. It also was used for cook fires by groups coming from town for the overnights required by the Camp Fire Girls’ program.

We never had simple camp fires when we would sit around and sing, like all the films show. I remember talking to someone who had gone to a day camp in New Jersey where they had huge bon fires. I assume the camp bought the wood.

We didn’t have that luxury. At the camp I attended sponsored by the Camp Fire Girls, our leaders were more parsimonious. The director had lived through the depression and World War II shortages. The only reason we had cook outs was the cooks were given one day off each week, and on Wednesday we had to fend for ourselves: cold cereal for breakfast, left overs for lunch, the cook outs for supper.

Every other camp I attended in the area had the same rules about fires: rim it with stones and gather dead wood from the ground. I remember a woman at the local day camp being especially adamant about fire, because the peat in swamps in an area north of town would burn for weeks if it got ignited. [1]

The Barry County camp was built on hills around a lake. It wasn’t good farm land, and so wasn’t cleared until 1901 when the Grand Rapids Bookcase Company began producing mission style furniture in the county seat of Hastings.

The land probably had only just begun to recover when it was sold to the camp in the 1930s. By the time I was there the trees were medium size hardwoods on the hills, and pines in the distance. The only tree I actually remember by species was a sassafras by the side entrance to the main lodge.


The area in front of the lodge was cleared of brush and small trees because that was where we gathered before meals. The area on the opposite side included the cemented area outside the kitchen where food deliveries were made. The rest of the land was covered with leaves. Dense shade suppressed the growth of young trees or wild plants. Flowers only were found in openings.

It’s one of the ironies of life that fire is what destroyed the camp. Lightening struck the main lodge in the spring of 1974. It must have been during a rain storm, and I think it probably burned itself out before any fire fighters arrived.

I only saw the results in August, after the debris had been cleared. Only the lodge burned. The surrounding trees were singed, but all that clearing, those habits of living in the woods, had saved them.


The camp was abandoned, and reverted again to wood lot. When a group was trying to sell it as a recreation property in 2011 they posted pictures that showed it had returned to state I knew in the 1950s.

Notes on photographs:
1. The lake with new trees growing where the beach used to be, 14 March 2011.
2. Clearing in pine woods area with Queen Anne’s lace blooming, 14 March 2011.

3. Cook fire at my local day camp, 1956. We did not clear the area around the stones as we ought to have done.

4. Camp lodge, postcard from the early 1950s.

5. Remains of the camp lodge after a spring fire, August 1974.

6. The woods as I remember them outside a sleeping cabin, 14 March 2011.

End notes:
1. Wolcott Bigelow Williams. Past and Present of Eaton County, Michigan. Lansing: Michigan Historical Pub. Assoc, 1906?. He wrote "In a very hot summer the peat became so dry in the tamarack swamps that it burned readily several inches deep, exposing the roots of the trees so that they fell over, and in the next hot summer the fire consumed them. The fire would smoulder in those peat beds for several weeks, and through several hard rains. Thus the tamarack swamps were transformed into wet prairies." (page 7)

Sunday, February 03, 2019

When Lumberman Ruled


Weather: Our weather has returned to its normal pattern. It may get cold in the morning, and it did during the descent of the polar vortex in the east, but the afternoons are warm. The thaw is afoot - and underfoot. The ground gives when one walks on it, the melting snow and ice puddle on half-melted ground that can absorb no more.

Last useful snow: 1/22. Week’s low: 12 degrees F. Week’s high: 60 degrees F in the shade. Snow on the ground since 12/26 remains in a few places.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca; new growth on alfilerillo and a snapdragon. Many arborvitae have turned brown.

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

What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Still little evidence animals are entering the yard


Weekly update: Lumbermen always have an answer for the problem with forest fires: let them cut and thin. People shudder because they remember the last time they were given a free hand. While they acknowledge large corporations maintain sustainable forest programs, they also know those aren’t the companies who win contracts awarded to lowest bidders.

Roy Dodge published photographs of Michigan Ghost Towns in 1970. [1] Time and again the captions referred to towns, like Averill in 1877 [2] and Nahma in 1921, [3] that were destroyed by fires. He also had pictures of fires in process, including Shelldrake in 1910 [4] and Metz in 1908. [5] The latter was so severe "the red-hot rails of the tracks melted." [6]

His three volumes documented the ways dried wood was everywhere. Near Alger, a photograph showed the Rifle River filled with cut logs floating down to Bay City and Saginaw. Above the river, trains crossed on wooden trestles. [7]

When the logs arrived at a saw mill they accumulated in the area. After they were cut, the wood or finished products were stacked in yards waiting for ships to haul them away. [8] In the Great Lakes area, work occurred in winter or all year, depending on location, but shipping was limited by ice in winter.

Loggers left debris, the twigs and branches that weren’t usable, along with the cut underbrush in piles where they may have burned them or let them dry. Railroads were essential to opening woodlands and temporary crews left piles of waste that had been cut to lay tracks. The slash later could be ignited by anything, especially sparks if it were near tracks. [9]

Everywhere there was sawdust: in the woods where trees were cut and in the saw mills and finishing plants. It, too, was left in the woods where it could ignite. In more industrial areas, it might be burned. Dodge showed a sawdust burner on the Sturgeon River that resembled a tall farm silo. [10]

Loggers and pioneer farmers living near forests grew accustomed to fire. In Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1871 fires in the west had been continuous. The summer had been unusually dry and, in the fall, farmers burned their stubble and burned woodlands to open new fields.

Then the winds started. Fires blew toward the city. The local employer, who made wooden products like barrels from wood that was too small for construction, [11] sent his men out to clear anything combustible and stockpiled water in barrels around the town. [12]

These winds weren’t the ordinary ones of fall, but part of a great cyclonic storm system that reached from Arizona to Michigan’s upper peninsula. [13] As the winds intensified, the small fires merged. In the woods, ground fires became crown fires. Chicago was in its path, as were parts of western Michigan and the Thumb in the east. Peshtigo was destroyed in hours. [14]

William Ogden, who owned the Peshtigo factory, was one of the more responsible lumbermen. But, when wind and drought combine human efforts only magnify their destructive force. Half the population of Peshtigo died that night, [15] and many more deaths are suspected on farmsteads where nothing remained but ashes. [16]


Notes on photographs: All taken 2 February 2019.
1. Melting snow in path on west side of house.
2. Peach (Prunus persica) buds at northern end of path where snow disappeared a while ago.
3. Revived vinca(Vinca minor)leaves under the peach.

End notes:
1. Roy L. Dodge. Michigan Ghost Towns. Sterling Heights, Michigan: Glendon Publishing, volume 1, 1970; volume 2, 1971; volume 3, 1973. This is still available on Amazon.

2. Dodge. 2:67.
3. Dodge. 3:88.
4. Dodge. 3:62.
5. Dodge. 2:164.
6. Dodge. 2:163.
7. Dodge. 1:33.
8. Dodge. 2:170.
9. Wikipedia. "Great Michigan Fire."
10. Dodge. 3:87.

11. William Converse Haygood. Notes to Peter Pernin. "The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account." Wisconsin Magazine of History 54:246–272:1971. 246.

12. Pernin. 251.

13. Eric R. Miller reconstructed the storm system from "observations made by the observers of the Signal Service, U. S. Army, at 5:35 P.M. Central Standard time, October 8, 1871." His map has been reprinted many times, including in Pernin, 100.

14. Joseph Schafer. "Great Fires of Seventy-one." Wisconsin Magazine of History 11:96–106:1927. 96–97. Miller’s map is on page 100.

15. Wikipedia gives the official death toll as around 1,500 in "Peshtigo Fire."
16. Haygood. 271.