Not named for its resemblance to a fish or a musical instrument: the basswood

Species name: Tilia americana

Common name: American basswood, American linden

Location: Western University campus

The American basswood (from now on I'll just call it the basswood, since I'm in one of the Americas) is a great native species that's tolerant of many environmental conditions naturally thrown at it in North America (from Ontario and Quebec all the way south to Nebraska and Tennessee, but some pocket populations even exist in Mexico!). It is highly drought-tolerant, is shade-tolerant, salt-tolerant, and even flood-tolerant. Unfortunately, this tree has largely been replaced in ornamental plantings by the littleleaf linden (or, if you'd like, the European basswood), Tilia cordata, because of the rather unruly growth of the basswood (you can read all about the littleleaf linden HERE).

What do I mean by unruly growth? Well, if you look at the first image that's not exactly the type of "specimen tree" you'd normally see on boulevards. Once this tree reaches a certain height, it's nearly impossible to stop it from starting its bushy growth. It naturally clones from the base of the tree, and suckers form at the base. If you catch them early they're easily removed with a pair of small hedge clippers. But because of their vigorous growth they can get very large very quickly. They can grow so fast, in fact, that it's sometimes difficult to determine which was the original stem and which are the suckers! There are a few varieties of the basswood that don't sucker, but early settlers in North America figured this tree was incredibly similar to the "lime tree" they grew back home, so they just brought their linden trees to North America. Now, you can find large linden trees planted along roadsides as ornamental trees.

If you look at the second and fourth photos, you can see a rather unique characteristic of the basswood that the littleleaf linden doesn't show, and that's that not all leaves are created equal. Since I didn't think to include an object for reference of scale (only realizing after the fact that this was a poor decision), I included scale bars for reference to measure the widths of the leaves. The second image above is of a canopy leaf, as evidenced by the fruit that can be seen growing (they do not grow on sucker shoots until they reach the canopy). The scale bar on that leaf corresponds to about 10 centimetres, or about 4 inches. That's a pretty average size for a leaf in the canopy, but the ones at the very top are slightly smaller (some in shaded areas near the trunk of the tree an also be slightly larger). The fourth picture is a leaf growing on a sucker, and the scale bar on that leaf is about 35 centimetres, or almost 14 inches. That's an absolutely enormous difference, and one that can be consistently seen in all basswood trees (so you don't have to worry that I chose a mutant tree!). So why the huge difference in leaf sizes? This phenomenon can actually be seen in many plants, but to a smaller extent: leaves changing sizes or shapes to be better competitors for light. The small leaves at the very top of the tree don't have to be very big to get lots of sunlight, because nothing is blocking them. In fact, many leaves at the tops of tree canopies are angled so only the edges are exposed directly to this sun which prevents them from getting sunburnt :) (this phenomenon is called "scorch" in plants and is common in plants grown outside of their native range) As you travel further down the trunk towards the ground, there is less and less sun that reaches the lower leaves. They must grow bigger, and are usually darker in colour, to be able to absorb more sunlight to make sugars. For something without a brain, basswoods are pretty smart!

Surprisingly enough, both the leaves and the fruits of this tree are edible to humans, although not all that pleasant. I can't say I've ever tried them, and I also can't say I'll be tempted to do so in the near future. That being said, if you get lost in a maple-beech hardwood forest and are looking for food, finding a basswood would be a nice source of vegetal munchies to sustain you for a few hours. The basswood has also been used as a medicinal plant for many centuries, having effects very similar to the littleleaf linden (which is arguably more potent). The leaves can be steeped in a tea and consumed as a treatment for cough, cold, flu, and indigestion (none of which have been demonstrated to be effective treatments according to modern scientific studies); the flowers can also be steeped for the same purposes but also as a diuretic to promote urine production, as a sedative, and as an antispasmodic to quell intestinal cramps; and even the wood is used (once burned to charcoal) as a treatment for lower leg ulcers, cellulitis, edema, or infection (again, none of these treatments have shown any promise in modern clinical trials). As an aside, rubbing burnt wood into an open wound in order to treat infection is probably not a smart idea. Wood is festering with microbes whether burnt or unburnt (it's amazing the types of bacteria and fungi that can grow on charcoal!), and in order to sterilize it you have to use it while it's hot; rubbing burning wood into an open wound will probably do more harm than good, and I'm sure you can imagine why!

Hackberries can be nature's lightning rods

Species name: Celtis occidentalis

Common name: common hackberry, northern hackberry

Location: Western University campus

To keep with our "super-massive-gigantosaur" trees on campus, I have a compilation of pictures of the two biggest hackberries. Actually, I might be wrong on that one. When I asked Jane back in June if these were the biggest hackberries, her response was "I think so." Because it wasn't an adamant "yes!," I can't be positive; I'll have to keep track of all of the really big hackberries on my wanderings around campus from now on to see if I can find a bigger one than this one.

Hackberries are trees that are native to the Carolinian forest, with their native range extending from Ontario and Quebec in Canada south to Tennessee in the United States. It still exists in moderate numbers, but has a low tolerance to disturbance so is often one of the first species lost from a forest after a clearcut (even though there are seeds that are still in the seed bank). That being said, they are very good urban trees, and can withstand quite a bit of air pollution with no ill effects. The berries on the tree, which you can see in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth images above, are a great food source for native bird species preparing to migrate south in the fall, as they are some of the most nutritious berries available. They start off green on the tree then mature to a reddish-orange. At this point they can be picked by humans for consumption but be warned: "tart" is an understatement. I tried a bright red berry and thought my mouth was about to turn inside out from the sourness of the fruit! The way that hackberries are traditionally consumed by humans is as a jam or preserve-like substance: the berries are cooked in a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water) until they are mushy. They can then be used exactly like cranberry sauce on meat! After turning red/orange on the tree they start to turn a dark purple-black, and this is what birds consume. This concentrates many of the sugars in the fruit to make it more energizing, but also concentrates other compounds that react not very nicely with the human digestive system. If eaten raw they can cause severe stomach upset (but nothing that would require a hospital visit unless a whole bucket were to be consumed!). Once they're black and wrinkly like the bottom picture they can be used in wines and beers as a fermentation product. They give the beverage a really fruity undertone that, from what I understand, is unusual and pleasant all at the same time. The good thing about hackberry trees is that the fruit that falls from the tree doesn't start to smell after sitting on your lawn after a while (the same cannot be said for apples, crabapples, cherries, Cornelian cherries, or plums!), and the spent fruit do not attract bees or wasps in large abundance. These trees do grow relatively quickly, so are a great possibility for a boulevard tree. The bark is also spectacular, and one of the characteristics of hackberries that can be used for proper identification even in the dead of winter. In very mature specimens where the bark is starting to peel off, you can soak the bark in water to plump it back up and carve cork-like plugs out of it to use as stoppers. A multi-function tree!

So how big is this tree? Well, it's pretty big. Not as large as the Burr oak from my last blog (which you can read HERE), but still pretty darn large. Here's the herbarium tag for reference:

If we use our same method of size estimation as last time, that tag is approximately 6 x 14 cm (or 2.5 x 5.5 inches). Using my "tag estimation method" (there are about 12 tags that could fit across the tree, so the diameter would be approximately 66 inches or 167.5 cm), the circumference of that tree is 207 inches (5.26 meters)! That's one big tree. But wait...didn't I say it wasn't as large as the Burr oak? Circumference-wise, it's definitely larger at the largest point. But what you'll see if you look closely at the shape of the tree, versus the shape of the big Burr oak, this tree tapers starting nearly at the bottom of the tree. The Burr oak is like a barrel, and only starts to narrow very near the top of the canopy. If you compare weight or total volume of the trunk of the tree, the Burr oak is much, MUCH larger. That being said, this hackberry still has quite a few years left to live (this one is probably "only" about 200 years old) so I'll have to come back to visit this tree every decade or so to see how long it lives and how much bigger it gets!

So what's so special about hackberries? Their berries aren't overly tasty (for humans at least), their wood is of terrible quality (as far as furniture-building goes; it's very brittle and has uneven grain so is only used in cheap fencing and cheap furniture) and isn't very decay-resistant, and they can get old. So far, not very exciting-sounding. Well let me tell you...hackberries can withstand a huge level of "unanticipated stress" and make it out unscathed. Most trees, especially established trees, could never tolerate being split in half and heal up just fine. Hackberries regularly do this. Here's an example:

That tree might not look like much (for size perspective, it's only about half the size of the tree pictured above), but it's a survivor of a really unusual phenomenon, and one that trees rarely recover from like it never happened: lightning strikes. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you'll see a big ridge running from a large wound about 5-10 feet off the ground that extends all the way up to the end of one of the tallest branches. The lightning likely struck the branch, and the electrical charge traveled down the tree until it found a way out; that might have been where a branch once was, or perhaps it was even just a crack in the bark from a burrowing beetle or woodpecker. The ridge, while nearly impossible to tell from the angle of the picture, extends all the way to the ground on the other side of this big hole in the tree. The fact that this tree was nearly split in half by a lightning strike and has since recovered like nothing ever happened is pretty telling to how resilient this species actually is. An absolutely remarkable feat. Makes me want a hackberry just to have it get struck by lightning. What a great story to be able to tell your grandkids, or even great-grandkids!

One of the last big burly oaks on campus

Species name: Quercus macrocarpa

Common name: bur oak (sometimes burr oak or even burl oak), mossycup oak

Location: Western University campus

Burr oak trees (that's how I spell it since that's how I was taught to spell it, but Bur oak is just as common a spelling) are native to the Carolinian forest of eastern North America, and are still present throughout much of their native range. Unlike most oak species, the burr oak does best in open areas like savannahs (depending on the area, they can sometimes be the only oak species in a traditional Oak Savannah habitat) and actually does rather poorly in forested areas. It is very shade-intolerant but grows very quickly, and these two characteristics have made it one of the most popular boulevard trees (or landscaping tree). The burr oak is also incredibly long-lived, with some individuals reaching ages of 350 years or more! That's one old tree!

Like most oak species, the burr oak is known for its masting. Masting is when a tree over-produces fruit in an attempt to overwhelm seed predators so that some of their offspring (fruits are the structures produced by plants to carry and protect their seeds, which are their babies) make it to the next generation. Burr oak seeds are some of the most prized nuts in the eyes of wildlife (like squirrels, deer, and in some places even bears), and they will selectively eat burr oak acorns over any other type of acorn. There are a few reasons why this occurs: first, the acorns are the largest of any oak species ("macrocarpa" means "big fruit"). Second, the acorn wall, or that tough shell you have to crack through to get to the yummy meat of the nut, is quite thin compared to other oak species so it's much easier to eat. Third, there are fewer tannis in the acorns of the burr oak, which make it much more palatable than other oak species. They are rumoured to even be choice edibles to humans, although I've never tried one. As long as you roast it a bit I could see them being at the very least edible, but tasty? I don't know if I'd go that far. I would make a terrible forager! When tree seeds are the most eaten food item of an animal species that has co-evolved with the tree, they tend to use really odd yearly cycles to over-produce fruits. These masting years, depending on the species, are every 7, 9, or 11 years. Our red oak in the front yard had a masting year a couple years ago. It sounded like it was raining acorns every time the wind lightly blew through the tree! It was incredible. The squirrels didn't know what to do with themselves :) To put it into perspective just how many burr oak acorns are eaten by wildlife, there are reports of certain trees in Tennessee and Kentucky in "bear country" near the Great Smokey Mountains having a 0% reproductive rate in some years (non-masting years, that is). When you set up video cameras to check out what's going on with these trees reproducing less than their neighbours, you catch bears climbing the trees and eating every single acorn they encounter. They'll even rip off branches or shake the trunk of the tree to get the ones higher than they can climb (bears are heavy, you know!), and then scramble down the tree to eat what dropped. Something tells me you don't want to come between a burr oak and a bear...

Unfortunately, the burr oak that I took a picture of and its nearest equally old neighbour are on their way out as far as tree lifetimes go. The third picture above shows where a branch broke off many, many years ago and a massive hole has formed in its place. I have no idea if the hole is occupied, but it's large enough to be an ideal place for a Great Horned Owl to build a nest. And those birds are huge! It would also be a good nesting place for a raccoon family, or the equivalent of a Hollywood mansion for a family of squirrels. The fourth picture shows where on that same tree the bark is starting to come off the tree. Unlike in my previous blog post about the butternut (which you can read HERE), this is not a direct result of a fungal infection. There is now likely a fungus that has exploited the tree's old age and exposed wood, but that bark fell off because the tree is just getting old and nearing the end of its natural life. The last picture shows where more bark is coming off the tree near the base, and you can see that it, at one point, was heavily infested with insects. Again, that's likely not what caused the bark to come off in the first place, but once the old rotting wood was exposed the insects took advantage. The tree is also likely hollow, because the old inner wood of trees is often decayed by fungi before the tree is completely dead; this is called heart rot. This also doesn't directly kill the tree, but rather creates a standing hollow tube. Doesn't take much of a wind storm to knock the tree down once the structural integrity is compromised. I personally have no idea how old this tree is (I might be "old" according to my students, but I'm not THAT old!), but I'm guessing upwards of 250 years. It will be a shame to see this tree come down in a storm, and I'm sure it's not that many more years before it does.

Aside from being some of the oldest trees that can be found around southern Ontario and the eastern half of the United States, burr oaks can also be some of the largest. They grow to be very, very tall trees but also grow to an enormous girth. It's hard to tell from the above pictures, but the burr oak I was taking pictures of is one of the largest trees on campus. To put it into perspective, I took a picture of the width of the tree at "breast height" (about 4 feet off the ground; this is traditionally a way to determine if a tree is ready for logging) with the arboretum label for size:

Still doesn't really look like much, but that arboretum label measures 2.5 by 5 inches (or about 6 x 14 centimetres). So if you figure out what the diameter of the tree is (by my rough estimation, 63 inches or 160 centimetres), that's...enormous. That would make it about 196 inches in circumference (or almost 5 meters!). You would need three people joining hands to comfortably circle the tree. That's bigger than enormous! There are two trees of this size that are burr oaks, and a couple hackberries (look for this species to be covered in my next blog), all in the same general location. Standing here looking at the trees, I often wonder what these trees have "seen". They would have survived the entire outwards growth of the city I live in, and would have been here long before London, Ontario actually became a city. I wonder who planted them? Or was this an acorn that sprouted there? If it was, where was the tree it came from? It would be long gone by now. Did anyone care for this tree when it was a wee seedling? If so, who were they? What did they do? Did the Kingsmill family, the ones that owned the property that Western University is built on for many generations before Western purchased all of the land in 1919, ever use this tree for a rope swing? When there were bears living in southwestern Ontario, did bears used to climb this tree to get the acorns? So many questions and no one left to ask...

When I helped Jane Bowles with an arboretum tour back in June, she said that the four trees in this small patch of campus were "some of" the largest, oldest trees on campus. I never thought to ask her where the biggest or the oldest trees were. I guess I'll have to go exploring to find them myself now (and learn a bit about how to determine the age of a really big tree depending on the species). Until then, I'll just have to be content with the geezer trees I know :)

The unfortunate case of the butternut tree

Species name: Juglans cinerea

Common name: butternut, white walnut

Location: UWO campus

The butternut is a rather unfortunate tree, and a great example of how "world connectedness" is sometimes a bad thing. The butternut is native to the Carolinian forest, but is now completely absent from North and South Carolina in the United States, and almost completely absent from Ontario in Canada (the two extremes in the natural range of this species). Towards the middle of the range of this species in Ohio, numbers are dwindling quickly. Why is the population of butternut decreasing, you ask? Well, the saying "when in doubt blame it on a fungus" certainly applies here. In fact, when in doubt blame it on two fungi is even more appropriate.

Before we go blaming things on fungi, let's talk a bit about the butternut tree itself. It looks incredibly similar to the black walnut (which you can read all about HERE), but differs in two major ways. The first way that a butternut differs from a black walnut is in the shape of the leaves. Both butternuts and black walnuts have numerous leaflets in their compound leaf (and this number often depends on maturity of the leaf which determines the length of the petiole or the "leaf branch", rather than genetics determining number of leaflets in a compound leaf), but the butternut leaf ends in a terminal leaflet where the black walnut leaf ends in a terminal pair of leaflets. Unfortunately, the wind can shear off the terminal leaflet (pictured in the second image near the pink arrow) so the leaves end up looking identical. So when using leaves to identify species, make sure you look at more than just one! The second way to tell them apart can be seen in the third image above, but admittedly this is a terrible picture of the fruit (the pink arrow points to the fruit in the third image). On this entire tree there was only one single fruit produced this year, so I didn't have much to work with for angles to photograph. But in a nut shell (pun intended), the fruit (or nut) of the black walnut is spherical, but the fruit (or nut) of a butternut is shaped like a football. This can even be distinguished by looking at the shell casings on the ground, so take a poke around the base of the tree if you're trying to identify a butternut or black walnut. Like the black walnut, the meat on the inside of the nut is completely edible, and apparently tastes wonderful when roasted slightly in the oven or pan-fried a bit (I haven't ever had the pleasure of eating a butternut, so I don't speak from experience on this one; see below for why I DON'T recommend eating butternuts).

I guess there's no time like the presence to talk about an evil fungus. The steady decline of butternuts isn't just due to habitat loss (and there is quite a bit of that happening in the Carolinian deciduous forest in Eastern North America!). It's actually because of a disease called Butternut Canker, which is caused by a fungus. :( I know, sad face. But, of course, that's a boring story so I wouldn't just tell you about a single fungus. Recent evidence shows that it's not just one fungus that's responsible for the butternut canker disease, it's actually two. The first one comes in and attacks the tree, causing a localized disease that, theoretically, the tree should be able to overcome. Unfortunately, this causes open wounds in the bark of the tree, exposing the underlying wood and the juicy vascular tissue. This vascular tissue is critical for the survival of the tree, and is the only living part out of all of the wood in the trunk in the tree. Because it is located just under the bark, this is one of the reasons why cracking bark is a critical step in so many fungal infections (sometimes even insect infections or bacterial infections) of trees. Once this vascular tissue has been exposed, the second fungus comes in and completely kills the tree. It will start off being one or two limbs of the tree near the crown (a fancy word for the top), and once the branch loses all of its leaves it won't grow them back the next year. Even pruning these dead branches won't save the tree; once limb death starts it's only a matter of time before the rest of the tree is killed. Because it's a combination of two different fungi that cause the death of the tree, it is exceedingly difficult to come up with a solution to prevent infection. The first fungus that attacks the tree (it has a ridiculously long name: Sirococcus clavigignenti-juglandacearum) is carried by potentially hundreds of different vectors, from the wind to other plant species to insects, and nearly all of these are impossible to prevent from coming in contact with the tree. You might think that lone trees would be most susceptible to this disease, but actually that's not the case. The canopy of the forest traps a lot of pathogens in the circulating air within the forest, so it actually increases the incidence of butternut canker. Lone trees often survive much longer without the disease. This fungus, an invasive fungus introduced from Asia, has managed to infect nearly 90% of all butternut trees left in existence. It won't be long before this species goes extinct, as there is no way of preventing the disease. It's an incredibly unfortunate set of circumstances for butternut trees, and for the Carolinian forest in general. We're about to lose one of the most majestic trees in the deciduous forest of eastern North America. Because this species is so critically endangered, do the world a favour: if you happen to find an intact butternut fruit, don't eat it! Instead, hold it in your hands, do a little "rain and good health to butternuts" dance, and lovingly plant it in the ground. Cover it with some chicken wire (I recommend making a box, and burying it at least 4 inches into the ground over where you planted the seed), and hope for the best. These are one of the preferred food sources for deer and squirrels, so not many seeds manage to escape being eaten (especially considering how few are left). I'm not going to suggest you take a seed home and try to grow it in a pot; that would be illegal in Canada according to our Species At Risk Act (SARA). Even if you plant the seedling back exactly where you found the nut, it would still be against Canadian endangered species laws, and much the same regulations exist in the United States. You might ask who enforces these laws and how common these people are in butternut territory...

Instead of ending on a sour note, let's end on a happy note! There is currently an effort underway in both Canada and the United States to try to protect the butternut in some way from disease. The method developed currently will not save the trees that are dying, but will instead protect the new generation of butternut trees. When butternuts are hybridized with the Asian walnut, the tree has almost complete resistance to the butternut canker. This is great, but unfortunately it dilutes the genetic pool of butternuts with Asian walnut genes. To try to combat this (since hybrids don't actually have any status according to any endangered species act anywhere in the world), hybridizing this hybrid with a different butternut tree causes the tree to have characteristics that are nearly identical to the butternut, but still have the disease resistance of the Asian walnut. This process is known as "back-crossing," and is commonly done with agricultural plant species to introduce disease resistance. This still doesn't make a "true butternut," but the resulting tree is nearly identical to a genetically pure butternut. There might come a day when we have forests containing this "butternut" (technically called a "Butter-Buart" which to me just sounds strange) in abundance once again. I wonder if anyone has tested the edibility of the butternuts of this backcrossed hybrid to determine tastiness... :)

The sedge masquerading as nutsedge

Yesterday I did a Sherwood Fox Arboretum tour with a group on campus (the Senior Alumni). We walked around a tiny corner of the campus, talked about a bunch of trees (but certainly not all!) that we saw on the way, they asked questions (I tried my best to answer most of them!), we laughed at my silly jokes, and then we all went on our merry way. If you're here reading my blog because I told you about it yesterday, welcome! I'm glad you found it. To the rest of the almost 21,000 of you that have discovered my blog: you're awesome! Thanks for helping make my "little project" turn into a rather large project read worldwide. I appreciate your eyeballs glancing over my blog every so often :)

Species name: Cyperus sp. (probably Cyperus strigosus)

Common name: false nutsedge

Location: Western University campus

Sedges are neat and wonderful plants, but most of them get completely overlooked by the average person. They are relatives of grasses (in that they're in the same order of plants, which I guess would make them cousins in a way), along with rushes, but have one notable characteristic that distinguishes them from the grass family. More on that later. A lot of people, even a lot of professional botanists and a lot of amateur botanists, completely ignore sedges (any kind of grass, really) when coming up with plants to identify because they're just so gosh darn hard to ID without a microscope. There are so many species of grasses and grass relatives that it is incredibly easy to misidentify them. There are only a few subtle characteristics that can be used to identify different species of grasses and sedges, most of which require the use of either a dissecting or compound microscope. Characteristics like the shape and size of the flower (in this species you can see the flowers in the bottom picture; they are about 1 mm long and are yellow, with the white stamens sticking out to disperse pollen), and the shape and size of the pollen grains (not pictured since that requires a microscope to see, and that would have required me collecting the plant which I don't normally do). Since I have neither of these to work with, the best that I can do is a "best guess" based on habitat (a place that regularly gets wet, and can be quite swampy at times), country location (North America), and colour of the flowers based on the time of year (many turn brown as the seeds mature, and seed maturation is in the spring for some species, the summer for others, and the fall for yet others). I know I definitely have the genus correct, this is most certainly a Cyperus. I'm also pretty certain about the species name (C. strigosus) because of the presence of wispy leaves at the bottom of the stem (many sedges only have leaves under the flowers, not also at the base of the stem), and the general shape of the inflorescences or the flower heads.

If I am correct about my identification, this species of sedge is native to North America, from Canada all the way south to parts of northern Mexico. It prefers disturbed areas, as this species is only good at competing for resources with other plants when there is low diversity and a large amount of available light. This is the same as many species of sedge; in established meadows it is rare to see a lot of sedges (although, at the periphery they might lead you to believe they might be common, since edge habitats are disturbed areas by definition). In areas of bare soil (like newly tilled agricultural fields or even backyard gardens), it is common for this plant to invade and spread rapidly. It can become invasive in some areas that are under constant states of disturbance, and is also considered an agricultural pest.

So what makes sedges, as a group, interesting? They look a whole lot like grass, and with one exception have no major economic value. The fascinating part about these plants is their stem structure: it's triangular. If you make a cross-section of the plant, it is incredibly obvious that the stem is triangular (mint stems are, as a general rule, square but some species have "rounded square" stems so you have to use your imagination a bit to see the square; this is not the case with sedges. They all have distinctly triangular stems). You can even tell that the stems are triangular in the middle picture by looking at the leaves emerging from just under the inflorescences: the largest leaves all radiate outwards from each edge of the triangle, and the smaller leaves under them radiate outwards from the three corners of the triangle stem. If you think about it, maintaining a triangle during growth would be incredibly difficult. The more you push the sides of a triangle outwards to "make room" for stuff on the inside, the more it becomes a circle. You'd think that after the stem was finished growing, it should be completely cylindrical and only have three ridges or bumps where the triangle's corners used to be. That's not actually what happens, since fully-mature sedges still have triangular stems. Plants aren't as simple as we think they are!

I mentioned somewhere up there that there's only one economically important sedge. Even at that, the economic importance of this species is significantly less than what it once was. I'll give you bonus points if you can figure out what it is (these points can be added to other hypothetical points you get in other places. You know, like bonus points you get for doing the dishes or walking the dog without having to be asked. Those kinds of points).

The pin oak

Species name: Quercus palustris

Common name: Pin oak

Location: Ontario

My friend Tanya demanded more native species in my blog, so here we go! Another native tree, just for Tanya. The pin oak is just barely native to Ontario; the native range extends only as far north as my hometown so I guess I should be considered lucky! The native range extends quite far south, as far as Georgia and all the way west to Oklahoma and Kansas. In Ontario this tree is relatively rare except where planted for ornamental value, and it's difficult to say what might happen with climate change. Species ranges are expected to move towards the poles (so in this case, north) but one also has to keep competitive ability in mind before you make those kinds of assumptions. The pin oak is an incredibly poor competitor, especially when it comes to shade and moisture. In the spring, during the seasonal flooding periods, the pin oak is incredibly tolerant of being partially submerged, and opts to set leaves later in the season once the ground is drier. During the growing season, however, the pin oak is very intolerant of standing moisture around the trunk, and any moisture at all towards the base of the tree often leads to severe decay. Unlike most other oaks, the pin oak doesn't have a large taproot that it uses for underground support; instead it has a very shallow root system that stretches over a large area. Once the bottom of the trunk is rotten, the tree no longer has a support system and it is prone to being blown over during any kind of severe weather. This tree is also very shade intolerant; even small shrubs can out-compete this tree for resources when young. It just doesn't seem to have the ability to push up out of the lower canopy, even though the potential height of this tree is 60 feet or more.

I guess this is the first blog post where I have to admit that my plant identification skills are sometimes aided just by the location that I'm in. My hawk-eyed blog readers will notice that there's a post coming out of the ground in front of the tree with an information plaque on the top. All of Western University's campus is an arboretum, which is basically an outdoor museum of living plants. It's not quite a botanical garden, since botanical gardens often have public greenhouses associated with them (we don't), but they also have ALL plants labelled to the species level. At Western, it's only the trees that have labels, not all plants. The label contains the common name, the species name, the family that the species is in, and soon will have information about whether or not the tree is native, and whether or not the tree is considered invasive. It's incredibly convenient being able to walk around campus and learn about plant identification; you can actually walk up to the trees and touch them, smell them, feel their bark, break open young twigs to see what colour they are, etc. It's also incredibly helpful to be able to see a tree through the seasons, which can also help with remembering names of trees.

But back to the pin oak!

The uses of pin oak are many aside from the ornamental value of this plant. The pin oak is actually one of the many reasons why we now have an entire field of work called "forensic botany"! Sometimes the pin oak is sold as lumber under the name "red oak," which as you know is a completely different species. If it stopped there, then I wouldn't really see a problem. But in reality the wood of the pin oak is much weaker compared to the red oak, has much less of a desirable colour and grain pattern, and has many, many more knots in the wood than a red oak would. Using this species in place of red oak could lead to disastrous consequences, depending on the intended purpose of the wood. The best use of pin oak wood is as firewood, or to make wooden pins for building construction (where the common name probably originates). It is also a medicinal plant, having been used historically in a tea used to treat intestinal and abdominal pain.