Woods Behind Glass

The timing of Stephen Long’s Long View (Spring 2010) article was remarkably ironic for woodlot owners, foresters, and loggers based in Massachusetts.

His closing paragraph, which states, “We cannot put a fence around nature and leave it alone. But we can develop a humble reverence for the gift we’ve been given. Let the golden age of stewardship begin,” bore sharp contrast to conclusions reached by a committee reviewing management policy for Massachusetts’ state forests and parks.

That committee’s recommendation? The state should buy 20,000 acres of private woodlands and then permanently recategorize up to 70 percent of all state forests and parks as “Wildlands.” These forests (about 220,000 acres in total) would be made forever “off limits” to logging and most forest management practices.

How could such different conclusions be reached? That answer is easy: one opinion was that of a person who lives with nature, the other was made by folks who like the idea of it – and enjoy visiting it.

Malcolm Chase said it best: “Environmentalism increasingly reflects urban perspectives. As people move to the cities, they become infatuated with fantasies about land untouched by humans… and it’s partly a healthy trend. But this urbanization of environmental values also signals the loss of a rural way of life and the disappearance of hands-on experience with nature. So the irony: as popular concern for preservation increases, public understanding about how to achieve it declines.”

However, Northern Woodlands does help many understand their forests better. I think it’s the next best thing to being in the woods itself.

Ed Carlson, Princeton, Massachusetts

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Pitch Pine Communities Are Not Monocultures

In the spring edition of Northern Woodlands, Virginia Barlow discusses pitch pine (Pinus rigida). The article states that this species forms “a natural monoculture.” Having conducted numerous studies in pitch pine communities over the years, I take exception to the characterization of these communities as monocultures. Even in those communities where pitch pine is the only tree species present, there are numerous other species present that would indicate that they are not monospecific communities.

These communities usually contain a number of shrub and subshrub species that provide a greater diversity to the community. These include bearberry, low-bush and high-bush blueberry, huckleberry, and bear oak, to name a few. It is quite common to find a tangle of shrubs under the pitch pines.

Barlow’s article pointed out the characteristics that enable pitch pine to survive in fire maintained communities, namely basal sprouting and epicormic sprouting as well as a considerable number of serotinous cones. Not all of the cones are necessarily serotinous. Basal sprouting is by no means the only method whereby pitch pine survives in these systems. We found an average of 16,000 seedlings/ hectare one year following a catastrophic fire on Long Island. Four years later, there were still 7,500/hectare with 99.1 percent survival rate from year three to year four.

What the shrub species have in common with the pitch pine is that they are able to survive fire by resprouting from old roots after the fires. To me, the amazing thing is that these sprouts do not appear to be chlorotic. Fires are notorious for volatilizing nitrogen from the burned biomass and litter, yet the sprouts of the shrubs tend not to be chlorotic. One would expect nitrogen to be a critical factor for growth in communities like these, which are often on sands with little ability to hold on to highly mobile nitrogen. The fact that the shrubs are not chlorotic is an indication that they have sufficient nitrogen. What is implied is that either they have low nitrogen requirements or that they have considerable nitrogen stored in their roots or both.

These stands are monospecific if you only look upward but not if you look at the entire community. Of greatest importance in these communities is that fire acts as a force of natural selection that favors those species with adaptations that allow them to recover from fire events. Fire is also what keeps tree species diversity low.

Franz Seischab, Rochester, New York

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Little Faith in Biofuels

I read your article on growing willow for fuel in the spring issue with much interest, even if I don’t have much faith in the process. Biofuels in any circumstance are solar: the plants, whether they are algae, sugar cane, switch grass, or willow, harness the sun’s energy and turn CO2 and water into biomass and oxygen. They do this by way of photosynthesis. Unfortunately, photosynthesis is at best about 6 percent efficient, that is, about 94 percent of the energy is lost on the first step of the biomass production. Throw in the root stock, fertilizer, processing, the fact that the project requires level ground for mechanical harvesting, the fact that the above-ground parts of plants grow in the Northeast less than half the year, and one has an extremely inefficient project.

If these figures are correct, does pursuit of this method seem reasonable? Obviously the only saving attribute is energy storage capability. Photovoltaic cells, which are close to 20 percent efficient, work all year and can be mounted on a rocky, southfacing hillside (lots of these available) but produce energy that needs to be stored. I would think a college would pursue efforts to discover a method of artificial photosynthesis, powered by photovoltaics, which would produce something like methane.

Frederick Gralenski, Pembroke, Maine

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Taphole Devaluation

There was a lot of good information in the piece on sugaring versus timber production in your spring issue, but I was uncomfortable with the dollar figures you used to illustrate your point that trees are grossly devalued if you tap them. It seems to me that there is a lot more of a gray area than your hard math suggests (you say that a $2,000/MBF log becomes a $300/MBF log when you drill a hole in it).

You’ve taken a veneer log and dropped it to essentially a low-grade sawlog. I wouldn’t think that a log buyer would look at a taphole on an otherwise beautiful log and say the thing is basically a low-grade log because of one defect. Also, there’s more than one way to make logs out of a tree. If you have tapholes three feet up on an otherwise clear 22-foot log, it may make perfect sense to butt off the taphole section and make two veneer logs above them, or to cut an eight foot character log with the taphole defects and a 12- or 14-foot #1 or veneer log. The point is, any reduction of the yield on the butt log should not reduce the overall value of the tree as drastically as you made it sound. If it does, your logger’s not cutting your logs for grade very well.

This is not to suggest a sugarmaker should tap veneer logs; they probably shouldn’t if they’re after every dollar of value in the woods. Like you say, veneer trees can be flagged and not tapped because there’s not a lot of them on most woodlots or in most sugarbushes. But tapping and harvesting is a perfectly viable option in many cases. Trees take 80–100 years to mature and realistically 20–30 years between harvests, so tapping could fill an income gap. Owners shouldn’t think that growing timber and tapping trees are mutually exclusive uses of their forest.

Joseph Adams, Rupert, Vermont

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Some Apples Don’t Fall Far From the Tree

Apples and apple trees are dear to my heart. I have spent many years pruning, grafting, and growing apple trees in Vermont. I am a professional horticulturist/arborist/farm-gardener, with a particular passion for the apple.

I would like to comment and expand on a few things that Stephen Long wrote about apples in his column, “The Long View,” in the Summer 2009 edition.

The Cortland apple is not a chance seedling from a wild apple tree. It was a Geneva, NY, experimental station introduction in 1915. Cortland’s parents are Ben Davis and McIntosh. The Rome Beauty apple was introduced in 1848 by H. N. Gillett of Lawrence County, Ohio. Parentage is unknown; it was most likely a tree that sprouted and grew in Mr. Gillett’s orchard. I speculate that most chance seedling apple varieties get their start in someone’s orchard rather than out in the wild, simply because there is a much better chance of producing a new apple variety with the genetic material of other edible apple varieties than from wild trees.

Most apples will not come true from their own seed, but this is not always the case. One example is the variety Fameuse, an apple from Quebec introduced around 1700. Also, Duchess of Oldenburg, an apple from Russia also introduced around 1700, will produce offspring from its own seed that is similar to the parent variety.

Except for a couple of crabapple species, there were no apple trees on the North American continent before the arrival of Europeans. I surely hope that we one day do not decide that the wild apple tree is an invasive species. What, then, would our wildlife do for food?

Eric Johnsen, Plymouth, Vermont

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Flowery Prose

Even though I have neither woodlot nor sugarbush, I enjoy every issue of Northern Woodlands and have for years, even before moving to Vermont from the New York metro area.

As a writer, I admire the clear writing and impeccable editing. As an outdoor enthusiast, I take pleasure in the photographs and poems. As a nature lover, I appreciate the essays and clear explanations. In your last issue, for example, the box on flower parts on page 27 was superior to the same explanations in all the textbooks I studied toward my botany certificate at the New York Botanical Gardens.

Thank you for bringing me so much enjoyment and learning.

Martha Molnar, Castleton, Vermont

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Hold the Herbicide

The Discoveries column in the spring issue mentions using chemical (herbicidal) control on red maples. Herbicides can be carried by rainwater into aquifers, leading to increased contamination of watersheds and reduced ecological (and human) health. There are also worker safety concerns, as somebody has to apply the chemicals. It may be far more practical to live with this tree. As the rest of the spring issue suggests, the red maple is a highly useful species!

Dana Loew, Leominster, Massachusetts

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