Let’s Plant Native Trees!
by Ross Signal—(OYB Assistant Coach, Defense)
It’s embarassing, but all that time I worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, I didn’t know a thing about trees. There I was, sawing up boards of maple, walnut and yellow poplar, but I wouln’t have recognized a walnut tree if one fell on me.
So I got some books and started to pay more attention to trees. Suddenly, a whole part of my world I’d been totally oblivious to became fascinating. One of the first things I discovered was that almost all of the lawn and street trees that get planted are from just a handful of species: some maples, green ash, honeylocust…
Well, this is a little scary. What if some Norway Maple Blight came along? Remember Dutch Elm Disease? What about biodiversity? The more different genes there are floating around, the more resilient nature can be when there’s a shock to the ecosystem. But here we are, putting all our eggs in one basket, blanketing whole suburban tracts with Norway Maples.
Worse, these nursery trees are all from a few selected strains; they don’t have the genetic variation of the wild ones. Take the Honeylocust. The ones in the woods are just bristling with thorns. It’s rather dramatic, actually. But all of the city ones are descendants of a few freak thornless trees. They’re literally clones.
Some friends in landscape architecture school started telling me that a lot of these cultivated trees aren’t even native, they’re from England or China or someplace. Some turn out to be pretty invasive in our climate, squeezing out native trees in the wild: The European Alder has replaced the American one along riverbanks everywhere; exotic buckthorns and honyesuckles are strangling our woods; and those damn Norway Maples have started to move in on the northwoods’ native Sugar Maples–the ones with the syrup and the eye-popping fall color.
There seems to be a vicious circle: People go to nurseries and buy the trees that are cheap and vaguely familiar. The trees that are cheapest are the ones the nursery can order in quantity and sell a lot of. And these are that same handful of species all over again, the abuse-proof ones you can slam into a hole in the concrete and still get reasonable growth from. It’s up to us to break out of this mindless rut!
Another reason to plant natives is that wild habitats are being lost left and right, bulldozed to make room for more “Edge City”. If we can’t make a little room for nature in the human environment, growing trees and plants the native birds and bugs need to survive–well they’re toast.
Step one is to tromp off into the woods near you and figure out out what trees are really native to your area–particularly the bizarro ones you’ve never heard of. (I was suprised that almost no conifers were native in our county.) Get a book to tell you which habitat each tree thrives in (see “books” below)–some want a moist, shady valley, some are content in baked sand, but you should get it straight which is which. The great thing about planting a native is that after you pick the right tree for the site, it should take off and grow without a lot of fussing. Not like all those scorched, shrimpy pines you see in corporate “landscaping”!
We found out about many unusual, beautiful native trees which which would be right at home in our yard, an old stream valley. (OK, we’re two blocks from downtown Ann Arbor, and the stream is in a concrete culvert now–but that’s all the more reason to try restoring some wildness.)
First there’s the Tulip-tree. Over the years I’ve sawed up yards of its beautiful greenish wood for bookcases and such, under the lumberyard name of “yellow poplar.” It grows up so straight and fine, they say the biggest old ones were the Sequoias of the East–those are all gone now, of course. The leaves are unlike any other tree’s, they look sorta like a cat’s head. The yellow-orange tulip-y flowers ripen to an oddball “pine-cone” of seeds… It felt nice to finally put one back into the ground.
There’s the Hackberry. The name’s not so pretty, but it’s a very nice tree, with an arching, elm-like vase shape and light green leaves that look wonderful with the sun behind them. Suprising, warty bark, too. And the Chinkapin Oak: It’s not rough and massive like a White Oak, but trim and fast-growing. It has leaves you’d never expect from an oak, narrow and saw-toothed. Somehow they make me think of dinosaurs.
There are actually dozens of wild woodies, once you start to learn about it: The Paw-Paw–an avante-garde tropical fruit that made a wrong turn at Panama and ended up in the Midwest. The Prickly-Ash–a sweet-smelling, thorny, living fence, home of the Giant Swallowtail butterfly. The Bladdernut–a nifty shrub which grows little papery lanterns. And all those native berries, which will pack the birds into your yard…
But the bitch of it is, when you go to most nurseries and ask for any of these, they will have no idea what you’re talking about. Or they’ll think you’re just being a crank: you don’t want this very ornamental dwarf cut-leaf variegated weeping European Beech? (Or some other freak of intensive breeding.) Finding native plants means growing your own, or dealing with a funky underground of mail-order nurseries, homey xeroxed price-lists, and starting from little knee-high whips that don’t look anything like a tree. (It’s an act of faith, I guess. We’ll really enjoy those trees when we’re 70.)
My greatest amazement in this whole affair was that I had to order certain Michigan natives from a nursery in Oregon! Insane. Twisted. When you go to your local nursery and they don’t even have one Tuliptree, make sure you let them know how sick it is, too.
For the most part, mail-order nurseries send you inexpensive “bare-root” plants–which needless to say is cheaper for everyone than UPS-ing dirt around the country. But don’t be suprised if your new little stick spends its first year clinging to life by a thread. It helps if you keep ’em heavily mulched and watered. But that’s why bare-root stock isn’t the bargain it seems like at first. If you can find potted or balled trees it’s usually worth the higher price.
Don’t be too discouraged by the shrimpy size of the trees available. It sounds ridiculous, but 15 years down the road the little guys sometimes outgrow the ones that started out eight feet tall, but whose root systems became stunted growing in some nursery container.
Isn’t the cheap solution just to go dig some trees up in the woods? Well, ethically it’s a bit uncool to go rip up a healthy forest–and for a lot of species disturbing the roots will kill ’em. Plus, trees growing in the shade usually look a bit straggly. But if some subdivision is bulldozering through, go out with your tree books and see if there’s anything that really ought to be rescued. Ideally you move trees when the leaves are off; but if you can move a big enough chunk of dirt with the roots you might get away with it in early summer too. (To compensate for the roots you lose, you’re supposed to lop off a bit of the top growth too–sounds rough but it works.)
Now that I know more about this, I find it quite annoying that in the big “Earth Day” tree-planting events they get the kiddies out for, they rarely plant native trees. As usual, it’s whatever you can buy a lot of on the cheap. Yes, the Colorado Blue Spruce is a nice tree, IF YOU’RE IN COLORADO. Grrrr… I shouldn’t grumble too much, I guess any tree is better than no tree. But it seems they’re missing their chance to keep the unusual natives going, and to teach the young ‘uns something about the local ecology.
It’s no use sputtering about those evil Brazillians, cutting down their rainforests, if we’re not willing to do something for biodiversity right in our own back yards. Planting some native trees is a place to start!
