Oaken resilience

March 23, 2011

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Image RemovedThe one thing that I’ve learned living in the woods is that trees can take care of themselves. All we puny humans need to do to help them is to stop the bulldozers from removing them in favor of more asphalt and corn. But since my inclination is to worry too much about almost everything, learning that trees know what they are doing has not been easy.

I like oak trees, especially white oaks. They may not be the very best wood for any particular purpose, but they rank up close to the top in just about everything wood is good for. One big old beauty stands right outside our bedroom window. We run the clothesline on pulleys over to it from the deck, the way the Amish run a clothesline from a porch to the side of a barn. Easy to reel the day’s laundry out for drying and back in again. I also take great pleasure in sitting on the deck for unseemly long periods of time staring up into its branches.

Taking special notice of this tree every day, I have become aware of just how many dangers the oaken world faces while it goes about its business. I am beginning to understand the resilience of nature. The trees will outlast us even if they don’t know the Pythagorean theorem or how to figure compound interest. Nature’s math is a far cry from ours. Mrs. White Oak will graciously produce many thousands of acorns and figure it a profit if she gets only one new tree out of the effort.

I keep a close watch on the acorns because I want more white oak trees coming along in my grove. I especially want acorns to plant in the new grove I am starting. It is amazing how many bugs, birds and beasts feast on these seeds of the oak. At least two thirds of the thousands that fell last fall were already infested with bug and worm holes beyond any hope that they could germinate. The oak’s response to that is to skip a year or two of bearing every so often, mostly because of frost kill, which has the effect of disrupting the life cycle of the insect pests.

Wild animals moved in to feast on the rest of the acorns: deer, squirrels, blue jays, squadrons of blackbirds, rabbits, crows, chipmunks and no doubt others I do not know about. In the middle of winter, I uncovered a cache of acorns in a rick of firewood in the garage, put there by mice, I presume. The deer seemed to me the biggest poachers. A whole herd of them came every night, right outside our bedroom window, and gobbled acorns. I found myself cursing deer. But then I remembered. Before the deer overpopulated, sheep ranged these woods for half a century and they eat acorns too. The trees survived.

I was sure that this year there would be no acorns left to sprout even one new tree. White oak acorns usually begin growth in the fall, sending a single root or shoot rapidly down into the soil to gain a foothold before cold weather arrives. Today, March 19, I was out walking under the tree, looking, without much hope, for acorns with a foot in the ground. Miraculously, despite all the predation, I find three survivors. Each had a shoot growing rapidly farther into the soil. I will need to transplant them soon before they get rooted too deeply.

So here’s the glory of the old math: 50,000 acorns might very well equal one tree, the kind of capitalism Wall Street cannot fathom. But that tree, barring fire, lightning, windstorm, disease or bulldozer, could last 200 years. It needs to generate only one tree every century or so to sustain the species.

Obviously, the odds are a lot better than that. At the edge of my neighbor’s woodlot, under old white oaks, I counted 30 saplings, all the same age. One year out of the last ten or so, conditions were right in that spot (not too many bugs, birds or beasts, and no bulldozers,) to start a new oak grove. That stand, left to its own devices, could live for another century or two. White oaks will even survive forest fires. New sprouts come back from the roots. That is why foresters say that if you find a grove of white oaks in the woods, it is a sign of a past forest fire. The fire cleared out the old growth and let in the sunlight so that oaks, which do not like shade, will grow for another century or so.

I’m not going to worry about the trees anymore. Just bulldozers.

Gene Logsdon

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio. Gene is the author of numerous books and magazine articles on farm-related issues, and believes sustainable pastoral farming is the solution for our stressed agricultural system.

Tags: Building Community, Food