Green Hour #11: Trees

SAP
Strong as the sea and silent as the grave,
It flows and ebbs unseen,
Flooding the earth, a fragrant tidal wave,
With mists of deepening green.
--John b. Tabb
(Handbook of Nature Study, pg 627)

It's taken a few weeks for me to get this post out. We enjoyed studying the trees in our back yard. We love our trees. We play in them. We lay in their shade. But we have never really studied them.

The challenge this time was to start a year long tree observation. We are planning on moving at the end of the summer, so we will do the best we can.

We have three crab apple trees in our back yard. We use to have four. One was recently cut down. We also have several peach trees that were planted last year.



The tree we will focus on is our "swing" tree. It is an apple tree. After reading the hand book, we think it is a thorn apple tree. Several descriptions lead us to this conclusion, but this one was the most convincing:

"Though we may refrain from eating these native apples, which consist of a bit of sweet pulp around large seeds, the codling moth finds them most acceptable."
(Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 664)



It has lots of nobs and scars. We counted the rings on the cut down tree. All these apple trees were planted at the same time, so we know that it is about 29 years old.

My kids love to swing on the rope from this tree. Imagine our surprise, while we studied the tree and in it's branches we found this tidy little nest. Unfortunately, it is empty. I'm sure who ever built it quickly realized that our backyard is a noisy, dangerous place for little eggs.