Trees Acquired Just As They Grew Are Most Truly Your Own, When You Know Them

As this book is begun, across the writer's memory passes a panorama of American homes from New England to California and from the Adirondacks to South Carolina. Six have been his own homes, three suburban, three truly rural. Most belong to people who have sought professional advice about their trees, in grounds ranging from segments of raw "developments" to expansive, manicured estates laid out in unspoiled countryside. Regardless of size or pretensions, the central questions have always been the same and always should be: "What, if anything, do our trees really need? How can we preserve and improve them most prudently?"

Every one cherishes his trees to some degree, but no one really thinks money grows on them. Between the most affluent, experienced owner and the most modest and inexperienced, prudence is a common denominator. What the former well knows, the latter fears: tree care can be overdone as well as underdone. Each seeks a happy medium where overhead will not outrun psychic income and real value in the property.

As with any other performance, some familiarity with the cast of characters is essential to directing and enjoying tree care. Happiest are those people who can recognize and understand all the trees they own. It is not within the scope of this book to provide a catalog of species, but careful thought has been given to a list of guidebooks appended to this chapter. Manuals that cover all sections of the country have been chosen, and also books of appreciation—good writing about trees by authorities who love their subjects as well as they know it.

Having acquired or planned a home with trees, an owner should, before he goes in for any planting, make the most of what he finds growing wild on his site. Later chapters will discuss grounds long since built on and planted, and naked acres where a start must be made from scratch. Considered in this chapter will be virgin land more or less wooded and not yet trammeled by the bulldozer; or, if building and grading have begun, not yet treescaped. Trees never before touched by man give their first possessor a sense of receiving gifts straight from nature, entirely his own.

Tree guide in hand, walk your property—purchased or prospective—when the country is in full leaf. If you can inspect it during spring bloom, so much the prettier; but later on, when all the leaves are out, even in summer's heat when some trees are suffering, your view of shading, crowding, and moisture conditions will be much clearer.

What you want to know first is what species you have got. Then: Where stand the finest specimens? Are there many more of some species than of others? How do your trees compare in kind and condition with the trees on neighboring land? How is their water table? Their drainage? The answers to these questions may have strong bearing on whether or not you buy. If you have already bought, the bearing will be on how you handle your investment.

After you have identified and sized up your trees in a general way, start thinking about the position of your new house in relation to feature trees, the finest specimens. These are not necessarily the largest ones. Kind and shape are what count, and promise for the future. Close proximity to the house is not an important criterion either. Looking from a little distance at trees is often more satisfying than seeing how they flatter the architecture. Fine outpost trees will enhance your grounds as a whole, and your sense of space.

Where conflicts threaten between valued trees and the building, driveways, or pipelines, make early decisions and avoid compromise. If a tree must go to make way for a wall or footing, take it out promptly and forget it. Later this would cost you much more, with the finished work in the way. If you really do want a tree that "interferes," change the blueprints.

Architects have some feeling for trees. Many builders have none. Most of the men on bulldozers and back-hoes develop definite blind spots, if not visible horns. If the earth-moving and fine-grading are within your control, mark the trees you want to save with bright tags or rags. Baffle or board up the trunks of those near work traffic. When your house is staked out, stake out your best trees also. The stakes should be driven and stringed out around each tree beyond its crown area, where its roots run. (See Chapter III.) Have it understood with the contractor that no rapacious jaws or blades are to invade these areas, or any heavy machine treads. Impaction of the soil can damage roots, by suffocation, as badly as cutting or exposing them will. So can piling earth over them more than three or four inches deep, even temporarily. Graders have a way of piling earth against tree butts and then leaving it there on the theory that the fine-grading, by hand, will be done soon enough. It seldom is, and those pile-ups can be fatal after just a few weeks.

Where fill is unavoidable, have spacious stone or cinder-block wells laid up quickly around buttress roots, and a scattering of drain tiles—up-ended and filled with small rock—embedded over root systems to provide ventilation and irrigation. Contractors are perfectly able to do these things, if you insist.

Where roots must be cut, or are damaged regardless, feed these trees and have their tops pruned, to compensate, as soon as possible. Equally prompt should be repairs to torn limbs, butt scars, and bark wounds. (See Chapters V and VI.)

In deciding which trees to retain and feature in your new grounds, be practical. Some softwoods like silver maple, the willows, and poplars make a pretty show, but are shortlived. If they do not interfere with hardier species, well and good. Otherwise give preference to more durable stand-bys—the oaks, beech, ash, sugar maple, tupelo, honey locust, sassafras, shagbark hickory (but not the smoothbark, or pignut, which has small character).

Sycamore, sweet gum, horse chestnut, and black walnut are all hardy species, but you will like them better away from your house than near it. They drop fruits that can be bothersome underfoot.

All flowering trees you will favor as a matter of course-dogwood, redbud, hawthorn, shadblow, and any of the wild-grown fruits like apple, pear, and cherry (but not chokecherry, in which tent caterpillars spawn). Locust and catalpa are attractive in flower but are better kept toward the property's edges for they are shedders too, the one of deadwood, the other of elephant-ear leaves and trashy bean pods. Lindens (basswood) and mulberries are more welcome: they bring bees and birds, respectively. So are the paper and gray birches: their graceful white stems are like dancing girls.

The soft maples—silver, Norway, boxelder, and sycamore —present problems. All the maples cast grateful shade with their broad leaves, but these four kinds are brittle, hence hazardous. They tend to overgrow, and their resistance to ants, borers, and decay is low.

Nothing is more lovely than a feature elm, standing off by itself so that its palmate or lyre shape and spread can be fully appreciated. Nothing could be more trouble, either. If there is any Dutch elm disease in the vicinity—and there probably is nowadays—you will never know from one year to the next when your tree may be attacked by it. Spraying, feeding, and pruning out the deadwood are imperative safeguards, and not cheap for any elm large enough to deserve them. If your grounds contain no rapturous old elms, perhaps you are not exactly to be envied, but over your head will hang no season of heartbreak. If your grounds contain young elms competing with sounder species, blaze them first of all when you mark your grove for thinning.

Wherever evergreens stand behind birches or white-flowering species like dogwood, consider yourself blessed by Nature. The contrasting effect is one for which tree-scrapers strive. Among the evergreens that you may find in your wildwood, commonest will be the cedars, spruces, white pines, and hemlocks with maybe some firs in northern latitudes. All these are hardy varieties but should not, just by that token, be taken too much for granted. Evergreens are more easily replaced than most deciduous trees, but not in the large sizes that show the best and give grounds grandeur even in winter. So check the health of your needly old-timers as carefully as you do the rest. Their greenness when other trees are bare can be deceptive. But if large evergreens stand close to where the house is to go, have this in mind: their shade can be as gloomy in winter as it is cooling in summer.

When you mark your trees for thinning, take a leaf from the Stout study of forest root systems. (See Chapter IV.) Remember that, in a wild grove, each tree has been competing with three or four of its neighbors for nourishment and light. The trees you wish to keep can use all the elbow-room you will give them. Shade-grown trees tend to be spindly, but given air space and root room they can fill out almost like field-grown specimens. Spare the saw and spoil your specimens. As they are spaced, so will they flourish.

When your thinning is undertaken, don't let the bulldozer do it. That blade, those heavy treads, will do more underground damage than you know when they knock the marked trees over and push away the stumps. Do it or have it done by ax and chain saw. Cut the stumps flush to the ground, where they will rot away soon enough. You can speed their dissolution by boring holes and putting in saltpeter or waste crankcase oil and then burning them out. If you are in no hurry to get your final effect, your thinning can be done piecemeal, and often it is better done so. You will not have to find shelter for all the firelogs at once, or burning space for all the brush. If you girdle (ring-cut) one year the trees you plan to take out the next, you can be just as sure of an immediate root-kill—to unshade wanted trees—as if you felled the trees at once. Also, you can thus season your firewood right on the stump instead of having to stack it, which rots the bottom logs.

Vines growing wild on trees will strangle or smother them eventually. Cut them at their roots and they will fall away in time. Not harmful are morning glory, an annual, and trumpet creeper, which climbs free, without throttling, and whose deep-necked blooms the hummingbirds love. If you value the trees you find them on, show no mercy to wild grape, honeysuckle, woodbine, poison ivy, or wisteria (which you can cut back partially and then train to a support all its own). The evergreen ivies—English, American, Boston—are decorative on tree trunks but should not be allowed to grow much above the first main crotch.

An advantage that woods-grown trees have over their cousins in fields and lawns is that they were nourished from infancy by leaf mold, which is organic. Remember this when you decide about lawning around your selected trees. They will appreciate your not raking away all their fallen leaves every autumn. Lots of people let their power mowers chop the leaves into mulch and leave it lying to benefit grass and trees alike. If you are going to insist on raking, have the bulldozer do one last thing for you before it departs: scoop out a leaf pit, like a small trench silo about 8'Xi5'X47, off in some corner where your annual leaf harvest can be dumped to rot and disintegrate for use another year. If you have oaks, try to save their leaves separately. Any broad-leaved evergreens you may want to cultivate, especially hollies, will thrive on oak-leaf mulch, which is strongly acid.

So far, only that situation has been considered where a new home owner has control of his trees from the beginning. But the suggestions offered above apply with equal force when the new home you are buying or debating has already been started, or even completed, by a builder-developer. Knowing what to look for, you can tell whether he has conserved or laid waste the tree values in the property. If he has any tree sense, chances are that he has conserved values and will co-operate with you in improving them while there is yet time. If he has massacred the trees, sheer off and buy elsewhere.

A sure key to a developer's tree sense, apart from his placement of the house and the care shown in grading, is his treatment of the driveway. Pennies pinched by slamming a driveway in on the shortest course, without regard for good trees, are dollars thrown away. Roots ripped or hacked off to let in concrete or blacktop could just as well have been pruned carefully and the trees' necessity for food and top-pruning recognized. The writer has vivid memory of four fine oaks in front of a $55,000 "development" home near Princeton, N.J., which were plainly slaughtered by such thoughtlessness. Not far from that house is another new one where a dozen tall hardwoods in the front grounds are now grisly skeletons just because about eight inches of soil, excavated from the cellar hole, were spread over their roots instead of being hauled away.

In the Saturday Evening Post (January 28, 1961), Charlton Ogburn, Jr., estimated that the nation's metropolitan population will increase by sixty million in the next year, of which twenty-five million will move into new houses in suburbs. Mr. Ogburn, a park commissioner of Virginia's fast-growing Fairfax County, across the Potomac from Washington, canvassed a lot of land planners, architects, and builders with this question in mind:

"Will the land for the oncoming developments be scalped and flattened, or will the new dwellings be fitted into the existing terrain with minimum destruction of trees and undergrowth? . . . The answer will make an important difference in the kind of country we have to live in—and in the kind of people we are. . . . When . . . our dwellings seem to belong where they are, to be parts of their surroundings rather than invaders, we ourselves seem to gain a sense of belonging, of having roots. We even gain some of the serenity which is apt to be the scarcest commodity of all in the abundant life."

Mr. Ogburn found that the more intelligent—and successful—builders have learned to care for trees because it pays off. Added expense is more than returned in their properties' saleability. The Federal Housing Administration promises maximum evaluations to tree-saving builders. One subdivider even "located every major tree on a big topographical map and cranked them all into the plan." In another development the builder put up signs reading:

NOTICE TO ALL TRADES

Trees Are Sacred

Trees Must Be Kept in Perfect Condition. Do Not Destroy Unless Construction "Super" Gives Approval. Anyone Guilty of Damaging Trees Will Be Put Off the Job.

Homes in new sections usually have to have the utilities brought to them—power and telephone, at least, if not water and sewer as well. It is wise to find out just where your trees stand in relation to these welcome but sometimes reckless arrivals. The workmen who clear the right-of-way and run in your service lines are not interested in saving trees, only in getting wires up or pipes down. Here again your builder is responsible, but keep an eye cocked over his shoulder, and get repaired promptly any tree damage he fails to forfend. In the end you will be glad you did, when other buyers' trees go to pot and yours are the nicest in the neighborhood.

One other thing the bulldozer can do for you before it departs: clear a strip of ground for your tree nursery. Put it in a sheltered spot, below a slope, and don't let them scrape away all the topsoil. In the course of events you may be wanting replacement trees or added starters for empty spots. There is no better time or place to collect and start some specimens than right on your own ground, to which your species are already accustomed. Your woods will be full of sprouts and switches which can be moved with little more effort than it takes to destroy them. The rudiments of transplanting are described in Chapter VIII. Here it is simply suggested that, while an unkempt tract is being tailored, future additions to its wardrobe can be provided for on the spot, to avoid expensive trips later to commercial tree farms.

Before passing on to the physiology, care, and culture of trees, let new home owners introduce themselves to the great Tree family through some of the following books:

Pocket Field Guide to Trees, William Carey Grimm (The Stackpole Co.); Handbook of the Trees, Romeyn Beck Hough (The Macmillan Co.); Introduction to Trees, John Kieran (Doubleday & Co.); Our Trees: How to Know Them, Arthur I. Emerson and Clarence M. Weed (J. B. Lippincott Co.); A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America and A Natural History of Western Trees, Donald Culross Peattie, ed. (Houghton Mifflin Co.); Illustrated Manual of Pacific Coast Trees, Howard E. McMinn and Evelyn Maino (University of California Press); Trees and Shrubs of the Southwestern Deserts, L. D. Benson and R. A. Darrow (University of New Mexico Press).

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