Postcards from the Rogue Valley

How many trees can you name? Which trees are most common where you live? Do you ever stop to look at the trees that provide you oxygen every day? 

Botanists have a word for this: tree blindness.

There are times, to be sure, when trees catch our eye and steal our breath — with their brilliant leaves in autumn, their fragrant blossoms in spring, their bows weighted with snow in winter. 

Trees can be destinations in themselves, too.  My nearby favorites include Sequoia National Park with its General Sherman Tree, the largest tree by volume on earth, and Mojave Desert’s Joshua Tree National Parkwith its small, twisted bristle pines. The annual National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C draws over 1.5 million visitors a year while the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest bathe visitors in lush silence.

Some of us are lucky enough to have an extraordinary tree grace our daily route, like the Atlas Cedar I pass on my morning coffee run, its branches spreading 60 feet wide, matching its height. 

Still, by and large, few of us can speak knowledgeably about trees. A friend puts it this way: “Folks tend to know a heckuva lot more about dogs and their breeds than the many-limbed creatures dogs use for a toilet.” No wonder, some might say. A U.S. Forest Service report called the “Checklist of Native and Naturalized Trees” suggests that there may be more than 865 different species of trees in the United States. 

But here’s the good news: tree blindness can be cured. As science writer Gabriel Popkin, who leads tree walks in Washington, D.C., explains:

A few years ago, I knew two types of native trees, oak and maple. I considered all conifers to be pines. Then in 2012, I took an ecology course in Wisconsin in which we learned to identify 14 tree species — which, in the chilly upper Midwest, actually gets you pretty far. Suddenly the largest, most conspicuous living beings in my environment were no longer strangers. The trees lining my street in Madison with the rough, saucer-size leaves were basswoods. The giant in my backyard with the diamond bark and opposing rows of leaflets neatly lined up like soldiers was an ash.”

Trees as neighbors

Here in Ashland, Tony and I share our house with residents far longer-lived than us: a 90-foot redwood tree whose elegant branches reach towards the desk where I write, a triple-trunked birch tree that’s just as tall, and a towering blue spruce whose roots turn up the concrete in the driveway ten feet from our house. They keep us close.

What drew us to this spot, though, is the nearby Oredson-Todd Woods, where Tony and I hike daily. With time, I’ve learned the names of these new neighbors (more than my humans neighbors): Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, incense cedar, Pacific madrone, California black oak, Oregon white oak, big leaf maple. 

As winter nears, the underbrush has withered — more than ever, old timers say, thanks to an unremitting drought and early frost. It is the tree trunks that now command center stage. Twisted or erect, almost horizonal or largely vertical, lichen covered or not, they offer a woodland phantasmagoria. The gnarled blood-red trunks of low-growing manzanita, perhaps a hundred years old, rise from the pine needles.

In a forest made up of conifers and hardwood evergreens, the oaks are the only ones who have surrendered their leaves. A month ago, lobed oak leaves over a foot in length carpeted the trails in yellow. 

Recently, Tony and I puzzled our way up the 1,000-foot ascent to the top of our trail. Ribbons in four colors, not there two days ago, wrapped trunks here and there. We wondered whether it might be the work of local high school students, part of an exercise in “distance learning” in these days of COVID and closed schools. 

Our next trip up we learned the answer. The trees had been tagged by Ashland’s Lomakatsi Restoration team, destined to be cut and burned as part of the town’s winter “controlled-burn” campaign, key to thinning Ashland’s combustible forests.

The “Wood-Wide Web”

These days, however, I have been overcome with another, much deeper, puzzle. Journalists are warned to never “bury the lead” (the headline), yet I have surely done that here. 

Trees, it turns out, are far more intelligent than we thought and interconnected in ways we never imagined.

In 2016, Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, published a popular book titled The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, which became a best‐seller, but not without angering professional forestry scientists. The latest scientific studies, however, confirm what Wohlleben believed from his close observations: trees are alert, social, and sophisticated. 

A week of reading led me to one of the current spokespersons for forests, Suzanne Simard, featured in a recent New York Times magazine article. Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and studies the immense webs of roots and fungi that interconnect underground in forests, what some have nicknamed “The Wood-Wide Web.” 

Her discoveries, and that of others, solves the puzzle that has stumped me since I became a believer in the ability of trees to protect and nourish each other: how do they do that?

The answer, it turns out, is buried in the soil. Underground, trees and fungi form partnerships known as mycorrhizas. Threadlike fungi surround and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. In exchange, the trees give up some of the carbon-rich sugars they produce through photosynthesis. Simard believes these fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest, even trees of a different species.

Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees [what Simard calls “mother trees”] to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors.” (New York Times, Dec. 6, 2020)

Fungi has its own story, captured marvelously in the documentary film Fantastic Fungi. The fungi that sustains the trees were the first organisms to come to land, appearing 1.3 billion years ago. Sixty-five million years ago, when an asteroid struck Earth jettisoning debris into the atmosphere and cutting off sunlight, fungi inherited the planet. They do not need sun.

Over centuries, a single fungus can cover many square miles and network an entire forest, I have learned. The largest organism in the world is here in Eastern Oregon: it is 2,200 acres in size and 2,000 years old. 

‘Tis the season

The demand for fresh-cut trees this Christmas has soared, it seems, as customers look for a bright spot amid the coronavirus. “Whether we can have a gathering with family or not, I know we’ll have our own little tree with the purple lights, and that’ll be something small to look forward to,” a respiratory nurse in Portland told the Associated Press. 

Oregon leads the nation in Christmas tree production.

At some pick-your-own-tree farms, customers allegedly sneaked in well before Thanksgiving to tag the perfect tree to cut down once the farm opened. Big box stores say they are seeking fresh trees a week earlier than last year and, for the first time, Walmart is offering free home delivery.

Suppliers recommend that customers make sure their tree is fresh before buying. “Check the needles,” an associate at Home Depot advises. “If they’re flexible and pliable, then you have a fresh tree and there’s no needle droppage. If the needles feel brittle, that tree is dried out and you don’t want it.”

My family and I have enjoyed fresh cut trees for fifty years or more. That’s how I learned the names balsam, spruce, and fir. This year we will be treeless as well as relative-less. I know too much, now, about the hidden life of trees.

Yesterday, as Tony and I made our way through the forest, my thoughts flew, but kept landing at the same place: while the pandemic frays human connection above ground, the trees continue to hug below.

When Tony and I reached our favorite bench and looked across the Rogue Valley, Douglas-firs and ponderosa pines stretched in every direction, standing sentinel in the late afternoon sun. 

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