Author: Bob Benz

Flush with the knowledge of a daylong tree identification class, I was determined to walk out to the White Whale of my micro-forest, a few vertical brushstrokes of light slashing skyward amid the autumn rust that’s encased the rest of the hollow. That tree catches my eye every time I lumber down the driveway during tug-of-war walks with my geriatric Pyrenees.

Birch or sycamore?

Time to find out. I started picking my way through the denuded woods, stepping over toppled logs, zigzagging to avoid the remains of a thorn patch. That’s when I spotted the Sullen Possum. He was sitting on a downed ash tree (the ash carnage is soul-crushing) eyeing me warily, if somewhat drunkenly, as if he were in a stupor.

He didn’t look ill. In fact, he was beautiful, as far as possums go. His face was as white as the tree I was trekking toward. But it was broad daylight and he was showing no signs of fear (or aggression, for that matter) so I retreated back out to the driveway and found a way to enter the forest farther down the hill.

(I’ve seen them play dead before; I don’t think that’s what this was. It almost looked as if he’d roused from a deep slumber, or had just chugged a jug of fortified wine.)

When I arrived at the White Whale, I looked through the leaf litter and up into the tree to see several dried leaves still clinging to the branches. I also saw seed balls. It’s a Sycamore. And a beautiful one at that. There are several on the property and it’s definitely my favorite.

I had hiked down into the hollow to a dry creek bed that is part of the drainage off Peach Ridge. It ultimately flows into Sugar Creek along OH 550. As I went, I found more blazes outlining the property boundary, including more barbed wire embedded in trees from the former fence lines. One of them was a white oak as magnificent as the Alpha Oak by Dove Cottage.

After walking the northern property line I went south, where there are several nice clusters of beech trees, including the Flying Eyeball Beach.

My tree identification class really is helping as I walk through the woods these days. When I filled out the evaluation form, it asked for my knowledge going into the class and going out. I said “2” inbound and “3” outbound, fearful they’d take that as a criticism. Learning is incremental. The class helped me to know what to look for and gave me confirmed examples of several species that had been perplexing me. I dug out my notes and came up with the following bullet points …

• Bark tip. Best way to learn is know tree then study bark.
• Sycamore fruit. Long stalk with ball filled with seeds.
• Beech fruit looks like burr
• Yellow buckeye most common here. Larger. More brownish. Husk can be baseball size. Ohio buckeye twigs stink like skunk. Yellow does not.
• Woody Plant Seed Manual.
• Redbud seed pod is close to tree. Not out at tip. Right off trunk sometimes.
• Maples have wing seeds.
• Walnut v hickory
  • Both have husk
  • Hickory comes off in sections. Obvious splits. Walnut husks just disintegrate over time.
• Persimmon won’t fruit without male and female tree.
• Poison ivy fruit looks like grapes. White-ish. Hairy and cling to trees.
• Sumac Bright red vertical fruit on one type.
• Ash fruits. Long and skinny. Look like canoes
• Acorns best way to ID oaks.
  • Look at cap. How much of acorn does it cover.
• Waterloo state forest loop has variety of conifers. We’re planting them there to see what would grow in Ohio
• Eastern red cedar = juniper
• Witch hazel in flower fall and winter.
• Bald cypress. Not native here. Only deciduous conifer. Drop leaves. Deer love the bark.
• The Woody Plants of Ohio. Good reference with flood line drawings.
• Tree id is a process of elimination
• Ash is opposite leaves
• Whorled leaves only example in Ohio is catalpa
• MAD Cap Burning Buck | (Maple Ash Dogwood Caprifoliaceae Burning bushes Buckeyes–all have opposite leaf arrangement)
• Oaks have clusters of buds on tips
• Yellow poplar is in magnolia family.
• Learned in class, details from Wikipedia: Shrikes are known for their habit of catching insects and small vertebrates and impaling their bodies on thorns, the spikes on barbed-wire fences, or any available sharp point. This helps them to tear the flesh into smaller, more conveniently sized fragments, and serves as a cache so that the shrike can return to the uneaten portions at a later time.4 This same behaviour of impaling insects serves as an adaptation to eating the toxic lubber grasshopper, Romalea microptera. The bird waits for 1–2 days for the toxins within the grasshopper to degrade, then they can eat it.5
• Box elder is maple relative
• Fruit key and twig key to trees and shrubs. By William Harlow
• Twig ID Dendro.cnre.vt.edu
  • vTree app
• Autumn olive. Silver underside. Speckled. Invasive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaeagnus_umbellata
• Pines have “bundled “ needles — two or more clustered together.
• America. Beach cigarlike buds. Long narrow.
• Red oak group (including black oak) have bristle at tip of leaves.
• Sugar maple bud is sharper smaller. Red is red.
• Tip hold lead against white background and shape will pop.

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OK. But if you’re still with me at this point, you’re no doubt wondering about the damned bobcat.

Sunny and I were walking outside Dove cottage on Thursday night and I was raking the woods with the beam of a flashlight I recently bought. I saw something that I first thought was a deer, or more accurately, a fawn. It was dark. About 8 o’clock, so it was mostly silhouette in the LED beam. But instead of freezing, or wheezing and running off, as I’d expect a deer to do, it crept, catlike, taking a few steps in my direction, then turning and walking about 20 yards away, deeper into the trees. There, it turned and looked directly at me, eyes sparkling in the light. It was some sort of cat. Larger than a domestic tomcat. I started thinking, irrationally, about panthers or some big toothy horrible thing that one conjures when lost and alone and cold in the Hansel-and-Gretel woods. I watched it a while, fighting the urge to approach it, and then walked back up the hill to Innisfree, where I was feeling a tad paranoid and watched on all sides.

Had it stalked us during the entire walk? Was it out there now? Following us? Ready to pounce? I even called Lara, breathlessly telling her what I’d just seen, trying to convince myself it really was a mountain lion. Or something like that. But smaller. And not really all that dangerous to a big dumb human and his big dumb dog.

As I stood outside Innisfree after having calmed a bit, the threat now downsized in my mind, the motion detector light snapped on, startling me and sparking the reflexive snap of my flashlight beam out into the darkness, searching for my nemesis.

Nothing.

Just a giant white lump of pyrenees sleeping in dried oak leaves on a crisp fall night.

Gratuitous tree photos …

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“My mind is never so pleasantly empty as when I’m chopping wood.”

— Arne Fjeld, quoted in ‘Norwegian Wood’

When I moved into Innisfree, there was a cast-iron beast brooding in the center of the cabin. I was both terrified and intrigued by it. I’ve lived in numerous houses with fireplaces. Never one with a wood stove.

The seller explained in detail how to operate the stove, where to get wood, which chimney sweep to use. I glazed over, a tad overwhelmed. My only real experience with wood stoves was the Jam Hut in Missoula, Montana, where a few chucks of wood allowed us to listen to music and hang out late into the night no matter how cold it was outside.

But this was different. This was my stove. And I had no idea how to operate it. So I did what any geek would do: I started Googling. I found a lot of great sources on YouTube, including Life In Farmland, which has a lot of great info.

But nothing quite matches a book I found on Amazon with the unlikely title of Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood The Scandinavian Way by Lars Mytting.

I was incredulous as I read the gushing reviews. It’s about wood. And stoves. And Scandinavia. How the hell could this be worth the time it would take to read? But still, something about it intrigued me, and after letting it sit in my cart for several weeks I finally pulled the trigger.

When it arrived, I started reading. And didn’t stop until I was done. It’s incredibly engaging and interesting, even though it does dive deep into the weeds at times. I picked up a lot of great info and even if I didn’t have a wood stove or fireplace, I still would have found the book delightful.

“Eg grev ned min eld sent om kveld. Naar dagen er slut, Gud gje min eld alder sloka ut.” (I damp down my fire, late at night, when day is done. God grant that my fire never go out.)

The quote above is a fire prayer from the Norwegian Middle Ages. One of the cool tidbits I picked up in Norwegian Wood. There are a lot of gems in here. For instance:

“A minor point worth noting is that local green energy is not a contentious issue on the large political stage. Countries that depend wholly on oil, coal, and other forms of fossil fuel guard their resources carefully. But no one has ever gone to war over a firewood forest, and no species of seabird has ever been drenched in oil because a trailer load of firewood ended up in a ditch. A woodpile might not stop a war from breaking out, but simple, local sources of energy are not the stuff of violent conflict.”

And this wise observation, part of a warning about exercising caution when wielding a chainsaw:

Wood won’t warm much when bits of your body are lying in a container outside the emergency room of your hospital.

There are great photos of wood piles throughout Scandinavia. I never realized they could be a form of self-expression, to the point where Mytting dedicates a page to explaining how a man’s woodpile can be the window to his soul.

The elephant in the room, of course, is pollution. I remember living in Albuquerque, where frequent “no-burn” days were declared in an effort to stop the city from strangling in a smog-filled bowl between the Sandia Mountains and the volcanoes on the West Mesa.

I’ve come to equate wood fires with pollution and carbon dioxide. But that’s not necessarily the case. As Mytting explains, trees will release the same amount of carbon whether they’re decomposing on the forest floor or in your wood stove. And with modern stoves, very little particulate pollution is released into the atmosphere, especially if you know how to manage the fire.

So I’ve learned to love my wood stove. Mytting’s homage got me moving. I dragged in seasoned ash from the woodpile, loaded the stove, and lit it. Once I started seeing it as a complex grill, with multiple ways to manipulate airflow and maintain a steady burn, I started geeking out.

For the past few weeks, I’ve heated Innisfree with nothing but wood. And we’ve gone through several sunrises that dawned in the upper teens. The heat from it is amazing. And as commanded in Norwegian Wood, I’ve learned to operate my stove so no smoke can be seen emerging from the chimney. Just heatwave ripples through icy air …

The cabin also is amazing. The southern exposure is nothing but forest, so in the summer, when the sun is punishing, oak, maple, birch, and beech leaves protect Innisfree from the heat. I think I ran the AC only two or three times this past summer. Now that winter-fall is here, the leaves are dropping (though my oaks cling stubbornly to theirs) and the sun streams through the windows in the back room, creating passive heat and complementing the warmth of the woodstove.