Tag: Innisfree

More screen time, please

Post author By Bob Benz
Post date June 3, 2019

While sitting on the deck with Sydney and Sunny, I noticed my neglected Kindle Fire and iPhone SE sitting screens-up on the table, reflecting the white oaks above them. So I reached over without moving the gadgets and took photos of what they were “seeing.”

I can’t think of a better way to enjoy “screen time.” The only right wing trolls on my screens were a band of red bellied woodpeckers who noisily swarm in each night like a bunch of juvenile delinquents.

The Kindle Fire’s view of the oaks above Innisfree.

This is the view my iPhone had of the oaks towering over Innisfree.

I finally broke down and bought a book on tree identification, but not without some misdirection. I downloaded the Kindle version of “Identifying Trees of the East” after reading the rave reviews of it. The book merited the praise; the Kindle version did not. The book is predicated on narrowing down what type of tree you’re trying to ID by referring you from page to page until you find the specific tree you’re after. But the Kindle version isn’t paginated so the entire organizing structure of the book is blown up. After whining about it on Amazon, I returned it and ordered the print version, which is fantastic.

Sunny shuffles along beneath an Eastern Redbud as we approach Dove Cottage, which was graced this morning with a solitary dove foraging around outside the front door.

This morning Sunny and I went out and started trying to ID trees. Well, I was trying to ID trees. Sunny was just patrolling her property to make sure no coyotes or deer were stomping around. I also came across a great story in this morning’s Columbus Dispatch about the largest sycamore in Ohio.

That article yielded two more interesting links:

The Ohio DNR’s big tree page

American Forests’ registers of big trees nationwide.

Otherwise, I’ve been working to impose order on Innisfree and Dove Cottage. Yesterday, I used a self-propelled push mower to cut the grass for the first time. It took about 2 hours but wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Hardly sore at all this morning … Har.

Here are a few more photos of life at Innisfree …

Sydney chows down on Beelzebub pizza from Avalanche.

Tags Dove Cottage, Eastern Redbud, Innisfree, Trees

Innisfree Tree Bob Uncategorized

Seeing the forest — and the trees

Post author By Bob Benz
Post date May 7, 2019

One the cusp of buying a cabin with 16 acres of forest, I started obsessing about trees. The book Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees has been aiding and abetting my new fixation.

One of the recommendations author Nancy Ross Hugo makes in Seeing Trees is to name specific trees and watch them closely, over time. We tend to see trees as massive brown/green blobs. Closer inspection reveals what complex ecosystems they are. So upon arriving here at Innisfree, I started sizing up the trees on the property. There are numerous white oaks and maples, but there are two trees that caught my eye immediately.

The first is Alpha Oak, a massive beast of a tree that’s west of Dove Cottage. Based on its size, I’m betting it’s a few hundred years old, and as I stood there looking at it in awe with a friend, he noticed that high up in the branches there’s some sort of block and tackle mechanism. I’d love to how — and why — it got there.

The second is the much more diminutive Dancer, which is near Innisfree. I’m to sure yet what type of tree it is (Hugo recommends not obsessing too much about that early on — to just get out and get acquainted with the tree). But the way the tree gracefully raises its branches to stake out a sunny spot in the forest canopy is beautiful. I’m going to pick up some binoculars so I can try to make an ID on what type of tree Dancer is, but that’s not stopping me from watching it sway in the wind as I sit on the deck at Innisfree.

At our place in town, there’s Maude, a massive tulip poplar that shades Maude’s Place. Both the house and tree are named after Ruth Gordon’s role in the 1971 film Harold & Maude. It was a year or two before I really even looked at that tree. It was the incredible flowers it produces that caught my attention, and from there, I started noticing what a beautiful tree it is year-round.

During the winter, Sunny and I spent hours hiking the trails of Strouds Run State Park, where I often paused (despite Sunny’s desire to push onward) to watch leafless trees sway and creek in the winter gusts, reminding me of a wooden ship bucking the ocean, it’s timber masts straining and creaking under sail. Now that it’s spring and I’m living in the forest, I’m looking closely at trees that I used to view only in profile and realizing what incredibly complex organisms they are. I’m spending a lot of time looking up, noticing deciduous details that I’d been oblivious to previously.