Cornell University Dragon Day 2013
This maple tree is one of the first plants to flower in spring.
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing.
We find boulders of crystalline rock, commonly derived from Adirondack sources, left behind on the surface of ablation moraine, in the Finger Lakes Region.
Cornell finds some and move them, maybe the case for this unremarked erratic found along the Allen Trail of FR Newman Arboretum.
Another enormous erratic, brought in from the Sixmile Creek valley, was carved into a seat as a memorial to Professor R.S. Tarr who deciphered much of the glacial history of the Finger Lakes Region. Find it at the southwest corner of McCraw Hall on the Cornell University Campus.
During the 18th century, erratics were deemed a major geological paradox. Geologists identify erratics by studying the rocks surrounding the position of the erratic and the rock of the erratic itself. Erratics were once considered evidence of a biblical flood, but in the 19th century scientists gradually came to accept that erratics pointed to an ice age in Earth’s past. Among others, the Swiss politician, jurist, theologian Bernhard Friedrich Kuhn [de] saw glaciers as a possible solution as early as 1788. However, the idea of ice ages and glaciation as a geological force took a while to be accepted. Ignaz Venetz (1788–1859), a Swiss engineer, naturalist and glaciologist was one of the first scientists to recognize glaciers as a major force in shaping the earth.
In the 19th century, many scientists came to favor erratics as evidence for the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (ice age) 10,000 years ago, rather than a flood. Geologists have suggested that landslides or rockfalls initially dropped the rocks on top of glacial ice. The glaciers continued to move, carrying the rocks with them. When the ice melted, the erratics were left in their present locations.
Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (v. 1, 1830) provided an early description of the erratic which is consistent with the modern understanding. Louis Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Prior to this proposal, Goethe, de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Goethe,[15] Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers.
Charles Darwin published extensively on geologic phenomena including the distribution of erratic boulders. In his accounts written during the voyage of HMS Beagle, Darwin observed several large erratic boulders of notable size south of the Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego and attributed them to ice rafting from Antarctica. Recent research suggests that they are more likely the result of glacial ice flows carrying the boulders to their current locations.
Also known as Canoe Birch
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing.
Betula papyrifera, common names Paper Birch, (American) White Birch, Canoe Birch, is a short-lived species of birch native to northern North America. Paper birch is named for the tree’s thin white bark, which often peels in paper like layers from the trunk. Paper birch is often one of the first species to colonize a burned area within the northern latitudes and is an important species for moose browsing. The primary commercial uses for paper birch wood are boltwood and sawlogs, while secondary products include firewood and pulpwood. It is the provincial tree of Saskatchewan and the state tree of New Hampshire.
As you can see in the following photoghraph, Betula papyrifera is a medium-sized deciduous tree typically reaching 20 meters (66 feet) tall, and exceptionally to 40 m (130 ft) with a trunk up to 75 centimeters (30 inches) in diameter. Within forests, it often grows with a single trunk but when grown as a landscape tree it may develop multiple trunks or branch close to the ground.
Paper birch is a typically short-lived species. It handles heat and humidity poorly and may live only 30 years in zones six and up, while trees in colder-climate regions can grow for more than 100 years. Betula papyrifera will grow in many soil types, from steep rocky outcrops to flat muskegs of the boreal forest. Best growth occurs in deeper, well drained to dry soils, depending on the location.
White Birch is a pioneer species, meaning it is often one of the first trees to grow in an area after other trees are removed by some sort of disturbance. Typical disturbances colonized by paper birch are wildfire, avalanche, or windthrow areas where the wind has blown down all trees. When it grows in these pioneer, or early successional, woodlands, it often forms stands of trees where it is the only species, a feature emulated in this Cornell Botanical Garden planting. Paper Birch is considered well adapted to fires because it recovers quickly by means of reseeding the area or regrowth from the burned tree. The lightweight seeds are easily carried by the wind to burned areas, where they quickly germinate and grow into new trees. Paper birch is adapted to ecosystems where fires occur every 50 to 150 years for example, it is frequently an early invader after fire in black spruce boreal forests. As paper birch is a pioneer species, finding it within mature or climax forests is rare because it will be overcome by trees that are more shade tolerant as secondary succession progresses.
For example, in Alaskan boreal forests, a paper birch stand 20 years after a fire may have 3,000–6,000 trees per acre (7,400–14,800/ha), but after 60 to 90 years, the number of trees will decrease to 500–800 trees per acre (1,200–2,000/ha) as spruce replaces the birch. After approximately 75 years, the birch will start dying and by 125 years, most paper birch will have disappeared unless another fire burns the area.
Paper birch trees themselves have varied reactions to wildfire. A group, or stand, of paper birch is not particularly flammable. The canopy often has a high moisture content, the understory is often lush green. As such, conifer crown fires often stop once they reach a stand of paper birch or become slower-moving ground fires. Since these stands are fire-resistant, they may become seed trees to reseed the area around them that was burned. However, in dry periods, paper birch is flammable and will burn rapidly. As the bark is flammable, it often will burn and may girdle the tree.
These metal tags are excellent signposts hanging from the branches on coated wire. Paper birch is a typically short-lived species. It handles heat and humidity poorly and may live only 30 years in zones six and up, while trees in colder-climate regions can grow for more than 100 years. Betula papyrifera will grow in many soil types, from steep rocky outcrops to flat muskegs of the boreal forest. Best growth occurs in deeper, well drained to dry soils, depending on the location.
In older trees, the bark is white, commonly brightly so, flaking in fine horizontal strips to reveal a pinkish or salmon-colored inner bark. It often has small black marks and scars. In individuals younger than five years, the bark appears a brown-red color with white lenticels, making the tree much harder to distinguish from other birches. The bark is highly weather-resistant. It has a high oil content; this gives it its waterproof and weather-resistant characteristics. Often, the wood of a downed paper birch will rot away, leaving the hollow bark intact.
Birch bark is a winter staple food for moose. The nutritional quality is poor because of the large quantities of lignin, which makes digestion difficult, but is important to wintering moose because of its sheer abundance. Moose prefer paper birch over aspen, alder, and balsam poplar, but they prefer willow (Salix spp.) over birch and the other species listed. Although moose consume large amounts of paper birch in the winter, if they were to eat only paper birch, they may starve.
Although white-tailed deer consider birch a “secondary-choice food,” it is an important dietary component. In Minnesota, white-tailed deer eat considerable amounts of paper birch leaves in the fall. Snowshoe hares browse paper birch seedlings, and grouse eat the buds.
Porcupines and beavers feed on the inner bark. The seeds of paper birch are an important part of the diet of many birds and small mammals, including chickadees, redpolls, voles, and ruffed grouse. Yellow bellied sapsuckers drill holes in the bark of paper birch to get at the sap; this is one of their favorite trees for feeding on.
As a species, Birches are commonly cultivated as fast-growing, graceful trees with ornamental bark.
The wood of Betula pendulas Roth. Is light and an excellent thermal insulator, so is used for the inside of saunas in Finland. The wood of Betula alleghaniensis is use for furniture, paneling, and plywood in North America.
Birch sap, collected in spring when it pours from the tree, can be used to make beer. Various species have been used medicinally, and Betula lenta was used as a source of oil of wintergreen, or methyl salicylate; American Indians used it to treat many ailments. Betulinic acid from the bark is reported to trigger cell death in melanomas in culture.
The bark of B papyrifera Marsh. Is waterproof and used for birch-bark canoes by American Indians, as well as for roofing in some parts of the world. Several species were used as paper, including Betula utilis, which has been found in the form of 1800-year-old Buddhist manuscripts in Afghanistan.
This maple tree is one of the first plants to flower in spring.
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing.
Acer rubrum is one of the most abundant and widespread trees in eastern North America. It can be found from the south of Newfoundland, through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and southern Quebec to the southwest west of Ontario, extreme southeastern Manitoba and northern Minnesota; southward through Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, eastern Oklahoma, and eastern Texas in its western range; and east to Florida. It has the largest continuous range along the North American Atlantic Coast of any tree that occurs in Florida. In total it ranges 2,600 km (1,600 mi) from north to south. The species is native to all regions of the United States east of the 95th meridian. The tree’s range ends where the −40 °C (−40 °F) mean minimum isotherm begins, namely in southeastern Canada. A. rubrum is not present in most of the Prairie Peninsula of the northern Midwest (although it is found in Ohio), the coastal prairie in southern Louisiana and southeastern Texas and the swamp prairie of the Florida Everglades. Red maple’s western range stops with the Great Plains where conditions become too dry for it. The absence of red maple from the Prairie Peninsula is most likely due to the tree’s poor tolerance of wildfires. Red maple is most abundant in the Northeastern US, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and northeastern Wisconsin, and is rare in the extreme west of its range and in the Southeastern US.
On the arboretum northeast side is a collection of native maples, this Red Maple is represented caught our eye.
These metal tags are excellent signposts hanging from the branches on coated wire. Red maple’s maximum lifespan is 150 years, but most live less than 100 years. The tree’s thin bark is easily damaged from ice and storms, animals, and when used in landscaping, being struck by flying debris from lawn mowers, allowing fungi to penetrate and cause heart rot.[8] Its ability to thrive in many habitats is largely due to its ability to produce roots to suit its site from a young age. In wet locations, red maple seedlings produce short taproots with long, well-developed lateral roots; while on dry sites, they develop long taproots with significantly shorter laterals. The roots are primarily horizontal, however, forming in the upper 25 cm (9.8 in) of the ground. Mature trees have woody roots up to 25 m (82 ft) long. They are very tolerant of flooding, with one study showing that 60 days of flooding caused no leaf damage. At the same time, they are tolerant of drought due to their ability to stop growing under dry conditions by then producing a second-growth flush when conditions later improve, even if growth has stopped for 2 weeks.
Acer rubrum is one of the first plants to flower in spring. A crop of seeds is generally produced every year with a bumper crop often occurring every second year. A single tree between 5 and 20 cm (2.0 and 7.9 in) in diameter can produce between 12,000 and 91,000 seeds in a season. A tree 30 cm (0.98 ft) in diameter was shown to produce nearly a million seeds. Red maple produces one of the smallest seeds of any of the maples. Fertilization has also been shown to significantly increase the seed yield for up to two years after application. The flowers are generally unisexual, with male and female flowers appearing in separate sessile clusters, though they are sometimes also bisexual. These pistillate (female) flowers have one pistil formed from two fused carpels with a glabrous superior ovary and two long styles that protrude beyond the perianth. These flowers were formed on the tree labeled “Frank’s Red.”
These staminate (male) flowers are sessile (grow direct from tip of branch without a stalk) containing between 4 and 12 stamens, often with 8. These seem to have 12 stamens.
The above flowers were formed on a “Schlesinger I” Red Maple Tree (see following lable).
“Water Banana”
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. We discovered this seeming lily growing from the muck along the Treman Woodland Walk. Scientific Name: Lysichiton camtschatcensis. Common names: Asian skunk cabbage, white skunk cabbage, Far Eastern swamp lantern or Japanese swamp lantern.
This is a plant found in swamps and wet woods, along streams and in other wet areas of the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin and northern Japan. The common name “skunk cabbage” is used for the genus Lysichiton, which includes Lysichiton americanus, the western skunk cabbage, noted for its unpleasant smell. The Asian skunk cabbage is more variable: plants have been reported in different cases to smell disgusting, not at all, and sweet.
In Japanese it is known as mizubashō (lit. “water-banana”) from a supposed similarity to the Japanese banana, a name with poetic rather than malodorous associations. It is not closely related to the true cabbage.
Old Testament
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. We found a path new to us, with this memorial stone bench, a biblical quote engraved on the seats. Biblical Quote on bench: “What doth the lord require of thee / but to do justly and to love mercy / and to walk with thy god.” Micah 6:8
The Book of Micah is the sixth of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Ostensibly, it records the sayings of Micah, whose name is Mikayahu (Hebrew: מִיכָיָ֫הוּ), meaning “Who is like Yahweh?”, an 8th-century BCE prophet from the village of Moresheth in Judah (Hebrew name from the opening verse: מיכה המרשתי). The book has three major divisions, chapters 1–2, 3–5 and 6–7, each introduced by the word “Hear,” with a pattern of alternating announcements of doom and expressions of hope within each division. Micah reproaches unjust leaders, defends the rights of the poor against the rich and powerful;[ while looking forward to a world at peace centered on Zion under the leadership of a new Davidic monarch. While the book is relatively short, it includes lament (1.8–16; 7.8–10), theophany (1.3–4), hymnic prayer of petition and confidence (7.14–20), and the “covenant lawsuit” (6.1–8), a distinct genre in which Yahweh (God) sues Israel for breach of contract of the Mosaic covenant.
In the quote tract, (6:6–8), Micah speaks on behalf of the community asking what they should do in order to get back on God’s good side. Micah then responds by saying that God requires only “to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Thus declaring that the burnt offering of both animals and humans (which may have been practiced in Judah under Kings Ahaz and Manasseh) is not necessary for God.
Gifts from the past
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. Found here growing outside native range, being the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to southern Pennsylvania, the Table Mountain Pine is named after the landform, not a particular mountain.
Its pinecones drew me to this scraggly, ungainly, poorly formed tree. All general mankind finds useful in the, scientific name, Pinus pungens, otherwise known as Hickory Pine, Prickly Pine and Mountain Pine, is to grind it up for pulp or chop it for tinder.
That said, the final scene of the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans takes place in a nice Pinus pungens stand on a rocky mountaintop in North Carolina.
The tree has personality. Pinus pungens is the Lonesome Pine of the 1908 novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by John Fox, and popularized in the Laurel and Hardy film Way out West: “On the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine” Several “Lonesome Pine” hiking trails have been waymarked in the Blue Ridge Mountains and elsewhere in the Appalachians.
Pinus pungens prefers dry conditions and is mostly found on rocky slopes, favoring higher elevations, from 300–1,760 meters (980–5,770 ft) altitude. It commonly grows as single scattered trees or small groves, not in large forests like most other pines, and needs periodic disturbances for seedling establishment. The three tallest known ones are in Paris Mountain State Park, South Carolina; they are 26.85 to 29.96 meters (88 ft 1 in to 98 ft 4 in) tall.
Gifts from the past
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. A type of sandstone popular with Cornell monument builders, called “Lenroc” after a mansion build by Cornell’s founder, was used for these benches built into the hillside of the FR Newman Arboretum. The views are more interesting than the bench, the arch of stone in midground in one photo.
The stone is mined locally from surrounding hills. Calling it “Lenroc” (Cornell spelled backward) is a misnomer as the stone is mined widely throughout the region.
“Bluestone from Pennsylvania and New York is a sandstone defined as feldspathic greywacke. The sand-sized grains from which bluestone is constituted were deposited in the Catskill Delta during the Middle to Upper Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, approximately 370 to 345 million years ago…..
…The Catskill Delta was created from runoff from the Acadian Mountains (“Ancestral Appalachians”). This delta ran in a narrow band from southwest to northeast and today provides the bluestone quarried from the Catskill Mountains and Northeastern Pennsylvania. The term “bluestone” is derived from a deep-blue-colored sandstone first found in Ulster County, New York.”
You can feel the origin of this bluestone from these macros of two pavers from a monument bench.
White on White
We mistook this magnolia tree for a “pussy willow” from its flower bud texture and shape.
The signage attached to a branch disabused us of this impression, incorrect all for being true until the flowers burst forth.
A visually beautiful magnolia whose golden flowers bloom in abundance and persist well; a small tree or large shrub with a loosely pyramidal form and large relatively coarse leaves; flowers appear before the foliage; an ideal landscape or garden accent
Golden Gift Magnolia is covered in stunning fragrant gold cup-shaped flowers held atop the branches in early spring before the leaves. It has dark green deciduous foliage. The large pointy leaves turn coppery bronze in fall.
Golden Gift Magnolia is a deciduous tree with a distinctive and refined pyramidal form. Its relatively coarse texture can be used to stand it apart from other landscape plants with finer foliage. This is a relatively low maintenance tree and should only be pruned after flowering to avoid removing any of the current season’s flowers. It has no significant negative characteristics.
Magnolia is an ancient genus. Appearing before bees evolved, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles. To avoid damage from pollinating beetles, the carpels of Magnolia flowers are extremely tough. Fossilized specimens of M. acuminata have been found dating to 20 million years ago, and fossils of plants identifiably belonging to the Magnoliaceae date to 95 million years ago. Another aspect of Magnolia considered to represent an ancestral state is that the flower bud is enclosed in a bract rather than in sepals; the perianth parts are undifferentiated and called tepals rather than distinct sepals and petals. Magnolia shares the tepal characteristic with several other flowering plants near the base of the flowering plant lineage such as Amborella and Nymphaea (as well as with many more recently derived plants such as Lilium).
Unusual Oak
Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing.
We marveled at this Pin Oak tree, unlike any other oak we have encountered.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 
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