I worry about the ash tree. It borders on obsession. I’m not the only person. There is a lot of loud “Chop them all down so the borer doesn’t get them!” going around (which, I guess, is a typical knee-jerk American reaction, and is sometimes justified if you don’t want a hulking tree to suddenly smash your house). This magnificent species is in danger because of an insect called the emerald ash borer which showed up in Michigan in the early 2000s, likely on a container ship from East Asia. They have since reached 35 states in the U.S. and killed hundreds of millions of ash trees. Time is short.
My house is surrounded by ash trees and they make up a large part of The Lung on the eastern slope. They are a great conductor of life here. So present, lovely and necessary, it’s not surprising that they figure heavily in the Abenaki origin stories. The ash tree’s importance to the First Peoples and stewards of this place make it that much more urgent in my mind and heart (I have made it a point NOT to tell those stories here as they are not mine, but I heartily encourage you to start here if you want to know more about them).
I think of the chain of events that is the spring in northeastern Vermont; just after the bloodroot is mature, the lilacs start to bloom, and the morel mushrooms start showing up under the ash. When I imagine this scenario without the ash tree it’s painfully easy to feel the rumble of the dominoes crashing down. When you’ve become habituated to noticing while madly in love with the ground you are standing on you take it hard. I let my own boundaries blur to the tree line. My blood flows and mingles with the other living things and I try to feel them all. Sometimes I feel elation, but sometimes I feel helpless like I can only wait for things to get darker, for the blood to drain out of all of us.
I decided I needed a wider scope to become more useful to The Lung and its trees. So back in August I left my inner goth at home and went out in the woods with three local foresters. It was such an exhilarating privilege to talk with them and ask questions as we crunched through the carpet of last year’s leaves. There is way too much I wanted to know. Luckily for me, they all love their jobs and my barrage did not tire them out. They pointed out some nice stands of healthy, young ash that may have a decent chance of surviving the borer, and explained how and why that could play out for the better. In most cases, it was letting the trees grow with the other native plant species around them as they take care of eachother. They “work it out”. No thinning or clearing required. We talked about the best times of year to remove infected wood as to not spread the insects more than necessary, etc. We talked about good open spots to put in seedlings and what to plant with them for the reason mentioned above. Trees like diversity and need lots of things to help get the mycorrhizal fungi network going. (Nobody is happy unless the fungi are happy!)
On our hike I was excited to show the foresters things too. Good foresters are always making note of populations of unusual or rare species. A large part of The Lung are medicine woods. There are SO many medicinal and nutritional plants in there, it makes my heart pound out of my chest and my hyperactive speech all gaspy like I’m eight years old. Mushrooms, fungus, lichen, moss, berries, cohosh, nut and acorn trees, ginger, rosehips, and thousands upon thousands of other living things, many of which are endangered, like the butternut tree. Its decline hasn’t been as quick as the ash’s but it’s no less important of a species. It was a staple of New England’s forests like the stately elm and beech trees whose massive mature examples are also infrequent now. Will more people be concerned about this when it’s the maple tree’s turn?
There are some state and provincial tourism/identity symbols and slogans in North America that get really tiresome. Some are vague and outdated, some are straight up racist, and others are just an advertisement for whatever regional extraction industry dominated a century ago. Many things made into regional colonial symbols are more often than not extinct (think about the English lion emblazoned on everything). The tragedy of this is the fact that most people don’t even realize that the settlers/colonizers (yes, I am one) who co-opted the symbols are also the ones who (wait for it) hunted or harvested or extracted them into extinction, and continue on that same trajectory to this day. The maple tree in Vermont is not one of those symbols, at least not yet. It is truly beloved and revered, which seems a rare thing. As a Vermonter of the future, I’d love it if we were known for, of course, delicious cheese made by happy, grass-fed, pasture-wandering cows with names; the familiar maple trees with their incredible decem millennial-plus partnership with the Abenaki people who have made what we know today as sublime maple sap and sugar, unrivaled in flavor and complexity. But I would also love it if we could be known for saving the ash tree -- ash trees whose generous, oxygen-making canopies protect the most delicious wild morel mushrooms, whose neighboring symbiotic companion plants continue to thrive and soothe and feed every living thing around them. And most importantly, the ash tree that IS, and has always been, central to the Abenaki people. Vermont itself is a fairly recent construct, but the Abenaki ARE the living place and history and future of this region all together at once, which is far too important a reality not to acknowledge and try to honor.
It would really be something if this twice-deforested state became a great innovator of tree conservation. I can see this better outcome so clearly when I go visit the stands of young ash trees, baby beech and butternut... I blur my borders into the treeline again and gather this feeling up to fit in my right hand. I curl back and then I throw it like a discus in one smooth motion toward the future, hoping to fire it smack into the current of a strong broadcasting orbit and seed a better outcome with its brilliance of trees.
We have gorgeous, gnarly, stately old oak trees lining important boulevards and scattered across New Orleans, our state, and the south. We also suffer from an invasion of formosan subterranean termites, gifted to us in the 1940's most likely from a ship at port from Asia. The formosans are much more aggressive than our native variety. Formosan termite colonies cause millions of dollars in damage every year to homes built of wood. Termites hollow out the Oaks and cause them certain deterioration and death. Colonies consist of one to four million foraging termites and can extend their "foraging galleries" to over 300 feet in length, connecting multiple feeding sites. There are treatments, and sometimes they work at containing and killing colonies. I don't know what I would do if there were no more oak trees to walk under and gaze into. They are so magical in any weather condition but my favorite viewing is when they are engulfed in fog.
In my home state of Arizona, I clearly remember a period of my childhood where nearly every tree in the neighborhood was whitewashed to stop the beatles from digging into the tree trunks. The majority took a hit from them including the ones in my front yard. It's devastating to see that house today with no trees. But while we're tree crushing, can I just say that the Quaking Aspens and Birch trees in Northern Arizona were my respite. They literally sang in the wind. The Birch and its patchy white bark made everything feel new again and the Quaking Aspens took the job of adding colors so precise it was like standing in a forest of crayons. Now, here in upstate New York, I grumble at my Acorn tree when my lawn mower hits one, pinging around the blades, smashing its hollowed out corpse that long ago dropped in a previous Autumn. But then I remember how it's a respite for the birds I love, the Bluejays and Finches and the occasional Cardinal, and I grin the stupidest grin when I think of the chipmunks stuffing their cheeks with a bounty of acorns. And I remember the soft, cool shade it provided my Blackie on his last day on this earth as we laid together under its umbrella of leaves. I sit there in the Autumn evenings to remember him now. It's funny how trees root us while simultaneously rooting themselves.