Category Archives: Trees

Smells like Christmas

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Tropical Storm Zeta dropped by here early Thursday morning. It was not a good visitor. It didn’t stay long, and it tore the place up.

We woke up around 3 am to wind and rain. Leah got up around 5:30 and went into the kitchen. I heard her say, “Oh, great!” That’s when the power went off.

Zeta was predicted to bring pretty strong winds, and it did. Rome reported a peak gust of 55 mph. That was bad enough, but we had had about three inches of rain the day before, and along with the rain Zeta brought, it was enough to make the ground soggy and soft. Especially soft. Soft enough that trees fell all over North Georgia. Falling trees means, among other things, fallen power lines. Georgia Power said the storm damage was the worst in about 60 years. I checked the Georgia Power outage map for our area. It was busy.

Each icon indicates a power outage in a given area. The icon just left of center, with 15 in it, is our area. Clicking on the icon brings up information on how many customers were without power. Our little mountaintop community showed 12 customers, which means every single one of us. The numbers in the icons don’t show the number of customers without power. Other icons closer to town represented up into the hundreds of customers. The total in the Georgia Power service area was around a million.

The worst power outage we have had in our 15 years up here is less than a day. Georgia Power’s estimate for restoring power is 11 pm Sunday. For us, a very long power outage is more than an inconvenience. We have a decent generator, which means we can string extension cords through the house and get some lights, the TV, and the freezer running. Unfortunately, our refrigerator is a press fit into the cabinets, so we can’t get to the power cord for it. So now we have lights and TV, but since we are on a well, we have no water. That’s a problem. So I decided to drive down to town to get some water. That’s when we ran into the next problem. Downed trees blocked Fouche Gap Road down to Huffaker Road, which is the way we get into town.

I walked the dogs down to check it out. There was a second blockage a little further down.

The dogs and I edged past the trees, which were hanging on power lines, something I wouldn’t have done if the power lines were live. Further down the road we ran into more downed trees, but also a county road crew that was clearing the road.

Unfortunately for us, they wouldn’t touch trees that fell on power lines.

All the broken pines smelled like a Christmas tree farm.

There is a detour that leads down the far side of the mountain into Texas Valley, west along the northern edge of the mountain, and then to Huffaker a few miles further out. That adds at least 10 miles to our trip. Unfortunately (a lot of things were unfortunate), Big Texas Valley Road was blocked by trees. There is another way out of the valley that leads to Rome’s major north-south highway, US 27. The road narrows to one lane for some distance. It also had downed power lines, but they were dangling so that we could thread our way through. We got into town, but that detour is more than 20 miles, because it ends up on the wrong end of town for us.

Friday morning I saw our neighbor John, who has a grading company. He met a friend and they cut a narrow tunnel through the first downed tree on Fouche Gap. They expected to clear both places. On Friday Leah and I decided to drive into town, so we headed down Fouche Gap to Huffaker, expecting to find both blockages cleared. The second downed tree was not cleared. I said S*%T, and not for the last time. So we turned around and decided to take a chance on the 10-mile detour instead of the 20-mile detour. It was passable, but only because residents had taken their own chainsaws to the trees and cleared just enough to get by.

We stocked up on gallon jugs of filtered water for drinking and washing (hands and dishes, not entire bodies). We have a little wet-weather spring next to our driveway that provided water for toilet flushing. By Saturday it was running fairly low. Just about the time I was finding that out a neighbor came by and said we could get water at his house. He has a generator big enough to power his well pump and most of his house. I took him up on that offer, so as of late Saturday we have almost six gallons of drinking water and five five-gallon buckets filled with toilet-flushing water.

Another neighbor got a generator that automatically shuts off the company power lead and sends power into the house. Her generator is big enough to power everything in her house. That would be nice, but that kind of setup starts at around $4000 just for a smallish generator without installation. It’s hard to justify spending that kind of money for something that happens so infrequently. On the other hand, another neighbor and her husband use EPAP machines, so they have to have power. They ended up at a hotel.

Saturday morning a power company crew cleared the two trees that were blocking out way off the town side of the mountain. That allowed me to get to a fast food place and back in a reasonable time.

So, as of now, we have some water. We have some lights. It’s going to get cool tonight and cold tomorrow night. If the power company is right, we ought to have heat in time for the coldest part of the night. And how shower. That will be nice.

Fall

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Apparently, from what I can find, autumn is called fall for the exact reason you might think it is — this is the season when leaves fall.

But not only leaves. When I was walking the dogs a few days ago, we came into an area where a lot of large oak trees overhang the road. These were falling from the trees.

A lot of them were falling. I could hear them hitting the leaves, and I could hear them hitting the road around us. I thought about recording the sound of falling acorns, but, even though they were falling frequently, I figured I wouldn’t be able to get a good recording. Oaks are pretty shy about that kind of thing.

I think we were all fortunate that none of them hit us.

These acorns come from the chestnut oak (Quercas montana), the most common oak around this part of the mountain. The chestnut oak itself is quite common from Massachusetts all the way down the mountainous spine of the East to Mississippi. It has a cousin, the swamp chestnut oak, which grows in lowland areas, as opposed to our chestnut oak, which, as its name implies, grows in higher elevations.

Our chestnut oak’s acorns are among the largest in the US.

The Wikipedia article says the chestnut oak acorn ranges in size up to around 1 1/2 inches. As you can see, one of the acorns I picked up from the road is around that size. The swamp chestnut oak’s acorns may be larger (or maybe not). The bur oak’s acorns are said to be larger, but bur, or burr, oaks don’t grow around here.

These are good throwing acorns. They are also useful as chew toys for dogs, although apparently the taste discourages them from chewing too long. Wildlife find them appetizing. There are other places along the road where squirrels have had a picnic and left all the chewed up skins on the road. The acorns of the white oak group, of which the chestnut oak is a member, have less tannins and are therefore less bitter than acorns from the red oaks. I don’t really know because I haven’t sampled them.

Another thing the Wikipedia article says is that the wood of the chestnut oak is dense and makes good firewood. I have found that to be true, second only to the dogwood, I think. A few years ago we cut several large oaks that were threatening the garage at our old house, and they burned well. It is not uncommon to see several trunks sprouting from the same spot, which tends to make them somewhat weak as they get bigger. For that reason I cut any that were close to the house. At our new house we have mainly pines and maples, so I haven’t had the chance to try much oak in our wood burning stove.

But if one of the oaks along the road had actually dropped an acorn on my head, I might have considered a little oak rustling.

Passion in the forest

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The forest on Lavender Mountain is a mixed hardwood and pine. The hardwoods include lots of oak and maple, with a few poplars and others. I have been noticing this particular pair of trees for as long as I have been taking the dogs for their walks on Fouche Gap Road.

It’s a pine in the embrace of a maple.

It would be interesting to see this pair in 50 or 100 years, if they lived that long.

Dogwoods and dead pines

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We have been losing dogwoods for several years. I remember seeing the side of a nearby hill on my way home from Huntsville in early spring a few years ago. It seemed like hundreds of dogwoods were blooming on the bare slopes. Around here, just a few miles away, I have been cutting and burning dead dogwoods for some time. I keep an eye on the remaining trees as I walk the dogs and note which seem be dead. This spring we have been pleasantly surprised to see quite a few dogwoods blooming.

When I look out the window where I’m sitting right now, I can see four, or possibly five trees in bloom. I may be misremembering, but it seems that in past years dogwoods bloomed before most of the surrounding trees began to leaf out. This year it seems to be happening simultaneously, which makes it harder to see the flowering trees.

I’m not positive of the cause of the dogwood deaths. We have had a couple of recent summers that were very hot and very dry. There is also a dogwood blight, dogwood anthracnose, that has wrought havoc on dogwoods from the northeast to the southeast, and on the west coast as well. Some forests in the northeast have had essentially all dogwoods infected, and infection of forest dogwoods almost always results in the death of the tree. There are some effects on the trees that are diagnostic. In reading about the blight I have found that some things I have noticed on trees that seem to be having problems are actually characteristic of infected trees. So it seems that the dogwood blight is infecting trees here on our mountain.

In the south, the trees that are most at risk are those at high elevations, those in moist conditions, and those that are in shaded forest areas. Our elevation is not as high as the sources I read worry about. Moisture has not been much of a problem here, either. Of course, most of the trees, except those that have been planted, are in the forest. Another condition that makes dogwoods more susceptible is drought and the resulting stress. I hope we don’t see that this summer.

Several sources indicated that climate change might be partially responsible for the increase in damage caused by dogwood anthracnose, and those sources were from more than 20 years ago.

We are also apparently in another kind of blight, one caused by pine beetles. I have written before about how many dead trees we have on our little five-acre tract. It’s getting worse here, and very noticeable along our dog walks.

Some of these trees that look alive are not. The three pines in the center of the image have lighter trucks because the bark has fallen off. What you can’t see in this image is the large number of trees that have fallen around these still-standing trees.

Pine beetle infestations apparently come in waves several years apart. There are several species of beetle that kill pines, and they can infect healthy trees, but trees that have been subjected to drought or other stresses are more susceptible. So, score another for our recent droughts.

I haven’t looked carefully at our dead pines to see whether there are signs of beetle infestations. However, I have noticed that it’s not just pines that are dying. I see a fair number of hardwoods that have died, as well. Probably not as many as the pines, but still, more than I would expect to result from simply aging. So I wonder whether we are seeing some effects on our forests from climate change.

And now from the large to the small. Here are some thyme-leaved bluets (Houstonia serpyllifolia).

I spied these beside the road on one of my dog walks.

Late summer color

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For about two years we have been staring out our bedroom window at a bare, red-clay area between the house and the driveway. This is how it looked.

I was just getting ready to start some landscaping when I took this photo. Now it looks like this.

There is actually a small Japanese maple in the middle of the bare area between the foreground vincas and the back ground vincas. The vinca plants have been doing quite well. Unfortunately, it has been so hot and dry here that they were beginning to wilt. I put about 30 gallons on them on Saturday, all from one of our rainwater collector tanks, which you can see at the left side of the house.

The hot and dry weather has caused some of the hardwoods to start turning color. I had not noticed this maple until Saturday.

The color is nice, but it’s way too early. Some other maples have started to turn red. Some of the other hardwoods, including oaks, which usually turn brownish yellow, are starting to turn brown. No color. That is sometimes a bad sign, especially for dogwoods. I have noticed that dogwoods whose leaves turn brown late in the summer often don’t come back next spring. I have mentioned before that we have lost most of the native dogwoods that used to grow on our property. We will probably lose more after this summer.