What’s Wrong with These Trees?

While driving to our cottage in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, I noted with some dismay many of these drooping young trees along Route 80 in the Poconos. We’re talking hundreds of trees, not just the few pictured here.

“What could be happening?” I wondered. Some disease? A new blight? Dehydration? Roadside fumes?

I decided they were birches, given the white trunks. So I went to the web, where I read about birch blight, and gypsy moths, and wood rot, but found no real answer to my question.

Then I found the website for the Pa Dept of Conservation and Natural Resouces, and emailed them my question. To my delight, I received the answer within 48 hours:

“I believe what you are seeing are gray birch trees. These are small, white barked birch trees that tend to grow in openings, like along highways. The ice storms of Jan. 2005 caused major damage to these trees. They are short-lived and tend to naturally suffer this type of damage. They reseed readily in openings and the storm damage has no effect on the overall birch population.”

Relieved that our forests were not on the verge of destruction, I went back to the web to read more about the drooping gray birch. There I found this wonderful essay written and read by Robert Finch as part of his NPR series Cape Cod Notebook. Although I encourage you to head on over and listen to this lovely essay in toto, here’s a bit of what Finch tells us:

If there’s a tree version of “white trash,” I suppose it would be the gray birch – tough, stunted, scraggly, generally disparaged, yet fertile and tenacious… After ice storms they’re often the most pitiful-looking trees in the neighborhood. Their thick heads of fine twigs and branchlets catch and hold the flying ice like nets, and bend the narrow trunks over into attitudes of despair.

Perfect description, Isn’t it? “Attitudes of despair.” Here’s more from Finch:

Robert Frost found a more hopeful and sensual image for this in his famous poem, “Birches,” where he describes their bent forms after an ice storm as being “Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.”

You can read Frost’s entire poem here. Do read it. Like all of Frost’s poems about nature, it is also about life.

Don’t you just love the internet? You start out searching for tree disease information and end up learning the poetry of Robert Frost.

Category: Considerations