Echoes of the chestnut die off last century and the woolly adelgids in the evergreens along the Blue Ridge.
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Start some silver or red maples from seed. They grow pretty fast and are not susceptible to many diseases or pests. Just find a tree of either in town or out in the country and gather up the helicopter seeds in the spring. They fall in late May around here. A large coffee container full will be enough to plant a small forest. I can gather up a couple of bushel baskets full from my two backyard trees.
They are great carbon sinks too. Silver maples can live well past 150 years. I planted two silver maples in my backyard in 88 or 89. One is three feet in diameter and the other is about half as thick. The biggest one had more sun and was planted in less sandy soil.
Next spring, I’m going to buy 50 five gallon pots and find a 15 x 35 patch of ground out in the country that has ample moisture and sun. I’ll till it up and put 5-6 tall poultry netting around it to keep the deer out. Then I’ll dig the pots in to ground level and start my seeds there. That way I won’t have to water them constantly and keep moving to bigger pots. After 3 - 4 years, they should be nice sized and won’t have any problem with them surviving or getting people to take them to plant on their land.
Added:
The woman I bought my house from planted two silver maples in the front yard. They were about 7 feet tall in 1986. They grew so damn large and shaded my house so thoroughly, I had moss growing on the shingles on the South side. I had to keep trimming branches off that touched the roof. I finally cut them down August of 2019 and planted apple trees in the spring of 2020 to replace them.
I got lucky and the power company paid to take them down because they were near the power lines and they had to keep trimming them over the years. Otherwise, it would have cost me 2 grand per tree because of their size and all the wires nearby.
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And if you don’t think they get huge and live a long time:
According to the home owners, this tree was rated as one of the largest Silver Maple trees in the state, per the University of New Hampshire’s Cooperative Extension. This massive tree, boasts 8 leaders, and stands over 100+ feet tall. It spans 120+ feet in canopy coverage. The diameter of this tree is over 8′, that’s a 25′ circumference.
Carpenter ants had infested it.
There is a silver maple in Germany well over 200 years old.
It’s great to see a reflection on the long history of human modification of forests, but a analysis which leaves out logging and the chestnut blight seems severely limited.
Chestnuts can establish on disturbed ground, are fast growing, cast dense shade, reach great heights and are long lived. I know of no other native eastern North American tree species with that collection of traits. They really were a keystone species and they disappeared just prior to professional ecology so we have very little information about how forests including them functioned.
It’s been 15 years since I was current on the literature of disturbance in North American forest biomes, but the emphasis on fire suppression surprised me. Eastern forests were long thought to be dominated by low frequency, large extent disturbances like the 1938 hurricane that hit New England. It would be difficult to disentangle a change in fire suppression policy dating to the thirties from regeneration after the hurricane with the keystone species newly removed all on top of two centuries of European logging (focused on finding high value specimens of white pine throughout the region for ship building and international trade, rather than just clearing land for farms and local building need)
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The New York Times had a great article on the struggle to bring back the American chestnut tree.
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Thanks for the article! This part seems relevant for many of our other discussions on the boards:
“ The chestnut blight arguably ended Appalachian subsistence farming as a common practice, forcing upon a region’s worth of people a stark choice: Go into the coal mines, or move away. “With the death of the chestnut,” the historian Donald Davis wrote in 2005, “an entire world did die, eliminating subsistence practices that had been viable in the Appalachian Mountains for more than four centuries.”
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thank you for planting trees
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Great suggestion! We have some red maple and a lot of red, and some white oak. (Also black and silver birch.) I plan to tube and mulch the best seedlings I can find in the spring. Also we have been felling some of the least healthy beech trees for next year’s firewood. I am still hopeful we can save some of them when they figure out more about beech leaf disease. Perhaps, with some work, we can keep our forest growing.
Still the loss of American beech (perhaps the end of the species) just after loosing almost all Ash trees is yet another blow. Beech tree species is at least tens of millions of years old. We seem to be loosing more tree species as time goes on.