Yesterday was cold but clear. A nice day for another walk! A good part of yesterday's three hour trek took place in what we call "The Jut." It's a five-acre piece of the property that extends to the east. It's a very pretty area, with a great variety of trees -- well worth the 4/10ths of a mile walk to get there from the house.
The pictures below showcase some of the great hardwood species found in the Jut. Temps were in the single digits, but the crisp air was terrific.
On the right of the first picture, you find a young red oak. From a favored type of trees, quercus rubra is Northern New England's only common oak. Two huge trees can be seen in the middle, with a cute little paper birch on the left.
Ah, the great yellow birch. The tree pictured below starts as one trunk on the ground. After about a foot, three trunks decided to shoot out in various directions. Wow!
Red maple often gets a bad rap in the forestry world. It's not as economically valuable as sugar maple, but it's still a great tree. Winter flowers, uncommon in most trees, can be seen in red maples. True to the name, the flowers are red. Excellent red leaves can be expected this fall.
A treasured tree that faces great peril, white ash (fraxinus americana) , pictured below, has some of the neatest bark around. The diamond-shaped ridges are a wonderful aesthetic feature. Unfortunately, the emerald ash borer has killed tens of millions of ash trees in the U.S. No sign of them in our area yet. Let's keep hoping for cold, snowy winters to keep them at bay! White ash foliage can be purple in the fall. A truly amazing sight to behold.
Look for house update photos -- and perhaps a few snowy forest pics -- by the end of the weekend!
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