There are certain things that I pay more attention to when I’m outside. I listen for animal calls, I watch for things scurrying by quickly, I note small insect movements all around me, but the things I most often overlook are the trees. Isn’t that odd? Yet, when I’m standing in the bright, hot August midday sunshine, I immediately seek refuge from the closest trees, knowing that temperatures will be ten degrees cooler under the shade. I also know that trees provide all the necessities needed for life by those insects, birds, squirrels, etc. Trees are, without a doubt, nature’s silent heroes. I don’t think they get enough credit.
I’m super thankful for Sara and Melissa’s reminder to become more familiar with my own trees. After watching the Trees to Meet You video below, I would like to learn more about my yard’s trees, starting with the three that we planted for our three children. You should check out your trees as well and let us know what you find! There’s nothing quite like the many colors of green in summer, and that is mostly thanks to the beautiful trees that silently, but strongly, serve our urban spaces.
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Written By Sara Gagné, Urban Ecologist, UNCC
For this installment of the Explore Your Nature Neighborhood Series, I took Melissa Dowland’s advice in the Trees to Meet You video she created for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and became more familiar with the trees in my backyard. I live in an older neighborhood near Uptown Charlotte, so some of the large trees that once graced my yard are long gone. Instead, I have new baby trees that I planted over the last couple of years – a black tupelo, Eastern redbud, American yellowwood, and Shumard oak to be exact – each with a story to tell.
I planted the black tupelo near the back of my yard where I’m pretty sure an old tree used to be. It’s got plenty of room to grow the 70 ft it is capable of. Black tupelos can grow just about anywhere, wet or dry, and they have a long tap root that anchors the tree to the soil, making them more resistant to the increasingly violent storms that have pummeled North Carolina in recent years. The black tupelo is also one of the best trees to plant to support wildlife: its hollows welcome bats, tree frogs, reptiles, and raccoons; its blue-black fruit feeds migrating songbirds like thrushes and tanagers in the fall, not to mention foxes and opossums; and the honey that bees make from its abundant nectar is highly prized.
The Eastern redbud replaced an 80-year-old dogwood near the back of my house that finally died last year. My office windows looked out on the dogwood’s upper, and mostly dead, branches. Those dead branches attracted a stunning variety of bird species over the years that feasted on the insects within the wood and on the dogwood fruit. From my window, I saw Baltimore orioles, pine siskins, Carolina chickadees, brown-headed nuthatches, and more. The new redbud will play a different role. Once the tree grows tall enough, I may be able to spy the southeastern blueberry bee sipping nectar from the redbud’s spectacular pink flowers, or one of more than a dozen caterpillar species chomping away on its leaves.
My favorite of my baby trees is the American yellowwood, one of the rarest native trees of the Southeast. I first saw a yellowwood at the Reedy Creek Nature Center soon after I moved to Charlotte from Wisconsin. That yellowwood’s spreading branches filled the air with a multitude of ethereal green leaves and cascades of heavenly-scented white and yellow flowers. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my northern sensibilities were overcome by its beauty. So, when I moved to my nearly empty backyard, I planted a yellowwood smack in the middle of it. Despite its natural rarity, the Society of Municipal Arborists (SMA) named the American yellowwood its Urban Tree of the Year for 2015, an honor that it bestowed at its annual meeting in Charlotte, of all places. American yellowwood does well in urban conditions, is relatively pest-free, attracts pollinators and nesting birds, and, as I’ve described, is incomparable in sheer gorgeousness.
The newest addition to my yard is the baby Shumard oak that replaced an 80-year-old willow oak street tree that came down in a storm last fall. As sad as I am to have lost a magnificent old oak, I am thrilled to have a new Shumard oak in its stead. The species was recommended by the City of Charlotte’s Landscape Management Division that takes care of our street trees because it grows rapidly and is very tolerant of the dry soil and pollution it will experience near the road. So far, it has grown like gangbusters, even with the heat we’ve had this month. The Shumard oak is a host plant for many moth and butterfly species, like the imperial moth, and, like other oaks, is one of the most valuable trees for wildlife hands down.
If you’d like to know more about the trees in your yard, your city or town may have a guide to common species, like Charlotte’s ID Your Tree!, that might help. The North Carolina Forest Service’s Common Forest Trees Pocket Manual is another very useful resource. Once you’ve gotten to know your trees better, take a moment and draw a leaf or write a poem about a tree in your nature journal. For my part, I’ll be pressing my babies’ leaves as a reminder of when they were young. I can hardly wait to see what my yard will look like when they are grown!
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Thank you to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for partnering with the NC Science Trail.
