HEMLOCK MEMORIES

 A HEMLOCK TREE SAVED

 

HEMLOCK FOLIAGE

YOUNG HEMLOCK

Tuesday, 8:00 AM.  56 degrees F on the back porch (no report from the ferry dock).  The sky is sunny, with no precipitation predicted.  The high today and for the next several days will be near 80; I would call this Indian Summer, but we haven't had a frost.  I'll take it, though.
   When my neighbor did some clearing on his wooded lot across the street I pointed out a good sized hemlock, perhaps 50 years old among the oaks and poplars, that I thought should be saved, and he spared it.
   Eastern Hemlocks, Tsuga canadensis, have a special place in my  tree memories. Growing up in southeastern Wisconsin they were few and far between, since they are trees of the far north and northeast in North America.  In southern Wisconsin a few might be found along the north facing banks of cold streams, or in other sheltered, shady, cool environments; places where the snow is slow to melt in the spring.  
   I don't remember seeing hemlocks until I was on university botany field trips to northern Wisconsin, where they could be found in remnants of Boreal Forest vegetation, and usually close to lakes Michigan or Superior.  Another reason for their scarcity was their use as timbers for barns and other structures, and for railroad ties, as the wood was strong and durable. Often the only place hemlocks were spared the axe were steep north facing hillsides, too difficult for the loggers and their oxen to assault.
   So imagine my joy when I first walked the Hemlock Forest in the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx; a relict forest left along the Bronx River by the last retreating glacier.  Overrun by visitors, subject to fires carelessly or purposely set, beset by squirrels so numerous they ate virtually all the seeds that should have grown into new trees, the aged giants hung on (and with better conservation practices still do).  
   Battered and beleaguered, the Hemlock Forest in the Bronx nevertheless introduced countless city children to nature; a full thirty-five years later, having found a true New York pizzeria in Texas, I discovered that the owner had grown up in the Bronx and spent many a day playing among the forest giants at "da Botanicals."
   About that same period I became familiar with another grove of out-of-place hemlocks, known as The Hemlock Cathedral, in the gorge of the Mianus River in southeastern Connecticut, about twenty miles north of New York City, close to our New York home.  These were truly mighty trees, the descendants of those left along the rocky river gorge in the wake of the retreating ice sheet ten thousand and more years ago. 
   To be reached only by a two mile hike along steep trails (and back out again) these trees did not suffer directly from human activity, but they were assaulted by insect infestations so caused: the woolly adelgid, a sucking insect, being the worst among them, along with the hemlock bark borer.  Older trees under environmental stress (heat, drought, mineral deficiency) are always the first to succumb.  but again, the Cathedral hangs on.  It has been a number of years since I hiked to the Hemlock Cathedral, and I doubt I could do it again even if I had the opportunity.
   But the tree that my neighbor spared sparks my hemlock memories, and that will have to suffice.