ABOUT TREES

A favorite autumn past time in the Bore household is to go for a walk and play the game, “What Kind of Tree is This?” Big Bore is a former Boy Scout Boy Wonder, so he is tree savvy. I’m a Girl Scout dropout and not too hot at this game, but I am learning. He has taught me that a walnut tree is NOT called a “big green ball tree,” and that it’s usually the first tree to lose all its leaves in the fall.

Thanks to his teaching, I can also identify a red oak, white oak, hackberry, ash, maple, elm, sweet gum, hickory, sycamore, and pecan…most of the time. Once the leaves fall, though, all bets are off. I usually cannot make identification from bark alone. Except the flakey river birch, maybe.

We have an old elm tree in our small front yard that has been through hell and back in the 28 years I have lived here. Wind and ice storms and the Westar tree assassins have cut away at many of its limbs and branches. If trees have feelings, than the elm must be suffering from post partum depression, for sure. Still, it hangs in there and provides ample shade in the summer but looks like a stark wounded soldier in the winter.

Nature has planted two mimosa trees in the backyard and four years ago Mama Bore gave us foot-high “sticks” from the Arbor Society that we have nurtured along. The golden raintree and Washington hawthorne are now approaching 15-feet, but the flowering crab apple hasn’t been as quick to grow. I’m always picking up after the mimosas and the raintree in the fall; along with their leaves, they both drop pods and I don’t like to have them littered all over the lawn. I'm afraid they'll develop into Pod People...like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

When BB and I were hiking in Arkansas, we came across a most unusual tree--one like we'd both never seen before. It's like Siamese twins, starting out as two, then merging into one single tree at about 6-1/2 feet. I had Big Bore "hide" behind it for this picture, so maybe you can tell how strange it truly is. “What kind of tree is this?” Let me know when you have it figured out.