HEART BEAT: The Forest for the Trees

By FELICIA MITCHELL

I thought that this would be the year I would walk into the woods behind my house and harvest morel mushrooms.  Why not?  They were popping up all over Meadowview.  Surely they were growing nearby.

During morel season, I told naturalist Jim Minick that I was not certain that I would find anything, even if I went foraging with a magnifying glass in hand.  Where should I start?  He asked me what kind of wood lay nearby.  Evidently a wood of poplar, hickory, walnut and ash trees likes morels, or vice versa.

So I set out, prepared for the hunt, only to find myself standing at the edge of the woods still a little confused.  I could spot a poplar tree.  The rest?  I couldn’t see the trees for the forest.

That was when I realized that it was time to learn the names of trees.  Remember collecting leaves in school and ironing them between sheets of wax paper?  I thought about doing that.  I even bought a Peterson guide to trees. 

But I procrastinated, daunted by the task, until one morning I woke up and took my interest and my camera outside.  It was time to document some trees.  Within an hour, I had leaves all over my desk and photographs in the computer.  What had I learned?

The four trees that Jim mentioned were right there, and so were all kinds of others.  I’m not sure what that means in the grand scheme of morel-hunting, but it’s fascinating to know that I’m on my way to finding my way through the trees in my own yard.

There are poplars, lots of poplars.  If you trace a broad leaf, it looks like the stencil of a tulip or a teacup.  And the tree that I called catalpa for so many years?  It’s really a princess tree.  There are several wild heart cherry trees, one dogwood that hasn’t been taken down by blight, and an American beech.

I also found many trees that I knew to be locusts, even before I looked them up.  My father, who spent a lot of times in the forests in his early days, did try to teach me a few things.  Some of that, like the identity of a locust, has stuck.

The locust in my woods, I’ve discerned after some study, is a black locust, a tree indigenous to our region.  It has alternate compound leaves sharing a long stem.  Need a mnemonic device?  Think Appalachian abacus. 

There are also hickories, oak trees, white ash trees with stalked leaflets, and small evergreen trees I haven’t put a name to but will, soon.  Sugar maples are the biggest surprise. 

Standing between the woods and a locust is my gardener’s guilt in the shape of a rhododendron that I planted.  It’s covered by a honeysuckle vine that wants to choke it back.  I could chop down the honeysuckle, or I could let the woods decide what belongs here. 

Next trek, I’ll try to catalog evergreens.