The humble mulberry

In the midst of the 'Bolder Boulder' hullabaloo, I stumbled upon two mulberry trees covered in berries.
The first photo is of a little tree on the corner of Spruce and 18th.  A couple years ago there was an old silver maple inside the corner fence that blew down---I remember it happened a couple minutes after Ron walked over to my place during one of our fierce windstorms.  We all were stood around and gaped at the fallen tree in amazement: kids hopped up on the trunk that was straddling the sidewalk. The tree was summarily cut up and hauled away and the fence repaired, and I had a feeling the neighbors wouldn't think to replace the old tree with a young version of silver maple.   There's a mulberry tree in the alley across from my house which the birds love, and one of them must have dropped the right seed at the right time because, lo and behold, from the old silver maple stump sprouted the wild and crazy bush-like growth of a young mulberry tree. They grow like crazy tangled hair, branches and sprouts every which way, no order, it's hard to even see a main trunk.  During one of our heavy snowstorms in the fall the top of the little volunteer mulberry snapped off completely.  Not to be deterred, it came back more vigorous than ever, and now provides very sweet tasty berries to alert passersby.  They're sweet like sun-ripened blackberries.  A little free neighborhood juice bar.
   The second photo shows a tree along the 'Bolder Boulder' route back in the Newlands area, near Cedar.  It's a got quite the spread of exuberant branches and is simply loaded with fruit.  I can hear some very happy bird flocks watching out for those berries to ripen in the next few days.
   Don't be afraid to sample these wonderful berries.  They're digestible, delicious, and might bring out the songbird in you while you pluck them with purple stained fingers!
 

In a grove of lindens

It's almost time for the lindens to start their flowering glory, and what better place to experience linden-hood than the west side of Cheesman Park.  There are rows of stately lindens that already are throwing a deep shade on the lovely lawns, creating a real English park effect.

   Trees thrive when they're planted in groups like this, and it's a magical experience to walk into a man-made grove of same-species trees like this, especially ones that have been well-cared for, watered, and well trimmed.

   Lindens throw a very deep shade, and they grow in a compact way, almost spire-like.  In the third photo down you can see the distinctive way their branches extend when they've been well-trimmed.

   They don't have that fountain-shape that I associate with the ideal shade trees like elms.  

   Early on they can assume a kind of heart-shape, wide at the bottom and tapering up, kind of onion-dome like (the lindens on Pine Street between 12 and 15th in Boulder).  More mature lindens grow more columnar, and I haven't seen but a couple of venerable giants (south west corner of Pine and 16th in Boulder, a battered giant on north side of Spruce between 22nd and 23rd).

    Get ready for their flowering, though!  There is really nothing like it in our urban forest.  They will soon be blanketing the night-time streets with the most heavenly-sweet honeyed odor of their blossoms.  

   One of the advantages of their exuberant and messy growth pattern is that unless they are trimmed, lindens will sprout branches very low on their trunks.  When they flower you can literally lose yourself nose-wise in bouquets of blossoms located conveniently and abundantly directly at nostril level.  

    On moonlit June nights, to drink in deep effortless draughts of this Elysian perfume is surely as near to the smell of Paradise as we're likely to get in this lifetime. 

    The Nissan dealership on the corner of Mapleton and 28th planted a row of 10 or so lindens on the south side of Mapleton that acted as a great shield and hedge to their back parking lot.  They never bothered to trim these lindens, and one June night I stumbled on the flowering Elysian fields of their flowering.  I wandered back and forth, from tree to tree, inhaling great gulps and trying to decide which tree smelled more like honey vanilla, or more like maple syrup with lemon, or which one was like orange sherbet and which had a hint of cherry.  As I stumbled scent-drunk down the line of trees, the flowering branches created odorous fortresses around each tree, extending out in a honey-scented radius.

    Early this year to my dismay I saw a team of gardeners had been called in to give the trees a proper haircut and trim-job.  All branches up to about 10 feet were removed.  The row of lindens now looks like cared-for urban trees, but gone is their protective foliage that hid the ugly wall and parking lot, and gone will be the chance to have such gloriously abundant direct 'nostril-to-angel' nose-level aromatherapy this year.   I'm sure it's good to encourage the trees to grow higher, and to clean up their messy lower branches, but ah, what a loss.  

   For a while, lindens were the go-to tree for the City of Boulder parkings, to replace the large plantings of silver maples.   They're everywhere----look across from the Casey Middle School football field on the west side of 14th St, along what used to be the Kaiser Permanente building.  They planted those lindens 20 years ago, and they've shot up into healthy 30 foot spires.  They're nice, don't get me wrong, but they just don't have all that pleasing or generous a shade-tree shape.  They're just too self-contained.  I know the City foresters prefer this because they're less prone to wind and storm damage.  

    Every spring I go up on a ladder and trim painstakingly all the very numerous dead twigs and branches off the linden in front of my house---it's also about 21 years old now, and I do love this little tree.  It leaves out so beautifully and bravely---while it's neighbor catalpa is hardly showing a green shoot, it will be fully decked out in it's soft magnificent spring green.  It can get very surprised by those deadly spring snows, and I try to get out there with a broom and relieve the stress on those pliable branches when they get bent almost to the ground.   I know it loves the attention of the careful pruning and trimming I give it every year, and literally fluffs up and leafs out even more fully in return.

     Lindens are dense, deep and dark.  They're a solid, fairly quick growing tree, but not as tolerant of stress as the City of Boulder probably hoped.  In my opinion they don't have  enough of the resilience, versatility, and drought tolerance that the frugal, thrifty early homeowners/settlers of Boulder were looking for.  They found those attributes in silver maples, catalpas, green ashes and Plains cottonwoods.  The three lindens they planted on the Pearl Street Mall in front of the old Art Cinema, directly south of the courthouse?  Remember them, all watered and cared for and primped by the ground crews that watch over the Mall plantings?  They got about 30 years old, about 30 or 40 feet tall, but they got sick, spindly, stressed, started to die of.  Now they're  all gone--they've been replaced by sycamore/London plane tree saplings  

   Good luck, Boulder.  Don't get me wrong, I am a sycamore fanatic.  I adore and worship sycamore trees.  If you want to get high, go down to Naropa and gaze up at those fantastic mottled beauties on the west and east side of the old Lincoln Elementary.  But sycamores are having a tough time on these stressful Boulder streets.  The ones they put in around the Post Office at 15th and Walnut didn't make it.  The sapling in front of Ted's Montana Grill, near the Laughing Goat has been replaced, and the new little one is struggling.  The sycamores get some kind of disease, their leaves wilt.  Look at the sycamore on the west side of 19th at Salberg Park.  It doesn't thrive.  Wish the one they put in on the northwest corner of Spruce and 14th--- the Shambala Center (the old Public Service Building)---luck.  If only 30 years from now the corner of Spruce and 14th could have the rustling leaves of a mature sycamore shading the busy street, like they do all over Europe.  Sycamores are the saving grace of all those European cities, from Paris to Rome to London.  Man's best friend may not really be a dog but rather a sycamore.  I sure wish they did better in Boulder.  I'd love to be able to back off on my Silver Maple rant, with a beautiful tree species that I thought stood half a chance with our ridiculous winds, our terrible droughts and heat waves, our ever increasing air pollution, and of course the absolute reality of brutal climate change charging at us, wanting to turn the Colorado plains into the Sonoran desert.

   Tangentially, I walked past 8th and Mapleton and looked at the canopy that is struggling to regenerate itself along the 4 rows of trees that line the Mapleton parkway.  We had a big fundraiser, spearheaded partly by my father, back in the late 60's/early 70's to plant maples to replace the big trees that were going to be lost to age and storms.  What did the City of Boulder plant?  Sugar maples, primarily, and red maples, some Norways and some Schweldlers.    35 years later, we would have rows of magnificent mature Silver Maples, had the City Forester followed the wisdom of the early settlers.  But no.  We have sporadic rag tag rows of filler saplings, full of holes.  They're not very good-sized sugar, red and occasional Norway maples, stressed and and struggling.  Nothing like the canopy of arching, gnarly, silver giants that I grew up walking to school under.  I repeat, there is no maple species that comes close to thriving in our climate like the silver maple.  The growth rate of silver maples is about the most gratifying thing in the entire urban forest lexicon.   In our mayfly human life-span we can actually see year by year as silver maples become magificent specimens.  And we get to enjoy their beautiful shaggy trunks that turn into real shade trees, in this life! Not the next generation, but ours!  And, since I follow Lucretius and Epicurus, I firmly believe this is the only life we get, and there are no trees in an afterlife that will shade our spirits.  Since it is our right and duty as humans to enjoy pleasure in this very life, much of which is found in observing, touching, noticing, and living intimately with and amid trees, lets plant trees for our old-age that we will get to sit in our rocking chairs under.

    Of course, I love a great many, if not most, tree species, and there is a place for a lot of variety and diversity.  But when they hit upon a good thing, in a very difficult-on-trees climate-zone like Boulder, it makes sense to listen and respect your forebears and learn by observation what species thrives and recovers quickly, and to follow suit and plant what they planted!  I still say, those unsophisticated tree-planters who probably didn't have fancy forestry degrees knew a thing or two about the many blessed benefits that so outweigh the weak points of the silver maple.  

   But wait, I was blogging about the linden.  Well, good old Tilia Americana is a hard tree to find fault with, but it's just not a knock-your-socks off kind of tree shape or shade pattern. And it's a pretty slow grower.   Look at the solitary specimens that shade so many lawns of north Boulder bungalows, and ranch houses in Table Mesa and South Boulder.  The shade is so dense, the shape so columnar and contained, that you can't say 'Grows well with others.'  It's not a dappled shade, it's a deep darkness under those dense branches.  And lindens get stressed fairly easily.  Every year the linden on the southeast corner of Spruce and 15th---in the street parking---loses half it's crown to some kind of brown-leaf shrivel.  I always think it's going to die and be removed, but it bounces back, sort of.  Up the street on the south side of Spruce directly behind the Courthouse you can see a little linden that is half-dead and valiantly struggles to survive with only half of it's leaf mass every year.  It just can't get ahead in that brutal heat and traffic on Spruce. 

   But my blissful stroll today down the magnificent linden--shaded walkways of Cheesman Park reminded me that if you have the generous acreage for rolling estate lawns---English manor style----and can plant lindens in stately rows, they make for quite the glorious and inspiring urban forest.
    Yes, we all can use a little of that upright and solid royal lineage called linden pedigree!    

Catalpas in Capitol Hill, Denver

These photos of catalpas in bloom come from my friend Albert Rose.  He lives in Wheat Ridge, and we've discovered many beautiful catalpas in our perigrinations around his hometown.  He was in downtown Denver, Capitol Hill and came upon a number of pretty spectacular blossoming trees.  This is a reminder----it's early this year, by about 3 weeks for the catalpas, so make sure you get out to one of these blooming wonders and collect some of the fallen flowers, examine their orchid-like delicacy and amazing shape and inhale the fragrance.  The blossoms never last after they're taken from the tree, so it's best to treat them like the gigantic bouquet they really are!  Living in this semi-arid desert climate, it's a miraculous time for us, to be able to touch in to a tree that is so utterly fecund and tropical with it's huge numbers of flower spires and it's electric green heart shaped leaves.  The  tree looks like it belongs in the Amazon or somewhere in Indonesia.  It's worth a couple minutes of your day to find a suitable flowering catalpa and walk around it and see it from as many angle as possible.  This is particularly satisfying with giants like the one on the south side of Arapahoe just east of 17th St in Boulder, a true forest giant.  I'm sure this tree was one of the first trees planted by the early settlers, and to go visit it is to get a direct connection to more than a century of weather and human activity in the Boulder Creek floodplain.  This will only last another week or two, so good luck in practicing some flowering catalpa gazing while they're at their peak! 

Catalpa's blooming early

What a year for all flowering plants!  The roses are spectacular.  On our morning walk up over the hill to Sunset and back along 19th Jambo and I stroll through a veritable garden of Eden.  I marvel at how much vegetative diversity and flowering beauty exists in these little front and side yard pockets of 'suburbia.'  One can take a 4 mile hike through the foothills and see 'in the wild' only a fraction of the diversity and abundance of species that can exist in the pampered 'greenhouse' conditions of well watered soil and mulching and tending that exists in the 'unnatural city.'

   Walking up the alley towards home I'm greeted with a view of my three trees on the parking: Kentucky coffee tree, catalpa and linden.  After they've leafed out in the spring, each of these trees tells a story to me, every time I see them.  Their leaf, their bark, their shape, their color, their growth patterns so distinctive!  Each tree species is like it's own culture.

   It's always interesting to contemplate the importance of making distinctions, identifying differences and characteristics, classifying the world and the amazing diversity within it.  The 'Hsin Hsin Ming' begins with these memorable lines:

'The Great Way is not difficult for those not attached to preferences. When neither love nor hate arises, all is clear and undisguised.  Separate by the smallest amount, however, and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth.'

   I must admit that I am indeed very attached to my preference for the Silver Maple, Acer Saccarinum.  What don't I love and prefer about this tree?  In particular, the leaf form, the finely indented cut and shape of the leaf, with it's gorgeous underside of silvery gray, never fails to delight my eye.

    This is an entire blog to itself, why I believe the Silver Maple to be the most intelligent and enlightened choice for city street plantings, and why, every time I see the City of Boulder plant yet another tree species instead of a Silver Maple and I watch it struggle with our climate and the increasing hostility of our global warmed weather I write my daily diatribe/blog in protest.

    One by one, the silver maples planted in the first half of the last century are being removed from yards and parkings all over the city.  And they are not being replaced, due to the supposed wisdom of the new generation of city planners and foresters who believe that diversity of species is preferable, and that the silver maple's wood is too soft and to vulnerable to wind and storm damage.

    I've had this discussion for years, every time the city forester comes by to put another 'blue dot of death' on a silver maple to be removed. 

   First off, remember that we live here in Boulder in an environment hostile to all tree species.  All.  It's grassland/high desert.  Even cottonwoods, a native species, struggle without some kind of year 'round water source.  

    What does best is a tree that grows fast----and the healthy silver maple has a spectacular growth rate--- but that also can lose limbs and regenerate fast.  This just rubs the insurance guys so wrong, and gets the City of Boulder's panties up in a twist with the threat of lawsuits and property damage.

    I have lost 2 giant limbs from the old Giant Silver behind my duplex.  What a marvel, each time it was as if Old Giant knew how to minimize the damage.  The first limb came down 8 years ago in the narrow space between the south edge of the duplex and the neighbor's fence.  It was really almost a miracle, as if the tree understood.  It cost me a couple hundred to pay for some fence repair and some brick repair on the roof of the duplex.  Most of the cost was just getting this huge limb sawed into pieces, safely landed on this 10 foot wide strip of land between the houses. 

   Last year it lost another huge limb in a windstorm, this one growing over the north side of the duplex.  Again, it came down in an almost miraculously placed way, no damage at all to the new roof, and only cost me an aluminum antenna that got mangled attached to a chimney.  

    My point, which I know will tweak some people, is that I know that trees have a kind of spooky symbiosis with human life, and that the Silver Maple in particular is a species whose supposed deficits are far outweighed by it's attributes and contributions to our own human species.  

    And not the least of which is that the bark, the leaves, the overarching branches, the winged seeds, the shape of the leaves, the growth patterns of the branches, the twigs----in short, everything about this tree species is, in my humble estimation, beautiful, desirable and superior to almost any other species of urban tree.

     It was growing up in a grove of Silver Maples, at 430 Mapleton Ave, that got me started on my lifelong love and observation of trees.  How could we ever thank those early settlers of Boulder who had the foresight to line Mapleton Ave with 4 rows of perfectly spaced maple saplings, and to continue on all the side streets in the surrounding neighborhoods?  I grew up in a rustling forest of giant, silver barked majestic trees, and it changed my life for the good!  

    We can add a short list of other trees that those early settlers understood were the right ones for our climate and location:  Western Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa), Green Ash (Fraxinus Lanceolata) and Plains Cottonwood (Populus Deltoides), and American Elms.  Growing up there were some other more weedy species like Boxelder, wild apple, and maybe some Hackberry's that did O.K. in the backyards and alleys.

       The city hadn't gone whole hog promoting oaks, lindens, thornless honey locust, red maples in their big plan for 'diversity.'  Supposedly their reasoning after the greatest tragedy to hit American city streets----Dutch Elm disease----was that it was dangerous and short-sighted to have monoculture plantings, as one little beetle could (and did) wipe out the magnificent umbrella of shade over most North American cities.  I remember one forester saying---imagine if that were to happen, and it probably will----to the Silver Maple, or the Green Ash.

       So many times my elementary teachers would use that argument----if I let one person go to the drinking fountain, I'll have to let everyone in the class go who asks, and then our classroom will be utterly disrupted.  'But no one else asked!' I would think. 

     And in fifty years of close tree observation, I have seen no disease other than neglect and underwatering ever affect the Silver Maple street plantings of Boulder.

      This is almost a magically impervious tree, a real treasure, and these scared reactions of City Foresters have unfortunately deprived the next generation of Boulderites the priceless experience of living in a sustainable urban forest within their lifetimes.

      All of this could be so moot anyway, as our climate veers dangerously in the direction of Phoenix and Tuscon anyway.  Maybe all these catalpas the City is planting will grow up to be 30 foot spindles that delight with their flowers, but it's simply not in the Catalpa gene to produce that miraculous umbrella shape that is the earmark of a great city shade tree.

    For this, always think of the American Elm:  the greatest shade tree of them all, and the n'est plus ultra and paragon example of the ideal urban tree.  Since that unspeakable tragedy of the crates of packing boxes that came over from Holland bringing with it that deadly beetle, sometime in the 20's or 30's, our cities have never been the same.

     And I still maintain that for us Boulderites, the only compensation, the closest replacement for those tragically cut-down Elm trees was and is the Silver Maple.  They grow fast enough, and with enough of a graceful bending fountain-like arc to their branches to qualify as a great street and house-shading tree. 

    It is of course their very growth rate and the pliability and softness the Silver Maple wood that has made them the great bugaboo for city foresters, whose ideal is some misplaced idea about the compact shape of lindens, or the super-hard wood of oak trees.

    I love American Lindens:  I had the City plant one in my parking (the choice I was given was a swamp oak or a linden).   But mine is never going to reach over the street to shade my car.  They grow in a kind of cone like shape----the City loves that, because they won't break as easily in the winds, but they also never give much shade.   

    And oak trees?  How about that fungus disease that is killing and/or weakening the oaks in Boulder's Central Park?  

    Or look at what Vectra Bank and the Pearl Street has done to the great treasure of 17th and Pearl, the Northern Red Oak on the southeast corner----it looks like this probably be the last year or two of it's life.

    When I get depressed about losing such a magnificent Northern Red, I'm reminded to tell you about 'King Arthur', the noblest tree in all of Denver/Boulder, in the heart of the Highland district.  It's on the east side of a house at Perry and 30th Street.  Just to stand under this glorious tree is a spiritual experience, but that needs to be the subject of another blog.  But it is the most perfect and the hugest Northern Red Oak that I know of, and charges the air all around it with an electric wisdom.  Visiting it is always a great pilgrimage.

     The catalpas are starting, so keep in mind a visit to the area around Folsom and Walnut, and especially the 'married couple' catalpa and the wonderful many-armed spreading catalpa on South Street just west of Folsom.   And don't forget the hidden giant in the front yard three houses down from the northeast corner of Arapahoe and 17th.   And while you're there, go north from Arapahoe down 18th street to the corner of Marine and 18th and gander up at the three giant Green Ashes that bless that part of town.  The bark on those huge columnar trunks is worthy of meditation.

     Anyway, the catalpas are starting all over town, only a month early, thank you global warming.  I'll try to keep you abreast of the most spectacular flowering ones that I come across.