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.
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