Photo to be posted at a later date
I bought a tree years ago, something called a
Bradford pear tree! The darn thing hasn’t produced a pear yet. It
does produce a pretty white blossom in the spring, outside my office window
where it has grown from just a twig to a tree about fifteen feet tall and four
or five inches diameter at the base.
Most years it seems as if those white blossoms last just about long enough to
know they were there… yesterday. And gone tomorrow. Here on
Lightnin’ Ridge there are redbuds everywhere. I’d like to have a few
white blossoms in the mix because on this whole ridgetop there are only two
wild dogwoods. One of them is a giant, with two weeks of beautiful white
blossoms. Redbuds last as long or longer.
Some young kid was here last week telling me that Bradford pear trees were an
invasive species and it is not wise to buy and plant them, even though twenty
years ago, many of us white-blossom lovers did. He said birds spread the
fruit, and from those trees others can emerge from underground runners and you
can have a mess, because the second generation of trees can have, usually do
have, THORNS!
I have to take it seriously because this young guy by the name of Ryan Guthrie
works at a giant nursery and tree farm in Rogersville, Missouri where he sells
all kinds of trees.
From Ryan, I bought only the second tree I ever bought, a great big beautiful
sweet gum tree. I lost a giant 200-year-old post-oak tree last
year. I miss it. The hole which it left in the sky is just not
tolerable on this ridge where I live and work. There are so many species
of trees up here that the trail which winds in a circle around these twenty
acres passes about thirty different species, maybe more.
But there are no sweet gums, a tree that is so beautiful in fall color that I
have missed it horribly since I left Arkansas twenty-five years ago.
Arkansas had a bunch of them!
Ryan had a bunch of them too, at his tree farm, and he gave me a heck of a buy
on one of the genetically altered trees which do not shed those awful seed
balls everywhere. A sweet gum tree without balls, twenty feet tall and a
ten- or twelve-foot spread, four inches in diameter at the base, weighs about
2000 pounds and will have to be hauled from his place to mine on a trailer and
planted in a fifty-inch wide hole thirty inches deep. It needs to be done
in February, so I have been digging that hole since Christmas. I have it
fifty inches across, that was easy. But so far I have only got it about
six inches deep.
The recent freeze-up has slowed my progress. What I need is Matt Dillon,
one of my idols in boyhood from ‘Gunsmoke’. Did you ever notice how many
graves he dug in only minutes? He always set out to bring the outlaws to
court in Dodge City but brother did he ever bury a bunch of them.
Any way, when it thaws out I will have the hole dug in time for my new sweet
gum tree in February.
Ryan guarantees that next fall, after all the beautiful leaves from other trees
have fallen I will have leaves of orange, red, yellow and purple still on the
branches of my sweet gum. I am pretty excited about that. It makes
fall last longer.
Ryan is awfully young to know more about any tree than I do. We got to
talking about buck deer damage to trees, and he says some that he sells have to
be guarded with wire fences. He has promised to sell me a big white pine
tree, which will also be a first for Lightnin’ Ridge. When any kind of
pine or spruce with a ground-level trunk diameter under five or six inches is
planted in white-tail country, it is in danger of being killed by some
antler-raking buck between September and December. If you see some
country folks with a small pine tree five or six feet tall surrounded by a
seven-foot fence, you now know why.
I have an apple tree which deer favor in October, eating more of the apples
than I do. They rear up on hind legs and shake the limbs so that apples
fall to the ground. This always takes place at night or I would eat fried
apples with venison steaks quite often in October.
This might be a good time to mention that buck deer are said to rub their
antlers against small saplings as a way to rub away the blood-engorged soft
velvet that shrinks up and dries as the antlers harden. That is true to a
great extent, but bucks attack those places which we hunters recognize as ‘buck
rubs’ as late as mid-December. They do much of that antler rubbing in
November when the rut is in full force and not one little piece of dried up
velvet remains. I have seen more buck rubs on my place that were made in
November than all the ones made in September and October combined. That’s
because they use these small saplings as both imaginary adversaries and scent
posts. They rub scent from glands around the eyes where it can readily be
recognized as one buck’s domain and avenue of travel. I have seen bucks
with glistening white, rock-hard antlers attack small saplings like they were
mock fighting with another buck, then watch them rub their eyes against that same
sapling or young cedar before they leave. It is true that when you find
small saplings an inch or two in diameter, those rubs have been created by
smaller bucks as a rule. And as a rule, when you see a buck-rub that has
occurred on a four- to six-inch tree, it has been done by a deer with bigger
and stronger antlers.
Unlike most outdoor writers who learn too much from what they have read, I know
this from what I have SEEN. Cleaning velvet from antlers has nothing to
do with the majority of rubs bucks make because most are done long after velvet
is gone.
But there is no young tree a buck seeks out for those attacks that he favors
more than a young pine or spruce. I don’t know why, but I have a theory
which may or may not hold water having to do with the sap.
If you want a tree, now is the time to get and transplant one. Ryan says
he has about two hundred four-to five-inch-diameter trees up to twenty feet
tall. Most are red maple, river birch, and white pine. He can’t let
them grow much longer and still transplant them so he will sell them for the
next month at half-price, which is 200 to 250 dollars. Contact him at
Willow Green Nursery at Rogersville, Missouri and you can really learn a lot
about trees. Ask him why Ozarkians shouldn’t transplant a tree from
Texas.
By the way, I am making a flier now with info about our Panther Creek
Wilderness Adventure Area for underprivileged children and also a flier with a
map for our big Grizzled Old Outdoorsman’s Swap Meet in March. If you
want to reserve one of our free tables at the swap meet to sell outdoor gear
and equipment of any sort you need to let me know soon.
If you
want either of these fliers, write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613 or email
me at lightninridge@windstream.net
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