There’s a burr oak
in the front yard, maybe forty or forty five feet, but broad, and with a trunk around five feet wide.
This year it is dropping acorns like it never has before, they lay on the ground a couple layers deep, now. I love the tree, but it’s hollow, and I expect some day soon I will be forced to cut it or trim it back very hard, I will not relish doing either. It has been a lovely tree and it has shaded our home from the late day sun for many years.
So I have decided to scatter it’s seeds far and wide, so that it’s genetic heritage will spread across the land as far as I can take them. I’ll keep some in my car and put them in the ground wherever I see loamy soil, and maybe hand some off to friends and family. Today I put a handful in the ground at several expressway rest areas. Yeah, maybe hardly any will make it, but they just get eaten in my yard. I owe the big old brute at least to try.
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Sounds like a damn fine idea
Just how far you wanting to spread that ol’ tree?
as far as I can take it
Good on you.
If you want to mail a sack of acorns, I can plant ’em in Tennessee, Texas, and maybe even Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.
Way back when, the native americans used to plant acorns along the banks of rivers and streams.
One can still find some of those oaks (or at least the descendants) in out of the way places.
USC, I will take you up on that.
USC hit on where I was leaning.
I can cover Iowa pretty good as I travel around for Appleseed shoots.
A bit of Western Illinois too.
I have this daydream. Sort of a “wouldn’t it be nice” thing where I tend a largish plot of temperate forestland. Nothing too big. 10,000 acres would do. It would be maintained for the purpose of long-term growing and harvesting of native North American hardwood species.
Yeah. I know. Lotta work. I wouldn’t do it myself. I’d hire logging outfits to do that. So you can tell there’s a lot of if-then-but-first stuff that would lead up to it. Like earning enough money to buy all that land.
Did I mention this was a fantasy?
And one main purpose would be — after just growing the trees, mind — to provide a ready source of good lumber for my woodworking shop.
Oh, yeah. That’s part of the dream, too. A place where I could make neat stuff out of wood.
It was started by seeing all the trees that get cut down with perfectly good lengths of timber in ’em, but get bucked into lengths for fireplaces because it’s not worth the effort to haul ’em to a sawmill. And I wondered if I could put together a set of equipment to go around and beg the logs from the tree services.
See.
And then I figured, “Why not cut out the middle man?”
But in there was a desire to preserve creatures like your oak and use its wood to make something to carry its memory onward into the future. Once it had shuffled of ye olde mortal coil.
I wish I had a place to plant a bushel or so of your acorns.
M
Save me a couple if you would. We’re about to lose an old red maple in the front yard, and while I doubt I’ll live to see an oak mature, it would be worth it to know that someday someone will enjoy it.
What a lovely, and often-missiing sentiment in the midst of today’s looming uncertainties. It’s bound in us by our Creator, a desire to tend the earth with a care to its continuation. Life used to be just that simple.
Funny how we can get attached to trees too. Good on you for keeping the lineage going.
I’d like to order a gross of them, if that’d be possible? Some good inland creeks around here needin’ some good fishing shade.
I might even live long enough to enjoy sitting under one.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
“I’ll keep some in my car and put them in the ground wherever I see loamy soil, and maybe hand some off to friends and family. Today I put a handful in the ground at several expressway rest areas.”
That is really very, very cool.
I can spread some from Pittsburgh to the shores of Lake Erie if you want.
Let me know what you need for postage to 16002
I love oaks but, alas, must wage war on them on my property. They grow like weeds. Acorns everywhere. I have carried bags of acorns to nearby parks, however, and dumped them. I’ve been told deer are fond of them. And if they aren’t eaten they may grow. I just can’t have any more than I already have in my yard. Especially since there are always a few that escape my bad intentions and grow beyond the point where I have the heart to end them.
Knuckle we do that here for deer too. I have taken bags to where I’m going to be hunting- though in Indiana, God save you if you hunt over them!
There’s an old Jewish tale: an 80 year old guy plants olive tree sapplings on his property. His neighbor makes fun of him, saying he will not live long enough to get shade, let alone a decent olive. His response? “I know they do nothing for me. They will give shade to my son, and olives to my grand children.”
Your acorn distribution will do more for stewardship for the ecosystem than any environmental law. Nothing like an Oak, gnarled and rugged, saying “Over hundreds of years of change, of disaster, of fickle trends and random buildings and roads around me, I STAND.”
This is why I love this place. When I’m waging war on the sumac which invaded after some hillbilly clear cut the oaks on my little pied a terre, I actually swerve the brush cutter out of the way if I see a foot high oak seedling. Think its coincidence that Tristan and Parzifal went to the primeval oak forest looking for the wise hermit in those old tales? The Druids and Teutons were onto something.