Bad Poetry: Dead Tree?

Almost every year I think

"That peach tree's gone to come no more."

I turn my back on it, I blink,

and it's borne peaches by the score.

This herky-jerky winter, mild

days coaxed it into early bloom

the night before a hard freeze. Wild

trees mostly fall to such a doom.

The Feral Peach Tree's blossoms clung

on through the freeze, and bloomed still more

when it had passed. The first fruit hung

before Memorial Day. There's more

where that fruit came from. It's a tree

not seen before, nor seen again.

An evildoer slipped out free

from those who said they'd keep him in,

sprayed poison on the Feral Peach.

The branches that the spray could touch 

look dead now. Dormant, all and each.

Men have been hanged for half as much.

"The peach tree's dead," a visitor said.

Don't count on it. I think, like me,

that tree has vowed to keep its bed

and watch until the night we see

the evildoer on the ground,

by his own poison felled at last,

condemned to lie as he is found

till ninety days and nine have passed.

The tree will drop a rotten peach

to draw ants to where he did fall

and he will lie there and beseech

that someone come out, help to call,

and as he's made air so unpleasant

those who believe we should forgive

this vain, presumptuous, cringing peasant

stay in the houses where they live,

and I will call the notary,

the lawyer, and policemen, too,

to see our common enemy--

he can't repent, but how he'll rue!

And he'll learn, as his victims learned,

that doctors are no use at all

when glyphosate is what has burned

the skin that's doomed to rot and fall.

And I don't doubt the peach tree, too,

in its own way, will laugh to see,

unfailingly, the poison do

more harm to him than it or me.

Optional cut-off point for tired eyes.

The Famous Feral Elberta Peach Tree currently has three high branches, each loaded with more peaches than they look as if they could bear. Once again it's hurt, but I don't think it's dead. It has more life in it than all the other peach trees in the orchard had, together. 

That stubborn sell-out everybody loves to hate, you know, the old man who looks a bit like our late founding member Oogesti but has lately started looking "older" than Oogesti ever did, has put some obstacles in what looked like the clear path of Glyphosate Awareness. This week a local case involving pesticide vapor drift was judged in favor of the poisoner. 

So? I said to the Bad News Bear who drove up to bear this bad news. Is it not said that, when the pretty girls line up on one side of an issue, that side is about to win? All the young, pretty female Congressmen voted the right way on the Farm Bill. Spraying poison should be recognized as a violent crime against persons in another year or two. Meanwhile, even that judge who's about to retire reportedly said "Spraying on someone else's property is a different matter." I don't think my neighborhood is going to have a Bad Neighbor for very many more days. 

About the old man in Washington, I don't know. I hope he does have a soul that is capable of real repentance. I think people should be praying that he has.

As for the peach tree...you probably have to be local to appreciate this. Peach trees do not usually live long, this high up the Blue Ridge. The long hard freeze killed most. The sudden late freeze killed most that had survived that. The poison spraying? Hah. It's bearing fruit. 

Some trees are super-fertile the year before they die, but this one's been super-fertile for ten years in a row already. I think it thinks it's an apple or persimmon tree, something that's supposed to be strong and hardy. It did not get the memo that peach trees are supposed to die if you look at them the wrong way.

I doubt that anybody will get the full, rich flavor of an Elberta peach off the famous tree this year. It wouldn't be fit to eat, this year, anyway. Next year I won't be surprised if that tree is bowed down to the ground with sweet, ripe peaches, as so many times before. It does not rest for years in between crops, as other peach trees do.

Somewhere, one of the pits of one of its fruits will sprout into another tree like it. One, but probably not two. 

Nashery: Seeds

A Nashery is a poem consisting of mostly but not always rimed couplets in irregular metre, the form most often used by Ogden Nash. Not all of Nash's Nasheries were as preposterously irregular as his best known ones were, so cheap modern imitations like this one count as Nasheries. This form is especially well suited to Bad Poetry. It would be very hard to write a Nashery that seemed to take itself too seriously. Thanks to https://dsnake1.blogspot.com/2020/02/eating-orange.html for the idea...

Not all the fruits we eat 

are sweet.

To be counted as a fruit, it needs

to be an edible coating for seeds.

Tomatoes are fruit.

Zucchini are fruit.

Strawberries are fruit

because those cute

yellow dapples in their dimples are seeds.

So what do you do with the seeds?

If the seeds are soft and small

we may not notice them at all,

as in strawberries and bananas,

or eat them first, as in pomegranates.

If the seeds are big and hard

they might go in the compost in the yard

where most of them will never sprout

because fertility's bred out 

of many of the fruits we buy,

because our weather is too dry

or damp or cool or hot,

because animals eat them, or because they do not,

because the soil or the light

is not quite right,

because of an early dry spell or late frost.

In nature most seeds are always lost.

(Plant one for the jay, and one for the crow,

and one for the worms, and one just might grow.)

During the record drought and heat 

in nineteen-ninety-nine

a man sat out on his back steps to eat

a watermelon cool and fine

and although he lived in Maryland

a watermelon seed sprouted, all unplanned,

and it grew until it bore

one perfect miniature

watermelon, as sweet and pure

as the real thing from Arkansas.

An old hill farmer planted a peach

tree for his sons and daughters each.

They lived too far north

for the peach trees to bring forth

enough fruit to preserve, much less to sell,

except in nineteen-eighty-one when every crop did well.

The peach trees split when a heavy snow fell

and nobody pushed them back together

and they didn't survive much more cold weather.

But here and there a peach pit sprouted

in his yard, and the year he died

one sprout grew high enough they mowed round about it,

his children's joy and pride,

a Fabulous Feral Elberta Peach

tree that always bowed down under its fruit, each

year when other peach trees were bare,

and the borers just left it there,

and the sapsuckers dug elsewhere,

and the tree was green as Pomona's gown

and snapped right back up after bowing down,

and the peaches were small, but sweet

as any you ever would eat.

 

Though it's hard to raise seeds into apple trees

there was once an old preacher who had the gift.

He wandered the foothills and the prairies

saying apple trees gave the heart a lift

that he thought all people need.

He was called Johnny Appleseed.

The trees he planted along his way

bore fruit for a hundred years, they say.

So some of those trees (people said) were alive

in the year nineteen-forty-five

when our late,

great,

Grandma Bonnie Peters was a child at school.

Hearing this story, she made it a rule

to plant trees wherever she used to roam.

Wild persimmons, she planted around her home.

She said not a persimmon she ever found,

but when she grew old and moved into town

the trees bore persimmons, mellow and sweet,

for all of her friends and relations to eat.

Who knows whether, as we move on,

we leave some shred of our spirit behind

to stay near our friends when we are gone,

and always of us remind?

If fondly remembered you want to be,

think it all over, and plant a fruit tree.

Tree Rant

Earth-shaker, air-, soil-, people-mover

attack the great pines of Vancouver...

No. This is not going to be a Nashery

because Nasheries are fun and funny.

This topic is neither. This is going to be a rant

about the reckless sense of entitlement 

of those who forget that you can't

replace some things. Not ever. And you will

be sorry when those things are gone.

A rant should sound like a rant. Blank verse, then.

Today on the way to the city I passed a hill

being eroded into a big flat gravel pit.

Tractors and bulldozers were crawling on it

like maggots in roadkill, and I wanted a super possum

to mop up those maggots. Sin of mental murder.

The Bible says we can say unto a mountain,

"Be thou removed," but I pity the fools who want to.

What I always want to say to mountains

is "Be thou where God has placed thee, 

blessed Protector and Grandmother. Be thou in peace

and impart that peace to our stupid mortal minds." 

Some say, "It takes all kinds..."

I say, "There is enough flat land on this Earth.

Let those who want more flat land go to Kansas."

There is enough treeless land on this Earth.

There are enough oil wells. I remember Sarah Palin.

She spoke for her people. I didn't like what they said.

I know I have no real right to like 

or dislike what they said. I still dislike

what they said. I did not dislike the woman

who told us what her people had to say.

So many years, so much talk, so many women

have made our own real choices in our lives 

and still they say "choice" when they mean abortion

and "She's impossible to work with!" when 

they mean "I can't keep up with her." Bah, humbug.

When people can run twenty circles around you

before breakfast, you learn from working for them.

I thought I could have worked for Sarah Palin

but it would have been a tough and tiring job. 

If those who hissed and spat about her choices

thought I heard anything but envy from them,

they were mistaken. Very much mistaken.

I don't like those who hated Sarah Palin

but said no word about the honest voices

of those who truly wanted to lay waste 

their biggest natural assets. Is that possible?

I used to doubt the town called Appalachia

really existed. Well, it does. I went there

with native guides, brave, tough older people.

The devastation brought tears to their eyes.

"A virgin wood, trees of fantastic size

are two miles up that path, if you can walk it."

My own elder didn't even try to talk it

but let me climb with an ex-cop, a fire fighter,

and a modern and enlightened logger.

Three men, one woman, failed to span one hemlock.

One said, "There was mad talk of logging here once.

Now that you've seen this place, you who'll outlive me,

if ever you hear such talk, you promise now

you'll join the human chain around these hemlocks."

I did. I don't understand how anyone didn't.

Thirty years before, I rode up to Vancouver.

My parents wanted us to See America 

By Bus, though all three of us had chickenpox

and nobody saw much of anything

but our own whines and itches. But I remember

the monstrous conifers, redwoods, sequoias,

and the great pines that stood beneath their feet

like foothills around mountains, windswept, ragged,

towering in their strength; not unlike those hemlocks.

The pines are nothing to compare with redwoods

but bigger, stronger than any pine Back East.

How people say anything to them but "Peace,

Tall Ones, and blessed be: long may you stand

where God has put you"? I don't want to know.

It's not as if there were a shortage of cheap wood.

They say Vancouver is stripping off their great pines

though sickly little pines are so abundant,

so easily reared to Christmas trees or pulp wood.

They say Brazil is burning their great rain forests.

They say Alaska wants to drill their parklands.

I believe it, because here in my own town

the maggots are gnawing into the side of our mountain.

The maggot-souls are poisoning human beings

because they're too lazy to pour boiling water

on native plants, and cultivating kudzu.

God, what is man, and how do You endure us?

And for how long now? I don't want to know.

"Do you Greens prefer trees to people?" 

Say: "Which people?"

I prefer almost anything, possums, poison ivy,

real honest maggots who dispose of garbage,

to people who pollute and destroy land;

yet it's for people that land's worth preserving,

real human people who on sight love mountains

and beaches, rocks and trees and butterflies,

who ought always to inherit all of the Earth

but we don't see that happening, somehow.

Phenology: Gather Roses While You May

This phenology post is brought to you by a sight I've not seen before, in my fifty-plus years, and don't expect to see again.

Trees on the Blue Ridge Mountains are just starting to show bright colors, many still waiting for a real frost. Air temperatures dipped below the freezing mark last week, but not for long enough that anything actually froze.

At the same time, flowers, fooled by a long cool summer and that freaky last late frost, think it's spring.

This morning on the way into town I saw asters and convolvuli, calendulas and ladies' bedstraw. Those flowers normally bloom until frost. It's unusual, but it's not the first time I've seen them in early November.

I saw honeysuckle in full bloom. I've seen honeysuckle bloom twice in a long summer...I think this web site noted that in 2011 or 2012?

But I also saw two old-fashioned irises, blue-and-white ones. And I saw roses. I saw several different kinds of roses. I'm particularly appreciative of the ones in front of the retirement project, sometimes known as Bedbug Towers; the background of white gravel reflected enough light that even the cheap cell phone photo makes them look like roses. I assure you, the other blobs you may or may not recognize are roses, irises, and honeysuckle, all blooming on the first of November, as the first maple leaves begin to fall.

This is actually a mushroom--a very large mushroom. That's my foot in the picture beside it, showing that the diameter of the mushroom is just about the same as a woman's size 7 shoe.

In real life the smaller flowers and ground cover in this floral border do not actually swirl in a circle around the Iris germanica. 

"Wild" roses accompanied by vines...in real life they grow up at about the same angle as the porch posts on the house. The Tracfone never ceases to amaze me.

In real life you can see from the Jackson Street side of this home site that two of the bushes on the Park Street side are rosebushes, one pink and one red, and both are in full bloom this morning. In the background, behind the houses, you can't see the railroad track but can see the ball park, with a few trees turning orange among the green ones behind the park. Blobs of color in between the camera and the rosebushes are painted rocks. People on Park Street got tired of looking at the bare rocks and painted them in colors.

It's hard for me to recognize these blobs, too...the white blobs are honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica, almost covering the bush that supports the honeysuckle vines.

Roses and other pretty things.

Roses in the gravel patch.

It cost me about two dollars to snap and download these pictures, but it was worth it because I don't know whether anyone else is documenting them. The normal autumn flowers, and autumn leaves, are similar to the ones professional photographers have documented using good cameras.

Today will probably be the only chance anyone gets to see them all at once. The edge of the storm is expected to wipe out both flowers and maple leaves tonight. If you are a school child or parent, be sure to schedule some time for leaf and flower peeping on the way home from school...after supper could be too late.

Gardeners: Native Plants of Southwestern Virginia

(A version of this one appeared on Associated Content, years ago, and has been rescued by a funder. You need to support this web site, using the links in our main "Greeting" post, to bring more informative posts like this one back. To my surprise, the link I embedded in 2008 still works. The plants are still free or cheap to obtain, easy to cultivate, and nice to have in the garden.)

Native plants are good news for gardeners. They're usually free...the best ones for your garden are probably already there, and need only a little arranging and encouraging. If they're not free, they're cheap. Neighbors may offer them to you when they thin flower beds or clear space for vegetables.

Native plants are also low-maintenance. In fact, some of them may seem like weeds in the vegetable garden. In their proper places, of course, they're valuable.

The Virginia Department of Conservation has prepared a list of plant species that are considered native and recommended for public garden spaces. The list is extensive. The question was how to pick only five plants. I was tempted to pick five trees! Instead, here's a list, now enhanced with pictures, of only one of each of five types of garden plants: shade tree, fruit tree, grass, flower, and cash crop.

Shade Tree: Red and Sugar Maple (Acer rubrum, A. saccharum)

Few people think of maples as flowering trees, yet their flowers provide some of the first color of early spring. (Photo donated BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=508152 )

America's favorite shade tree family includes more than a half-dozen species that grow well in Virginia. Red and sugar maples are officially classified as our native species.

What Vermont maple growers don't want the rest of the country to know is that all maple trees produce sugar. The official Sugar Maple is native to the Blue Ridge Mountains, but red maples, black maples, and politically incorrect Norway maples can be tapped too. Sap rises earlier in Virginia than in Vermont...sometimes one gets a good flow of maple sap during the January thaw, or, if not then, in the February thaw.

An interesting detail Noel Perrin mentioned in his Person Rural book series is that the definition of what makes the "best" maple syrup has changed over the years. In the past, when maple syrup and sugar were used as cheaper substitutes for cane sugar, the best grade of maple syrup was considered to be the kind that tasted most like white cane sugar. Today many people actually prefer maple syrup with a more distinct flavor, and red or Norway maples are likely to provide more distinctive flavors. (I speak from experience. My family used to tap maple trees in our wood lot and boil down sap to make our own maple syrup.)

Fruit Tree: Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)

In September, looking up through the leaves on a mature tree, you see the edible pawpaw fruit. (Picture donated By Scott Bauer, USDA - USDA ARS Image Number K7575-8, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10830 .)

This interesting, tropical-looking little tree has dark, unexciting blossoms, but it attracts a really exquisite "flying flower." Pawpaw trees exist in a symbiotic relationship with the Zebra Swallowtail butterfly. The small, unobtrusive caterpillars (you almost never see one) have no other food plant, but nature keeps their population in check so they never affect the pawpaw population. The leaves are mildly toxic to most insects other than Zebra Swallowtails, and make Zebra Swallowtails mildly toxic to predators.

The butterfly is unique in North America, with black and greenish-white wings, long tails, and bright red "false eye spots." A fun fact about the Zebra Swallowtail is that butterflies develop wings of different sizes and colors depending on the temperatures while they were pupating. There is usually more than one brood per year, and butterflies that emerge late in summer are larger, with wider black stripes and brighter green stripes, than those that emerge in early spring.

In Virginia this would be one of the bigger, darker specimens; the ones I see in spring are almost white. In Florida some can be described as black butterflies with light green stripes; the disparities are big enough that the different size/color types used to be classified as different species. (Photo donated By Megan McCarty - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5279919 .)

Grass: Fescue (Festuca rubra)

Fescue grows taller than Bermuda grass and may require more mowing if you insist on having a "lawn," but it needs no fertilizers or other chemical help, and makes a nice pasture for grazing animals. (If you want a smaller, lower-growing ground cover, the state web site provides an extensive list...clover, lespedeza, gama grass, and various other grasses.)

There are dozens of species of fescue, some considered invasive nuisances in places where they're not native. "Red" fescue belongs in Virginia and has appealing purple-tinged seeds if allowed to go to seed. (Photo donated By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1721573 .)

Flower: Phlox (Phlox, several species)

A good all-around flower, phlox is small enough that blossoms can be harvested for a table centerpiece, yet not too small to look decorative from the street or sidewalk. If you don't already have it, it's easy to get. Once you have it, it's easy to maintain.

Phlox blooms can be white, pink, blue, or any shade in among those.  Many are smaller and bunchier than the ones photographed here, which appeal to me because they resemble my vincas. Phlox are smaller than vincas. Both are good ground cover. (Photo donated CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=192105 .)

Cash Crop: Blueberries (Vaccinium, four species, and Gaylussacia, two species)

Blueberries and huckleberries are basically the same thing, but some people prefer to call Vaccinium blueberries and Gaylussacia huckleberries. (The tiny seeds you don't notice when eating the berries grow in different patterns, which is enough to qualify them as different genera.) Cultivation and growing conditions are what make the difference in the size, sweetness, and tartness of the berries. The bushes thrive in acid soil, which should come as a relief to those who have been applying lime or ashes to their vegetable gardens to counteract the high acidity of Southwestern Virginia soil...just make sure to plant the berries away from the vegetables! While the mechanically picked blueberries sold in supermarkets may be too sour or too bland to suit some people, those who pick their own blueberries soon learn how to pick the precise balance of sweet and tangy they prefer.

In Virginia, blueberries grow like weeds wherever humans stop tinkering with the chemistry of thin acidic soil. If you cut back any vines trying to grow up the bushes, and scare off the deer who want to eat all the new growth each year, you will have berries to eat, repay favors, and sell for petty cash every summer. Those little pale pinkish berries are immature; if left on the plant they'll eventually ripen. (Photo donated By Caleb Slemmons - forestryimages.org, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29977718 .)

SOURCE (AC used to have a text box for source links. This is the same link embedded above, spelled out for pasting into browsers...)

http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural_heritage/nativeplants.shtml

And, for those who want to try a more exotic and difficult native plant, today's Amazon link is the official guide to the Native Orchids of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. One of the most distinctive plants (though it doesn't have the showiest flowers) will grow wild near the Cat Sanctuary if it gets enough shade.

Stanley Bentley is credited with the scientific "discovery" of the wild orchid species Corallorhiza bentleyi, whose flowers are even less showy than those of either species of Goodyera, shown below.

Goodyera won't tolerate this much sunshine for many hours! For most of the year all you see are the distinctively streaked leaves that suggest a relationship to plantain, but some plants, some years, will send up a long spike of small yellow or white flowers. The plant is, technically, in the orchid family. (Photo donated By Cdc25A - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16158242)

Book Review with Insects: Apples

Title: Apples

Author: Peter Wynne

Date: 1975

Publisher: Hawthorn Books

ISBN: 0-8015-0340-X

Length: 275 pages plus 5-page index

Illustrations: many black-and-white reprints

Quote: “Much of this book is based onthe works of others...my contributionhas been to gather the data into one place.”

Despite a rather embarrassing diversion into a purely theoretical Apple Cult, imagined along the lines of The White Goddess but without the literary genius, this is a delightful compendium of apple lore. Wynne explores the most popular North American apple breeds (of 1975, when Staymans and Jonathans were more popular than Fuji and Granny Smiths), discusses methods of cultivation, describes traditional apple festivals, and gives about 100 pages of apple recipes, not all of them desserts.

About the tips on orchard keeping I can say that they agree with what my parents learned when they stopped trying to plant vegetables on a steep patch of land and instead planted apple trees...except for the recommended “spray schedule,” which I can recommend you dismiss as totally outdated, useless, and harmful.

About the apple breeds, I learned about some new ones (to me) by reading this book, but noted the absence of any discussion of Arkansas Black Twigs and Rambos, the stars of an orchard in which some novelty breeds of the 1970s failed to thrive. We had some basic Stayman Winesap, Jonathan, and crossbreed “Jona-Licious” and “Jona-Gold” trees too, and a Lodi tree that still bears fruit...Rambos prolifically produce June apples, which actually ripen in July and are always very crisp and juicy and tangy. Children always want to eat apples in summer and Rambos are the ones my siblings and I ate by handfuls, without making ourselves sick once. Arkansas Black Twigs are unpopular because the trees don’t bear fruit until they’re ten or fifteen years old; when they do bear fruit it’s what many consider the perfect apple, red, sweet, crisp and juicy. (Crescent Dragonwagon, a naturalized Arkansan and perhaps biased, commemorated Black Twigs as the fruit an old patient “wept for.” It’s possible. To me other apples do seem a bit as if they were trying to taste like Black Twigs and never quite succeeding.) All apple trees bear more and better fruit after a cold winter (by Virginia standards) than after a mild one—the trees respond to just the right number of freezing-cold nights—but the fact that Black Twigs were developed and appreciated in Arkansas tells us that they can thrive and bear after milder winters than most apple trees need, too.

Also not mentioned in this book, deservingly, were the trio of novelty breeds, Prima, Sir Prize, and Priscilla, that Stark Bros brought out in the 1970s. They bloomed out of step with most apples, so the company suggested planting two or three of them together. My parents bought one of each breed and, perhaps to entice us to care for the trees, dedicated them to firstborn, son, and younger daughter respectively...All three of the novelty apple trees had been dead long enough, when I chose a screen name, that I didn’t even remember that my apple tree had been called “Prima” and my sister’s had been “Priscilla.”

Wynne does mention the “Wealthy” apple, but does not mention the “Poor Folks” apple...we had one of each, another choice that appealed to us because of the names of the trees. Wealthy trees, Wynne notes, “are best grown in the north-central states,” which may explain why ours never produced much fruit and didn’t live long. The Poor Folks tree did a little better for considerably longer, but I don’t remember anything about it that would have inspired me to plant another one.

If and when I replace the departed trees in the orchard, I’ll look for Rambos and Black Twigs first, Lodi if I can’t find those two breeds. Stayman Winesaps do, as Wynne observes, thrive in the Southern Appalachian mountains. They are our basic apple, the way the bland and mealy Delicious breed are the factory farms’ basic apple. Stayman Winesaps have more flavor and texture than Delicious; there’s nothing wrong with them, except that everybody in my part of the world can have a Stayman Winesap tree, so there’s nothing special about them and no incentive for people to buy the fruit. If you have room for only one apple tree, and you live high enough in the Blue Ridge Mountains that your water boils at 218 degrees Fahrenheit, a Stayman Winesap is probably the tree for you.

About spraying...the most charitable thing I can say is that Wynne was writing about huge commercial orchards in parts of the Northern States where a Vicious Spray Cycle was underway. You do not actually need to spray poisons on any apple tree, ever, to maintain a nice little orchard. You paint fungicides and bactericides onto the wood as needed, so that they don’t harm anything that doesn’t eat wood, and here’s what Wynne ought to tell you about insects but doesn’t:

* Aphids are the natural food of ladybugs. Import brighter-colored ladybugs if you do see an aphid infestation, more likely on a rosebud than on an apple tree since aphids don’t fly and usually dig into things close to ground level...but these days, in Virginia, the variable Asian ladybug is a bit of a nuisance, and aphids are found only where some idiot has sprayed poison.

* Apple maggots are a Northern Thing.I don’t know any intelligent way to control them, but there has to be one that won’t start a Vicious Spray Cycle.

* Bagworms (the ones that hide in individual bags, not the ones that make communal nests, discussed below) are a problem only when you have a lot of them. Since it’s easy to pick them off when you find them—the caterpillars can’t hurt humans and usually react to danger by hiding in their bags—and burn them, you won’t have a lot of them. Even the lazy smaller species that will overpopulate and kill evergreen trees (the bigger species that attack apple trees like to spread themselves out) should never be a problem.

* I’m familiar with the word “cankerworms” as it describes a different pest, but I’m not aware of any “inchworm” species that either becomes a pest or matures into a sexually dimorphic moth species. Maybe there is such an insect, somewhere. In Virginia there are lots of cute, harmless inchworms—most get about one inch long, many never grow that big, and the larva of the lovely Tulip Tree Beauty moth can grow up to two inches long. They nibble on lots of different things and do no harm, not even to tulip poplar trees.They don’t even give you that creepy-crawly sensation the majority of humans are programmed to loathe so deeply if they walk across your arm. Appreciate inchworms!

* Codling moths are quite a minor pest unless they’ve been nurtured into a major pest by a Vicious Spray Cycle. The way to avoid biting into an apple and finding a worm is to look for the spot the worm leaves when it burrows into the apple. Spotted apples are still a treat for cows, horses, and especially deer...and if you’re vigilant about supplying the grazing animals with their treats, you won’t have many spotted apples.

* The social caterpillar species, webworms, tent caterpillars, and walnut caterpillars, are all very easy to trap and burn by winding the webs into a long stick, but, despite appearances, they almost never even affect one year’s apple crop, much less damage a tree. Nature has provided that the trees can almost always spare the leaves these caterpillars consume. You only need to kill the caterpillars infesting a first-year sapling or previously damaged tree. They are native species and mostly harmless.

* Milky spore disease has brought Japanese beetles under control where they’re not being fostered by a Vicious Spray Cycle. If Japanese beetles are a nuisance on your roses or red clover, anyway, a good natural remedy is bantam chickens. Many bantams like Japanese beetles.

* Weevils, “plum curculios,” are yet another pest found in orchards where a Vicious Spray Cycle has started. Birds keep populations nice and thin if humans let them.

* Ladybugs also keep scale insects from becoming much of a nuisance.

* Mites are a nuisance, even in a healthy Green orchard...but it takes a tremendous lot of them to damage a tree, and in a healthy Green orchard they don’t build up that level of population density. They crawl everywhere, which is a gross-out, and may stunt the growth of individual apples before your other insects and birds can eat them. Small, odd-shaped apples are better than a Vicious Spray Cycle.

* Peach tree borers will bore into apple trees too. As if that weren’t bad enough, they then attract sapsuckers and other woodpeckers, which dig into the damaged wood and cause further damage. As with most insect species, the larvae are the ones that attack trees. The mature insects are odd-shaped moths that look like extra-large, white mosquitoes,fly at sunset, and are attracted to light. Kill them on sight—they’re easy to swat, like flies, and can be trapped around light bulbs. When you find their tunnels into trees, drop in a little poison, but don’t spray. Chickens enjoy eating these moths. We used to look for a few when it was time for the chickens to roost for the night, and hold them out as bait to lure chickens who wanted to roost dangerously in trees into a nice secure coop. The birds would rush to snatch the borers out of our fingers.

If you can resist the greedhead’s urge to maximize fruit yields during the first couple of years by starting a Vicious Spray Cycle, your apple tree(s) will harbor lots of insects, many of which arehelpful, and a few resident birds, whose company you’ll probably enjoy. If you’re blessed with resident cardinals, never spray anything—the cardinals will actually eat some of your smaller, softer fruits and sunflower seeds, of course, but their help in controlling insects and their company will be well worth it. (What kind of person would endanger anything that comes to the window in winter and says “Cheer, cheer, cheer!”? Not even a cat! In the thirty years since I whimsically explained to Black Magic, the Founding Queen of the Cat Sanctuary, that the cardinals are part of the family and not to be molested, the cats have never reduced the amount of cheer the cardinals have brought us.) You will see some damaged apples—much more from dry rot, and the ants and wasps that are always watching for windfalls, than from any species-specific pest. Resign yourself to a little damage and you will not see a lot of insect damage next year.

In the apple lore section, Wynne explains what was probably the original traditional method of “snapping apples”—snapping the seeds out of their coats—but not the method I learned in Maryland. This is odd because one of his sources is a study specifically of Maryland folklore. Perhaps the apple-snappers I met at the Seventh-Day Adventist college had imported their method from Ohio or Pennsylvania, where many of them had grown up? Anyway, before cutting or eating the apple, you twirl it on its stem end, one twirl for each letter of the alphabet in order, and when the stem snaps, that’s the initial of your favorite person. You can choose, partly by the feel of the stem, whether the target is the first, last, or middle initial, too...any experienced apple-snapper can get the stem to snap on the right letter. (If you do miss your sweetheart’s initial, you can always say you were thinking about a relative.)  Snapping apples thus has less to do with divination than with dropping a tactful hint, indirectly, into a group of friends, about which friend would be your first choice of date for a “couples” party, and was extremely popular at that church school. Some of us never ate an apple we hadn’t snapped.

Wynne also neglects, probably by design, the whole question of Michigan apples (I remember mostly McIntosh and similar breeds, though many kinds of apple trees, including Delicious, thrive in Michigan). While in Michigan I was told, quite seriously and by several informants, that peeling apples before biting into them was considered an insult to Michigan; the only proper way to eat these apples was whole, peels and all, nibbling down to the core. In Virginia even fresh apples usually have a spot of dry rot lurking somewhere under the peel, so if you don’t care for that mushy semi-fermented flavor you form a habit of peeling and slicing your apples...but the whole time I was in Michigan I ate at least one fresh local apple every day, and although the vitamins in all those apples did not protect me from the effects of a contaminated unnecessary vaccination, I have to mention that I never tasted dry rot. Not once. This is odd because, when Michigan apples (proudly labelled as such) are shipped to Virginia, by the time they arrive they develop as much dry rot as other apples do.

The recipes for cooking apples are provided mainly for historical interest, or for preserving surplus and/or inferior apples. When you have a nice mix of late summer, autumn, and winter apples you don’t cook them. You eat them. Because of the acid and enzyme content, fresh sweet juicy apples are the one dessert carb cravers can eat as much as they want without gaining weight. (Diabetics, unfortunately, do have to be more cautious.) One fresh apple of most varieties is an adequate “dessert serving,” but children exposed to Rambos, Black Twigs, or even Stayman Winesaps can usually eat three or four of these “servings” easily, and as I recall this overindulgence does them no harm—growing children need more calories than adults. Sometimes the Lodi, which frequently produces a lot of second-rate fruit in years when mild winters cause other trees not to produce apples at all, inspires us to make pies or applesauce, but in a good year Lodi apples are a fine dessert too. In a really good year even Delicious apples are indeed delicious, just as they grow—a bit sweet and mushy in comparison with the more memorable breeds, but still good.

Wynne experimented with some old recipes for apple-enhanced baked goods and noted that, if you mix apples into any baked dessert, you can get away with reducing the shortening and sweetening way below the amount you’d normally use to make cake, cookies, or steamed pudding with the same amount of flour. If you raise your own apples and don’t have a lot of damaged ones to use up fast, baking with apples can seem like a deplorable waste of fruit that naturally tastes better than any baked goods ever will...but it is a good way to make “diet” baked goods that don’t have a weird chemical flavor. Low-calorie apple-enriched baked goods really do have the sweet, rich flavor of their sugary, buttery counterparts. Pureed prunes and bananas have similar baking benefits. Damaged Stayman Winesap apples are, however, the secret to Grandma Bonnie Peters’ alcohol-free fruitcakes that actually taste like cake. (Too many fruitcakes taste like bricks pickled in alcohol.)

The copy of this book that I physically own actually smells like fermenting apples. Yummy! I don’t know whether the publisher did this to enhance every copy, or my copy acquired its fragrance by being stored in somebody’s cellar.

One way or another, if you like sweet treats, Apples is in every way a delicious book. If you have room to plant a tree, let it tempt you to plant an apple tree.

And it's not yet become overpriced, so the usual price system applies: $5 per book, $5 per package (you could add at least one more book to the package), + $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen.

Phenology: Dancing with Leaves

It's been a while since this web site has displayed a phenology post. There's been a reason for that. I've not been out in nature enough.

In order to earn money (US$1-2 per hour if you go by hours) as a hack writer, I've been commuting to Kingsport, Tennessee. In order to get a free ride out there, I've been leaving home at 5 or 6 a.m. or sometimes earlier. I've been coming back at 7 or 8 p.m. or sometimes later, and a few nights I've stayed in Kingsport. I'm working out of Grandma Bonnie Peters' basement, a lovely big barn of a room that stays cool in summer and warm in winter, with room for all the grandchildren's sleeping bags on the floor. It's quiet and comfortable, frugally well lighted with lots of fluorescent tubes in different tones for clear natural-looking light, and as all GBP's friends know, the problem is knowing when to stop eating the fresh, delicious, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, and mostly sugar-free food GBP cooks and serves. (You can't just cook meals for her in return--you have to restock her pantry with the pricey things she eats.) It's a pleasant place to spend the night, if stuck in the city. Most days the air conditioning even filters out the smell of Kingsport air. But I'm always eager to get back to my own home and the cats and the orchard and all.

This morning I finally squeezed in some time for a walk around the Cat Sanctuary, and what I noticed most was autumn leaves.

Most people in Gate City aren't accustomed to thinking of autumn leaves as an economic resource, although the fact is that autumn leaves attract our favorite kind of tourists. Even when I was growing up here, the local woods were still recovering from excessive logging. Tulip poplar leaves turn yellow, maple leaves turn yellow or red, and dogwood leaves turn reddish purple, in September...and after that, in the 1970s, that was it, and the hills looked bare and drab until May. You had less than a week to feast your eyes on autumn foliage, and some years, during that week, it rained.

Autumn is a prettier season now. We have more of a mix of hardwood trees. If you can't visit beautiful Scott County this weekend, as the dogwoods and tulip poplars do their thing, there should be plenty of color left to enjoy for another month or two. Lots of leaves to crunch under your feet, around the Natural Tunnel or in your friends' or relatives' woodlot. Bright, breezy afternoons, warm sun on your face, migrating birds.

This year, I'm seeing a lot of leaves start to turn brown just because it's been a long, dry, mellow late-summer season. We've not come anywhere close to frost yet. Dogwoods, tulip poplars, sycamores, and some maples show their colors in September because their annual cycle is based on light more than temperature. They "see" the days growing shorter and prepare for autumn whether the temperatures are hot or cold. Oaks and beeches stay green until they feel frost. Some leaves turn brown just because it's been dry. What crunched under my feet this morning were mostly brown leaves. Purple dogwood, yellow sycamore and tulip poplar, and bright red leaves on just one (probably designer-hybridized) maple tree, are still clinging to the trees today and may stay on into the weekend.

Birds are migrating. You might see them do cute things if you're paying attention at this time of year. Last week serious birdwatchers converged on the wide spot in a back road known as Mendota, Virginia, to count migrating hawks. This morning, while GBP was sitting in her car, she saw a transient flicker inspect her deck, lilac bush, and pine tree for ants. (He didn't find any.)

Although nights have been mild and days have been quite warm this month, the time to dig out winter gear is here. I just laundered my smaller Blanket Shawl. GBP, who chills easily, has already been getting a lot of wear out of a jacket I knitted for her in 1996. (It was knitted in Red Heart Super Saver acrylic, which may stretch a bit but otherwise wears like iron, and it looks like a new oversized jacket if you don't remember...yes, if it were human, it'd be old enough to vote.) If you don't already own a selection of hand-knitted sweaters for comfort on all occasions, lurkers, please check the Lamplight Theatre's weekend bazaar. I have a few pieces on display there and am preparing more for a bigger display from October through Christmas at the Haggle Shop. By preparing I mean, mostly, letting the mothball odor air out.

If you shop early, you'll have new and beautiful gifts for everyone to put on when the nights get frosty. By putting on I mean on the bed, as well as on their backs. I have sweaters to suit every body on these displays, still have some sweater kits in stock--btw readers who knit could buy kits and patterns from me, if they want the fun of knitting their own sweaters their own way--but these days, when I think about buying yarn, I'm thinking cotton towels, bed covers, chair covers, car seat covers, insulating window covers, even trendy new mock headboard designs to hang on the wall above the bed. Your ideas are welcome.

Meanwhile, although I'm a knitter partly in order to corner a niche market in this part of the country, about a dozen crocheters and quilters are breaking out their winter displays too. However, when I was selling crafts in that grim unheated warehouse, I would not have liked to sit for hours underneath quilts, knitting, while the temperature hovered just above freezing. Crocheted afghans might have been cozier than quilts; underneath knitted blankets and shawls, I was practically comfortable. Quilts look lovely and traditional in a warm house, but if you must travel in winter, knitted blankets are what you need to have in the car.

As we all know, the cooler nights, bright yellow flowers, and few colorful leaves we're seeing this week are nature's little seasonal nag...do I need to type those familiar keywords like storm windows, flu shots, firewood, strawberry bed, insulation, or snow tires?

Phenology Post for June 29

After a week that felt like July, the past two days have felt like early May again: overnight lows in the fifties (Fahrenheit). I'm loving it. A few straggler berries managed to ripen in the orchard. The wind that brought in this cool weather brought us some thunderstorms, but nothing really unpleasant--although I was caught out in a thunderstorm on Friday night, and walking on a paved road, below electric power lines, in a thunderstorm was not very pleasant at the time.

I saw a small adult raccoon and two young raccoons, dead, out on Route 23 last week. They might have been our faithless friend Rackety Coon, whom I've not seen or heard lately, and her/his family. I hope so.

More pleasant sights on Route 23 this morning were the wildflowers. Chicory, a hardy weedy wildflower, doesn't usually grow in enough profusion to make patches of pale blue beside roads. This year it has. Crown vetch and native vetch are in bloom. Daisies are still in bloom. Some tiger lilies are still blooming, although the patch that was blazing beside Route 23 last week is subsiding now. A few morning glories have bloomed. In Tennessee a few sweet peas are still in bloom.

Grandma Bonnie Peters made a point of turning onto a road called Mimosa Drive, this morning. Most street names in most American cities are arbitrarily chosen, but on Mimosa Drive we could see an especially large and fully loaded mimosa tree. At this point I'd like to throw in a Morguefile image of a mimosa tree, for those who don't have one to look at, but, despite having been promised a new computer two weeks ago, we are still plodding along with the Sickly Snail.

Pawpaw Blossom Image...Lost Forever?

On May 13, 2014, I published a photo of a pawpaw blossom on Bubblews. I took the picture with a camera phone. After e-mailing it to myself, I tidily deleted it from the phone. After uploading it from the e-mail file, I tidily deleted the e-mail file. My picture of the pawpaw blossom, beautifully backlighted, may have been destroyed forever when Bubblews' format changes destroyed it.

While reclaiming this post from Bubblews, I felt that it's only fair to show readers what the flowers of Asimina triloba look like. Here's a nice photo essay about the life cycle of the pawpaw tree, with the flowers brightly lighted so they appear almost rose-colored on this computer screen:

http://www.blossomnursery.com/pawpaw_pix.html

The image at Wikipedia (scroll down) is closer to what I see at this time of year in real life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba

Here's the post reclaimed from Bubblews:

Possibly for the first time on the Internet, here's a rare photo of a pawpaw blossom. When the light's not shining through them they look drab and black. I happened to look up and see this one backlighted by a bright, sunny sky, so that the flower looked red. 

Pawpaw trees exist in a symbiotic relationship with Zebra Swallowtail butterflies. Both trees and butterflies can fairly be described as "strange" in North America, since each is the only representative of a tropical family that's found north of southern Florida. Pawpaw trees don't look much like any other North American trees, nor do Zebra Swallowtails resemble any other North American butterflies.

If all goes well, this flower will attract a butterfly (I saw one about 500 yards away on the same afternoon), be pollinated, and, by September or October, produce an edible fruit.

Here is a Zebra Swallowtail, photographed by Dancesincreek at Morguefile.com:

Phenology: Various Violets

The big phenology news this week is that, although a warm January and bitterly cold February altered the normal timetable on which leaf and flower buds open, we finally have dogwoods and redbuds blooming...just one week after Easter Sunday. (According to folklore, they're supposed to bloom during the week before Easter.)

We've been having mild, pleasant weather, with overnight lows occasionally dipping below the freezing point but not for long enough that anything's actually freezing. (The last time I came up here to get online, I walked nineteen miles of the way home in a T-shirt. Chilly, not cold.)

There's a section of the not-a-lawn at the Cat Sanctuary that used to blossom, at this time of year, in blue violets. For some reason it's started blossoming in white violets. Research conducted last year showed that these are two distinct species, one of which has displaced the other over time. I bog down in the specifics of identifying violet species, but on the road to the computer center this morning I found these four violets blooming on one half-mile strip...

Note the different shapes of the leaves, as well as the different shadings of the flowers. What the cell phone camera does not clearly show is that violet #1 is white with blue-violet at the center, and violet #2 is uniformly pale blue. Also, violet #3 is not much bigger than violet #4, in real life, but is a much brighter shade of violet-color. I believe these are four distinct species, and the ones in my not-a-lawn are a fifth species. Violets are edible in moderation; I strayed off that unpaved road a few yards and taste-tested a few, and found that although they all taste like violets--sort of lettucey--each species also has a slightly different flavor.

Bidens are starting to pop up as well. And dandelions...the Cat Sanctuary didn't have dandelions for a few seasons, because the cat Iris used to eat the flowers, but this year we have dandelions galore.

Phenology: Let the Dry Land Appear! Cheer!

After Thursday's cliffhanger, I should probably begin by explaining that my lights stayed on. I was actually pretty comfortable during the snow days I promised myself. The rain and snow stopped falling; the waters didn't get much higher than they were at 1 p.m. on Thursday. Although my evacuation plan had room for a reasonable number of friends from Clinchport and Duffield, I'm delighted to report that none of them reported a need to evacuate. It was just peace and quiet and more peace and quiet. A friend in Gate City whose house is above the flood plain went out of town for the weekend, so I promised I'd walk out and feed the cat. The possibility of online time was also mentioned. So I walked out and fed the cat and this computer was sitting here. So here I am.

Not everybody got off so easily; some disaster stories are linked at www.twitter.com/5PriscillaKing.

It was good to see our private road again this afternoon. It had been covered in snow for a long time. Thursday's rain washed a lot of snow away, forming channels of moving water between mounds of slush; Friday's sun melted the slush, and today's sun dried out the surface of the ground.

In the "famous last words" department, the friend on her way out of town remarked that at least all this cold weather ought to have killed the insects. No such luck. Though temperatures stayed in the forties (Fahrenheit of course), I killed the first fungus gnat of the season this afternoon. Down in the soil where baby fungus gnats help control the mold (try not to imagine what the local air would be like without them) temperatures have not been below freezing. Our annoying little friends have been toiling away on our behalf and are ready to come out and annoy us right on schedule. They are cold-blooded, but can fly at much lower temperatures than most insects.

And sap is rising in the maple trees; those little dark red flowers are budding. I walked into town around sundown, with the light behind me, and the mountain slopes did not look brown, black, gray, or blue, as they usually do in winter. Their color was definitely a shade of red. People seldom think of maple trees among the first flowers of spring, but they are, and in Gate City they're in bloom now.

The Cat Sanctuary has a resident cardinal family. They tolerate each other's company in winter; in spring they choose well spaced nesting territories and stick to them. It is possible that a younger male has replaced the patriarch in the tree near the house. Either that, or the thaw excited him. Male cardinals can make a variety of different sounds, but usually choose one--"their song"--to identify themselves and their territory. Ours have been saying "Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!" (Many male cardinals repeat one sound three times in "their song.") Today the little fellow said "Cheer!" eight times, paused for breath, and then repeated "Cheer!" seven times more.

Ten Things About Me

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where this "Bubble" appeared on 10.13.14. Topic credit: BeaShe , a.k.a. +Protecto Shell , responded to a prompt shared by NicholasE : http://www.bubblews.com/news/8818853-ten-things-about-me .Image credit: Openopin at Morguefile: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/912855.)

1. I think I did something similar to this, last winter, but this one's a different prompt calling for snappy answers.

2. I'm a registered Independent, though currently represented in our government by three Republicans, who I think are doing a good job, and three Democrats, two of whom I think are doing a very bad job.

3. I've earned $150 here and have yet to see either that the charity of my choice got the first $50 or that I've received the other $100.

4. I'm posting from a computer center thirty miles from my home.

5. I would like to do my Internet writing within comfortable walking distance from my home.

6. I have an e-friend who describes himself on Google + as a philanthropist, a Significant Other with the rare gift of being able to make a living in my part of the world even though he wasn't born here, and some relatives who are still millionaires (even since the oil bust, although they can wail about The Economy with the best of us)...all of whom have been making vague encouraging noises about the computer center I want, for years now, and none of whom trusts the others, or trusts me, enough to put down any money. (Yikes. Is this National Long Sentence Day? No, when I write without thinking I usually write long sentences. No editing. Keep going.)

7. I'm wearing a blue cotton dress from Talbot's.

8. Most days I wear suits and dresses from Talbot's, Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, Lands End, and similar. Sometimes Laura Ashley, occasionally Saks. Anyway...

9. I've never actually bought a new garment in any of those stores. I bought them all from charity stores, in aid of good causes, located close to the stores that sold them for $100, $200, or more. The most I've paid for one off-the-rack dress in my life has been $5.

10. Not sure whether this is "about me," but anyway what comes to mind is that I'm looking out a window, at white pine trees, which are currently being upstaged by a bright red-orange maple tree behind them. Right. Something readers should know about me is that I'm interested in trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, weather and so on. When I started blogging I started each day with a Phenology Post. (Phenology is the scientific study of people's day-to-day nature notes.) I still do the occasional Phenology Post, although I've not remembered to do one every day.

Wind and Rain Won't Spoil Leaf Peeping

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on October 14, 2014. Image credit: Marcelo Coimbra at Morguefile.com.)

Relatives in Florida warned me about the two-week rain storm headed our way. What else is new. 

Regular readers know there's a running thread about this in my online writing: so often some other place gets a weather disaster and, apparently as an "edge" or "ripple," Virginia gets a lot of rain.

It's inconvenient, though, because autumn came late. We've only had one night cold enough to start coloring poplar, maple, sycamore, and dogwood leaves. Other trees are still green. I've enjoyed watching the first patches of orange and yellow appear on the mountain slopes, but now the wind and rain are starting to blow those colorful leaves away.

When I was growing up here, we didn't have enough oak trees to keep the autumn foliage effects going long. Visitors did not come here as "leaf peepers," just to admire the foliage. What would have been the point? Poplars were colorful for one weekend if we were lucky, and then the mountains looked bare for six months. I remember 1981 as the first year it was possible to enjoy a changing palette of foliage for, wow, three weeks. Now hardwood trees are slowly displacing some of the poplars, and the mountains show different mixes of autumn colors through October and November.

So fear not, visitors. The foliage probably won't be as rich as some of you may remember from other years, but the mountains will be colorful after this rain moves on. (And it should move on in time for "Home Craft Days" in Big Stone Gap, which is this weekend, too.)

(Update: it did.)

Phenology: Cool Front

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where this appeared on October 4, 2014. Image credit: Earl53 at Morguefile.)

A little rain yesterday ushered in a cool front. The temperature's been about 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day. Nobody reported frost, but it's cool enough for sycamore and tulip poplar leaves to start to turn yellow.

I've been at home for phenology-related reasons. The weather has been delightful, with almost constant sunshine, for two weeks. In Wise County where I have access to functional computers, however, road crews have sprayed poison along Route 23. I walked far enough along the road, two weeks ago, to count five dead songbirds in less than a mile. I want to avoid walking along that stretch of road until we've had a lot of rain.

Meanwhile, on the way into town this morning I saw a patch of blue chicory, deep purple morning glories, and yellow leaves, beside Route 23. The colors looked so bright and beautiful I was tempted to take a picture...if only Bubblews displayed pictures, instead of ruining them by plunking the title on top of them, now.

What I See: White Pine Tree

(Topic credit: Jabo credited Jhunt for this idea: http://www.bubblews.com/news/6302005-jabo039s-what-i-see . Image credit: Morguefile.com didn't have the precise image I wanted; this one, shared by GaborFromHungary, actually shows a different kind of pine trees, and they're much older.)

What I see when I look up from the computer is a window. Windows are not for looking at. Windows are for looking through. What I see through this window is a white pine tree.

Web pages that show information about Pinus strobus always seem to mention that it can become the biggest pine tree in eastern North America, when mature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_strobus

http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/eastern_white_pine.htm

The white pine tree I see is not mature. It was planted as cover when slanting ground was broken to construct this building in the 1980s. It is one of a group of young white pine trees, probably about twenty feet tall.

The ground under these trees is reddish with "pine straw." If you were walking under the trees, you'd smell fragrant pine resin as your feet crushed the fallen pine needles, and even if you didn't feel or see a wind, you'd probably hear the distinctive sound wind makes in white pine trees.

White pine trees have some uses: very young and small specimens make nice Christmas trees, mature specimens make good lumber, and people have even eaten the inner bark of white pine trees as a survival food. But there is no hurry to make "use" of white pine trees. People enjoy them while they're still growing.