By Susan Neul
My dog, Bear-Bo-Baggins, and I love to meander in the woods for miles in all seasons, including black fly season and mid-winter. While the pup takes in all the smells, I mostly day dream as I walk, mentally working on my many to-do lists or untangling a design conundrum on one of my projects. In an effort to stay more focused while I walk, I challenged myself to identify the trees by bark alone and thought I would share what I have learned with my neighbors.
While three evergreens grow quite happily in Becket—white pine, spruce and hemlock—I am going to focus on the hardwoods, as evergreens are easily identified by their needles.
Luckily, there are only five main hardwood species in our area to choose from, and four of these have very distinctive bark. I think everyone can immediately identify a paper birch (aka white birch) with its white bark marked with horizontal lines (lenticels). It’s called a paper birch for obvious reasons as the bark peels off horizontally in sheets and holds together nicely. Perfect for a writing surface, not to mention canoes. The paper birch has a cousin in the forest called the yellow birch. Its bark shimmers like dull gold. Birch trees are not shade tolerant and often die out in forests comprised of faster growing, dense-leafed hardwoods.
The next species with immediately identifiable bark is the American beech. It has that smooth gray bark that is so tempting to carve one’s name in. Unfortunately, the beech have for some time now been inflicted with beech bark disease. This condition causes cankers on the beautifully smooth gray surface of the bark, which can require a second look to see if it is indeed a beech, because the bark looks so rough and non-beech-like. This condition is caused by a double whammy of an insect that feeds on the bark and creates openings through which several varieties of fungus enter and slowly kill the tree. The upside to this infestation is that without the beech, the maples and birches may thrive, and the possible reduction of some shade will make a better environment for oak to grow as well.
The third species in Becket is the white ash. The ash has distinctive bark that’s easily identifiable once you know what to look for. The bark’s furrows form a diamond pattern rather than the straight, up-and-down furrows of other hardwoods. These trees tend to grow tall in the forest, where they shoot straight up in search of sun.
The fourth species in the Becket forest was quite a surprise to me—black cherry! And yes, they do produce cherries, but not like what you might expect. The cherries are hard, round marbles that animals eat, later defecating the pits through the forest. The black cherries are quite successful in reproducing. Their bark is distinctive, both as a sapling and as a mature tree. The saplings are a beautiful, shining, reddish color with the same horizontal lines as the birch. The mature trees have much darker bark than the surrounding hardwoods. They look almost black after a rain. But most distinctive is that the bark forms oval plates overlapping each other rather than furrows.
The last species in our forest are the maples. We have three: red, sugar and striped. If you rule out that the tree before you is not a birch, beech, ash or cherry, then it is most likely a maple. However, telling a sugar maple from a red maple by bark alone is very difficult. I haven’t mastered it. The red and sugar maples have gray-to-brown, vertically-furrowed bark that peels off on one side or another as it gets older. Sometimes both sides.
Esau’s Heel Trail is the perfect place to test your knowledge. This 1.7-mile trail is wide and flat with minimal-but-sufficient elevation gain to create different growing environments. As you enter, the ground can be swampy, and you see many small white pine, spruce, and hemlock. There is also a fair amount of birch on this first section and a scattering of maples. None of these trees mind having wet feet, whereas the beech and cherry prefer that the trail after it climbs its total elevation gain of 45 feet to the bench at the turnaround spot. As you continue on the return trail, you enter woods dominated by beech and accented with maples and black cherry trees. The first marker for the return trail is on a stand of black cherries. The next time you have visitors, be sure to treat them to this trail and impress them with your ability to name the trees by bark alone!
Photos courtesy of Susan Neul
