Trees Part 2

Photo credit: NASA
Concentrations must be kept below 450ppm to keep global warming below 2 C. Photo credit: NASA

This is your atmosphere on Carbon Dioxide.   We need more trees.  So here are a few more from the yard.   Look at it as a carbon bank, taking Carbon Dioxide out and replacing it with Oxygen.   Come on!  How much difference can it really make?  Each new tree can remove 10 pounds of Carbon Dioxide in first year.  Ten years in that tree is grabbing 48 pounds!  Every new acre removes 2.5 tons of the greenhouse gas! Ten years later, doing the math 12 tons gone.  Now if we keep the trees we have too.  We save ourselves.  Ok maybe not.

Sides of your property can provide much need shelter for birds.  Where big  trees don’t fit, we enter a mix of shrubs and ornamental trees.  At the bottom, a Bush Honeysuckle branch curls from underneath.  On its own the Bush Honeysuckle woukd be ten feet with a ten feet spread.  The glossy leaves of the Common Dogwood actually lighten up a dark space.  The thin branches provide nest building platforms for songbirds.  At about ten feet tall, it’s blooms get lost sometimes.  Below is a better view.

The Silky Dogwood shares the leaf pattern buy  it much else with its more popular cousin.  It’s flowers hold a cluster of eight to twelve tiny flowers with a flat top.  It’s has many trunks, so spread underground called stolons to make addition plants.  It to provides plenty of shelter for birds.

The most common tree in North America, and it still needs an introduction!  Above is the Quaking Aspen, at five years old it’s growth rate is crazy.  It also has a problem keeping it’s branches at times.  They are great shade trees, but you are looking at fifty feet of tree in five years.  Don’t go near the house with one of these things!  (Somewhere a person reading this has a Blue Spruce up against their house that did the same thing at a slower rate ).  While after a good storm you maybe picking up leaves, during the breezes you’ll hear the leaves quaking.  Truly an awesome sound.  If you land is wooded, sometimes they get help being planted like this one was. I guessing a squirrel was involved, they have planted many oak trees too!

Speaking of oaks, the mighty Pin Oak, swampland’s friend!  If you have wet soil where nothing grows….I have a tree for you.   It needs only to be ignored, maybe lower branches cut if you mow around it.  Other than that, killing one is very difficult. This baby is at least 13 years old.  It’s about 35 feet tall.  There are lots of places for critters to hide.  Birds and squirrel in the branches.  Stray cat, racoons, and moles underneath.  It will turn brown in fall and those leaves will stay on the tree most of the winter.

Above is a close up of th e leaves.  The form is shape and deep cut between points on the leaf.  Opposed to the other one below, the Swamp White Oak.  Similar build and needs as the Pin Oak.  This is the only easily visible one in my yard and it’s mixed in a row of trees and doesn’t show its ture shape.  It would like the Pin Oak above, little narrower.