#bur oak

[spatheandspadix]

Bur oak, the largest acorns in my region

[greenmansgrove]

Bittersweet nightshade, among the plants I personally associate with the Morrigan in my practice, growing in the crook of a double-trunked bur oak. I have been seeking to divine a period of time for an oath/geis, and I believe the number of berries to be the answer after also divining a confirmation. Crows calls rang out as my Grove and I came upon this tree during a casual gathering. Rather than a new oath/geis, this is a continuation. Bittersweet nightshade is symbolic of fidelity, healing, and protection (though it is poisonous).

[claer]

the ‘signal tree,’ a 300-year-old bur oak believed to have been physically altered by native americans to help mark the portage trail between the cuyahoga and tuscarawas rivers

[the-mountain-life]

your girl is tatted

[aggiepython]

a piece i did for a class on native american history, inspired by Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon (more info under cut)

“She bounded down two concrete stairs and stepped out on to the green grass of the campus mall, surrounded on either side by thick stately oaks. She could tell each one had been strategically planted along the winding sidewalks between the red brick buildings. Even with groups of students sitting on the grass, leaning against their trunks, the trees seemed lonely. Nothing like the oaks along the river that grew where they wanted to grow and leaned in and touched each other with their middle branches, whose voices sang through their leaves like the hum of electric wires running alongside the country roads.” From Murder on the Red River

This piece is inspired by Murder on the Red River, a mystery novel by Marcie Rendon. It’s about Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman who investigates the murder of a Native man. Cash was taken from her mother and siblings as a young child and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which were abusive. About a third of Native American children were taken from their parents and placed in foster homes, even when they could have been placed with relatives instead of being separated from their community members and culture. Native American boarding schools, which also separated children from their families and culture, had mostly all been shut down by the 1970s (Katherine Beane), when Murder on the Red River takes place. But the removal of children to foster homes was just another way that the government tried to force Native Americans to assimilate into white culture. The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978. It set requirements to keep Native children with relatives when safe and possible, and to work with the tribe and family of children. This act has made progress, though Native children are still adopted or placed in foster care at a higher rate than non-Native children (NICWA). In my illustration, there are four trees, representing Cash, her mother, and her two siblings. In the image on the right, the trees are growing as they do in their natural forest habitat, winding together. In the image on the left, the trees have been planted on the neat lawn of the college campus, a place where white culture is dominant. The trees are apart from each other, separated as Cash’s family were torn apart. They were forced to assimilate as many Native Americans were. The trees are bur oaks, aka Quercus macrocarpa, a species native to North Dakota where the book takes place. Their range encompasses much of the U.S. and parts of Canada (Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center). The grass on the right image is Kentucky Bluegrass, aka Poa pratensis. It is invasive to North America. It was introduced in the 17th century from Europe, and is now found all over North America. It is commonly used for lawns and pasture, and can outcompete native prairie plants (North Dakota State Library). The Red River borders North Dakota and Minnesota. The Ojibwe have lived in Minnesota since before the 17th century, after migrating from Northeastern North America over hundreds of years (Minnesota Historical Society). The shape of the Red River traces through the image, weaving and intermingling through the branches of the trees, showing Cash’s deep connection with the land she is from.

Works Cited “About IWCA” National Indian Child Welfare Association, https://www.nicwa.org/about-icwa/ Beane, Katherine, American Indians in Minnesota, 12 March 2024, Nicholson Hall, Minneapolis, MN. Lecture. “Kentucky Bluegrass”, North Dakota State Library. https://www.library.nd.gov/statedocs/AgDept/Kentuckybluegrass20070703.pdf Rendon, Marcie. Murder on the Red River. Soho Crime, 2017. “The Ojibwe People”, Minnesota Historical Society, https://www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/native-americans/ojibwe-people “Quercus macrocarpa”, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=QUMA2

[rootedromantic]

Making a Bur Oak Leaf Necklace A  little behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making a necklace.  Also available as earrings! Wall-art coming soon. See the whole leaf series on the website. Choose your stone!

[stopandlook]

A bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) leaf impression in concrete.

[chocobosdungeon2]

Fagaceae Quercus macrocarpa

Bur Oak

Identification via Pl@ntNet

[housecow]

I find it strange how you'd like to get so fat that you depend on someone but at the same time you're saying that you wanna do gardening. It's like there is a confrontation between your kink and your regular life...

in fantasy (or with a lot of consideration between me and my feeder) i’d become dependent. realistically, i’ve always dreamt of having my own garden and i think i could keep up with it at over 350lbs tbh

why can’t i have both…… scooter accessible garden pls. with raised beds i won’t have to bend over too much 🥺

bonus. bacon and tomato sandwich w home grown red snapper variety tomatoes, one of the only beefsteak-like varieties that grow in TX 🥳 DELICIOUS w mayo and some black pepper.

[crippled-peeper]

have you ever seen an Oak tree so beautiful it made you cry?

[miggylol]

Hello, Sacramento. I continue to like your airport (so far as airports go).

[greenmansgrove]

Newell Park. I’ve been sorely neglecting my visits, but I’m not too late to see the oak blooms. This visit, I identified a number of other trees (not featured) including the Ohio buckeye, common chokecherry, elm, and redbud.

Featured are new fronds my bur oak friend is growing, the fact that my pin oak friend looks like a dryad from afar, and a deep hollow in one of the trees on the park’s southeaster corner. Last image is taken from my favorite bench in the park. Trying to catch what it looks like in every season.

[foreverfervor]

went on a walk, saw a 500 year old tree and a sad cigar

[alchemiccolored]

thoughts on midwest pine species?

if native: 👍

... im not much of a tree person.... much more of a flower/grass/shrub kinda guy. sorry :(

[collincountymagazine]

Storm knocks over historic Plano tree estimated to be 400-plus years old

The historic 90-foot tall Bur Oak at Bob Woodruff Park in east Plano fell during a storm this week. Arborists have estimated the tree could be older than 400 years old.

[headspace-hotel]

There, in the sunlit forest on a high ridgeline, was a tree I had never seen before.

I spend a lot of time looking at trees. I know my beech, sourwood, tulip poplar, sassafras and shagbark hickory. Appalachian forests have such a diverse tree community that for those who grew up in or around the ancient mountains, forests in other places feel curiously simple and flat.

Oaks: red, white, black, bur, scarlet, post, overcup, pin, chestnut, willow, chinkapin, and likely a few others I forgot. Shellbark, shagbark and pignut hickories. Sweetgum, serviceberry, hackberry, sycamore, holly, black walnut, white walnut, persimmon, Eastern redcedar, sugar maple, red maple, silver maple, striped maple, boxelder maple, black locust, stewartia, silverbell, Kentucky yellowwood, blackgum, black cherry, cucumber magnolia, umbrella magnolia, big-leaf magnolia, white pine, scrub pine, Eastern hemlock, redbud, flowering dogwood, yellow buckeye, white ash, witch hazel, pawpaw, linden, hornbeam, and I could continue, but y'all would never get free!

And yet, this tree is different.

We gather around the tree as though surrounding the feet of a prophet. Among the couple dozen of us, only a few are much younger than forty. Even one of the younger men, who smiles approvingly and compliments my sharp eye when I identify herbs along the trail, has gray streaking his beard. One older gentleman scales the steep ridge slowly, relying on a cane for support.

The older folks talk to us young folks with enthusiasm. They brighten when we can call plants and trees by name and list their virtues and importance. "You're right! That's Smilax." "Good eye!" "Do you know what this is?—Yes, Eupatorium, that's a pollinator's paradise." "Are you planning to study botany?"

The tree we have come to see is not like the tall and pillar-like oaks that surround us. It is still young, barely the diameter of a fence post. Its bark is gray and forms broad stripes like rivulets of water down smooth rock. Its smooth leaves are long, with thin pointed teeth along their edges. Some of the group carefully examine the bark down to the ground, but the tree is healthy and flourishing, for now.

This tree is among the last of its kind.

The wood of the American Chestnut was once used to craft both cradles and coffins, and thus it was known as the "cradle-to-grave tree." The tree that would hold you in entering this world and in leaving it would also sustain your body throughout your life: each tree produced a hundred pounds of edible nuts every winter, feeding humans and all the other creatures of the mountains. In the Appalachian Mountains, massive chestnut trees formed a third of the overstory of the forest, sometimes growing larger than six feet in diameter.

They are a keystone species, and this is my first time seeing one alive in the wild.

It's a sad story. But I have to tell you so you will understand.

At the turn of the 20th century, the chestnut trees of Appalachia were fundamental to life in this ecosystem, but something sinister had taken hold, accidentally imported from Asia. Cryphonectria parasitica is a pathogenic fungus that infects chestnut trees. It co-evolved with the Chinese chestnut, and therefore the Chinese chestnut is not bothered much by the fungus.

The American chestnut, unlike its Chinese sister, had no resistance whatsoever.

They showed us slides with photos of trees infected with the chestnut blight earlier. It looks like sickly orange insulation foam oozing through the bark of the trees. It looks like that orange powder that comes in boxes of Kraft mac and cheese. It looks wrong. It means death.

The chestnut plague was one of the worst ecological disasters ever to occur in this place—which is saying something. And almost no one is alive who remembers it. By the end of the 1940's, by the time my grandparents were born, approximately three to four billion American chestnut trees were dead.

The Queen of the Forest was functionally extinct. With her, at least seven moth species dependent on her as a host plant were lost forever, and no one knows how much else. She is a keystone species, and when the keystone that holds a structure in place is removed, everything falls.

Appalachia is still falling.

Now, in some places, mostly-dead trees tried to put up new sprouts. It was only a matter of time for those lingering sprouts of life.

But life, however weak, means hope.

I learned that once in a rare while, one of the surviving sprouts got lucky enough to successfully flower and produce a chestnut. And from that seed, a new tree could be grown. People searched for the still-living sprouts and gathered what few chestnuts could be produced, and began growing and breeding the trees.

Some people tried hybridizing American and Chinese chestnuts and then crossing the hybrids to produce purer American strains that might have some resistance to the disease. They did this for decades.

And yet, it wasn't enough. The hybrid trees were stronger, but not strong enough.

Extinction is inevitable. It's natural. There have been at least five mass extinctions in Earth's history, and the sixth is coming fast. Many people accepted that the American chestnut was gone forever. There had been an intensive breeding program, summoning all the natural forces of evolution to produce a tree that could survive the plague, and it wasn't enough.

This has happened to more species than can possibly be counted or mourned. And every species is forced to accept this reality.

Except one.

We are a difficult motherfucker of a species, aren't we? If every letter of the genome's book of life spelled doom for the Queen of the Forest, then we would write a new ending ourselves. Research teams worked to extract a gene from wheat and implant it in the American chestnut, in hopes of creating an American chestnut tree that could survive.

This project led to the Darling 58, the world's first genetically modified organism to be created for the purpose of release into the wild.

The Darling 58 chestnut is not immune, the presenters warned us. It does become infected with the blight. And some trees die. But some live.

And life means hope.

In isolated areas, some surviving American Chestnut trees have been discovered, most of them still very young. The researchers hope it is possible that some of these trees may have been spared not because of pure luck, but because they carry something in their genes that slows the blight in doing its deadly work, and that possibly this small bit of innate resistance can be shaped and combined with other efforts to create a tree that can live to grow old.

This long, desperate, multi-decade quest is what has brought us here. The tree before me is one such tree: a rare survivor. In this clearing, a number of other baby chestnut trees have been planted by human hands. They are hybrids of the Darling 58 and the best of the best Chinese/American hybrids. The little trees are as prepared for the blight as we can possibly make them at this time. It is still very possible that I will watch them die. Almost certainly, I will watch this tree die, the one that shades us with her young, stately limbs.

Some of the people standing around me are in their 70's or 80's, and yet, they have no memory of a world where the Queen of the Forest was at her full majesty. The oldest remember the haunting shapes of the colossal dead trees looming as if in silent judgment.

I am shaken by this realization. They will not live to see the baby trees grow old. The people who began the effort to save the American chestnut devoted decades of their lives to these little trees, knowing all the while they likely never would see them grow tall. Knowing they would not see the work finished. Knowing they wouldn't be able to be there to finish it. Knowing they wouldn't be certain if it could be finished.

When the work began, the technology to complete it did not exist. In the first decades after the great old trees were dead, genetic engineering was a fantasy.

But those that came before me had to imagine that there was some hope of a future. Hope set the foundation. Now that little spark of hope is a fragile flame, and the torch is being passed to the next generation.

When a keystone is removed, everything suffers. What happens when a keystone is put back into place? The caretakers of the American chestnut hope that when the Queen is restored, all of Appalachia will become more resilient and able to adapt to climate change.

Not only that, but this experiment in changing the course of evolution is teaching us lessons and skills that may be able to help us save other species.

It's just one tree—but it's never just one tree. It's a bear successfully raising cubs, chestnut bread being served at a Cherokee festival, carbon being removed from the atmosphere and returned to the Earth, a wealth of nectar being produced for pollinators, scientific insights into how to save a species from a deadly pathogen, a baby cradle being shaped in the skilled hands of an Appalachian crafter. It's everything.

Despair is individual; hope is an ecosystem. Despair is a wall that shuts out everything; hope is seeing through a crack in that wall and catching a glimpse of a single tree, and devoting your life to chiseling through the wall towards that tree, even if you know you will never reach it yourself.

An old man points to a shaft of light through the darkness we are both in, toward a crack in the wall. "Do you see it too?" he says. I look, and on the other side I see a young forest full of sunlight, with limber, pole-size chestnut trees growing toward the canopy among the old oaks and hickories. The chestnut trees are in bloom with fuzzy spikes of creamy white, and bumblebees heavy with pollen move among them. I tell the man what I see, and he smiles.

"When I was your age, that crack was so narrow, all I could see was a single little sapling on the forest floor," he says. "I've been chipping away at it all my life. Maybe your generation will be the one to finally reach the other side."

Hope is a great work that takes a lifetime. It is the hardest thing we are asked to do, and the most essential.

I am trying to show you a glimpse of the other side. Do you see it too?