The Black Walnut tree (Juglans nigra)

Today I'm going to talk about the Black Walnut tree.  This tree is not common to Canada.  However, it grows extensively to the south of the border, and will likely soon find much more of southern Canada to be a hospitable environment due to climate change, even this "early" in predicted climate changes models.  In fact, black walnut trees already grow quite commonly in southwestern Ontario, especially in moisture-rich lowlands.

 

Here's a range map for this species, courtesy of Wikipedia:

 

Black walnut is a pioneer species, similar to red maple.  This means that it grows well in wide-open spaces with plenty of sunlight, and is not a shade tolerant tree.  When a forest is cut, it will grow back quickly, but eventually (after several decades) other successional species will take over.  This is why you'll commonly see black walnut along roadsides and forest edges, but not deep in the forest.  It is important to note that full sunlight is also important to maximize nut production.

Speaking of the nuts, this tree has nuts which are quite edible.  In fact, they are grown and harvested commercially in the United States.  Missouri is the main state for black walnut production, accounting for around two-thirds of the US total.  For anyone who is a bit rusty on their geography, Missouri is very central to the US, just to the west of Illinois.  So it isn't that far from Canada.  However, if you're someone who likes to eat walnuts, it's more likely that you're eating English walnuts.  That's because the shell of the black walnut is thicker and much harder to crack than the English walnut.  Seriously, you'll need a hammer to crack the shell, not a traditional nut cracker.

Walnuts are very healthy to eat, although some people have allergies.  Walnut is one of the most common allergies to tree nuts, and can be severe.  Anaphylaxis can be fatal.  And unfortunately, unlike other food allergies, a lot of people don't "grow out" of these allergies as they age.

Here are some black walnuts in shell:

 

The leaves of the black walnut are similar to the white walnut, but generally have more leaflets on them.  But the interesting fact here is that a black walnut leaf is typically almost a foot and a half long on a mature tree!  That's huge.  But the definition of the "leaf" is tricky.  A lot of people confuse the "leaflets" on a black walnut leaf, thinking that those are the individual leaves.  But they aren't, they're part of the single larger leaf.  So this photo shows one single leaf, which has almost twenty leaflets on it:

 

One drawback with this species is that its roots emit a chemical known as juglone.  Juglone is a natural herbicide, which tends to kill off a number of other species that might want to grow near a black walnut.  This is in the best interests of the black walnut, as the tree rids itself of nearby competition, thus keeping more soil moisture and nutrients to itself.  But it does mean that you have to be careful of nearby plants and other trees when you plant it.  If you keep your other plants and vegetables out of the drip-line of the black walnut, you should be ok.

As always, here are some Fun Facts about the black walnut:

1.  The leaves of the black walnut have a distinct smell.  It's hard to describe, but think of an earthy medicine odor with hints of citrus lime soda.

2.  Black walnut is prized for its wood by furniture makers and cabinet makers.  The wood is is dense and durable, with a fine colour.

3.  The heartwood of the black walnut is extremely decay-resistant (similar to cedar).  Lots of people use it for outdoor applications, such as fence-posts.

We'll leave you with a photo of a black walnut seedling, growing in the spring:

 

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.

 

 

The Tamarack tree (Larix laricina)

In this post, I'm going to take a close look at a tree with many names, but which most Canadians refer to as the Tamarack.  The Latin name for this species is Larix laricina, but in addition to being called the tamarack in common usage, it's also referred to as eastern larch, black larch, red larch, hackmatack, or American larch.  In this case, "American" is a reference to North American, not to the United States.  In the northern dialect of the Eastern James Bay Cree, it is called the waachinaakin.

Here's a photo of a young tamarack tree:

The tamarack is a fairly unique tree among the conifers.  I'm excited to explain that in a minute, but first we should quickly look at the range.  If you look at our recent post about black spruce trees, you'll see that the range maps of these two species overlap almost perfectly.  The black spruce has a slightly larger range, but they are very similar overall.  And that means that it's pretty easy to find tamarack through most parts of Canada.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

I already referred to the tamarack as being fairly unique among conifers.  To explain why, I have to review some definitions.  A conifer is a tree that is cone-bearing.  Most people equate conifers with evergreens.  Evergreen is a slang term for a tree that stays green throughout the entire year.  Most conifers do retain their leaves (needles) through the winter, so yes, most conifers are also evergreens.

Do you know what a deciduous tree is?  Most people assume that any broad-leaf tree is a deciduous tree.  However, that's not quite correct.  Broad-leaf is a slang term for any type of leaf that is broad.  No surprises there.  Most people say that all trees have either [broad] leaves or needles.  Is there any advantage for a tree in having needles?  Well, needles are more waterproof and more wind-proof than broad leaves.

Anyway, let's get back to the point.  The true definition of a deciduous tree is one that sheds its needles annually.  In cold regions such as Canada, most broad-leafed trees shed their needles every year, so the terms are somewhat synonymous.  But here's where the tamarack bends the rules.  The tamarack is a needle-bearing tree, but it drops its needles every year, then grows a new set in the spring.  Therefore, the tamarack is both coniferous (cone-bearing) and deciduous (shedding leaves annually).  It is therefore known as a deciduous conifer.  The tamarack and the western larch are the only two common deciduous conifers found in Canada.

When the tamarack is about to lose its needles in the fall, they turn a beautiful golden-yellow colour, making these trees very easy to spot in some areas.  Here's are two photos that I took in October, where you can very easily identify the brightly coloured tamarack:

 

If you'd like to learn more about deciduous conifers, check out this article:
https://www.thespruce.com/what-are-deciduous-conifers-3269799

Now that we've covered the most exciting thing about the tamarack, let's get back to basics with a list of common characteristics:
- Extremely tolerant of cold.  Temperatures of -70^oC don't bother this species.
- Maximum height usually not much more than 15 meters (50 feet).
- Maximum diameter usually not much more than half a meter (a foot and a half).
- The average lifespan of a mature tree is around 150 years.
- Needles occur in large groups of up to 20 needles per cluster.
- Often found in wet swampy or boggy conditions, growing alongside black spruce.
- Strangely enough, tamarack is also a good pioneer species in fresh burns, at least until it gets overtaken by other species.

Here's a close-up of the needles and cones:

Even when green, tamarack has a very sparse look to it.  It provides very little shade compared to most trees, which allows a thick undergrowth of mosses and shrubs to thrive underneath the tree.  Speaking of shade, tamarack itself is a very shade intolerant tree.  If you plant it underneath other trees, or even under competing shrubs or vegetation, the mortality rate is quite high.  This is a pioneer species, and in the long term, is usually succeeded first by black spruce, and then by other species.

Tamarack wood is quite flexible.  Native Americans often used this species for making snowshoes.  It isn't a major commercial species, although it's very resistant to rot from moisture (just like cedar), so it is a good option for fence poles and similar applications.  My dad was a land surveyor, and he mentioned that tamarack is a good choice if you need to leave a pole in the ground for some time.

Fun facts:

1.  This is quite unrelated to the tamarack, but you'll notice that I've been throwing around the words "swamp" and "bog" fairly interchangeably.  Actually, there is a difference.  There are four distinct types of wetlands:  swamps, marshes, bogs, and fens.  But I'll save that for another blog post.  I only bring that up because tamaracks thrive near or even in various types of wetlands.

2.  The tamarack is Canada's most northerly tree, found as far north as the 72nd degree of latitude.  That's quite far north of the Arctic Circle (which is at approximately 66.5 degrees north latitude).  Therefore, tamarack trees can grow in the land of White Nights.

 3.  The Ojibwa used tamarack roots as a "thread" to sew together pieces of birch bark when making canoes, due to rot resistance and flexibility.

Here's a photo of a tamarack with its needles dropped during the winter.  Despite appearances, this is a healthy tree!  It's not a great photo, with the grey sky in the background, but if we get a day with deep blue sky I'll try to upgrade the photo:

And here is a photo of some of our tamarack seedlings:

Thanks for reading ...

- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca



Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!



Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.

The Black Spruce tree (Picea mariana)

Today's post is about a species which rarely gets any love.  It's the swamp-loving black spruce (Latin name Picea mariana).  Here's a typical photo, which I took from a helicopter in northern Alberta (the majority of these trees are black spruce):

Oddly enough, the black spruce doesn't have any other common names (except in French), regardless of where you find it across Canada.  And you WILL find black spruce all across Canada.  Its geographic range is much more diverse than even the Jack pine.  Black spruce can be found in all ten provinces and all three Arctic territories.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

It's quite easy to find specimens of black spruce.  Just look for a swamp.  Black spruce thrives in wet areas, even when the water is quite stagnant.  Remember that all spruce trees love water, but most varieties prefer flowing, oxygenated water.

Black spruce has roots that are especially shallow and wide-spreading.  This allows it to thrive in areas which are too wet for competing species.  Trees, like many other creatures, can drown.  Shallow roots help ensure that the black spruce does well in swamps.  Trees need water, but they also need oxygen.  Flood their root systems, and they will eventually die.  Some trees can only tolerate root submersion for as little a week or so before they start to die.  The black spruce can survive for more than a month.  Regardless, their shallow roots make it less likely that they won't have any access to oxygen for extended periods.  Unfortunately, it also makes this species susceptible to blowdown in windstorms.

If you take a close look at black spruce trees near bogs and swamps, you'll see that the closer you get to water, the less vigorous the growth.

Spruce trees rarely grow to be large trees.  It is quite common for mature black spruce trees to be no more than 15m in height, although they can occasionally grow to 25m in really good conditions.  However, you're more likely to see them in the 10m to 15m range.  The trunk rarely grows to more than 50cm in diameter (a foot and a half) for a large tree.  On a positive note, black spruce usually have very straight trunks, without a significant taper until the very top of the tree.

The top of the black spruce is interesting.  The crown is narrow and pointed, and the small branches all droop, yet the tips are turned upward.  Unlike the tips, the cones hang downward.  Here's an excellent photo from Wikimedia Commons:

One of the more interesting things that many people learn about the black spruce is their long-term fire ecology behaviour.  Black spruce trees often live in peat bogs, as well as swamps.  Despite the moist ground, black spruce stands are especially susceptible to wildfires.  If you're puzzled about this, it's important to know that monocultures (especially conifers) are often especially susceptible to wildfires, while mixed-wood forests with lots of species such as aspen will be less susceptible.  Since black spruce is so much more tolerant of swampy/boggy conditions than most other trees (except for larch/tamarack), it tends to grow frequently in pure stands.  These pure stands are susceptible to fire, despite the wet ground.

Black spruce stands tend to burn frequently, but they also regenerate quickly immediately after a fire (just like lodgepole pine).  Therefore, a lot of black spruce stands tend to be very even-aged.  Over time (centuries), swampy areas with black spruce will often slowly become filled in by organics, and the surface of the ground will become elevated and drier.  As this happens, there will be ingress from moderately moisture-tolerant species such as tamarack, white cedar, white spruce, balsam fir, and eventually balsam poplar and trembling aspen.  Don't judge black spruce as an ugly swamp tree with no significant value.  In the long term, it's an important precursor to more diverse mature mixed-wood forests.


I'll leave you with three random facts about the black spruce:
- This is the provincial tree of Newfoundland and Labrador.
- Like red spruce, it is good for making spruce beer.
- Disposable chopsticks are often made of black spruce (or trembling aspen).

That's all for now.  I hope you enjoyed reading this, and it made you appreciate this species a bit more.  We don't plant very much black spruce at Replant.ca Environmental, simply because it's not great for long-term carbon capture, but it does occupy a small percentage of our annual seedling mixes due to its suitability (along with cedar and tamarack) in swampy ground.  Here's a photo of some of our black spruce seedlings:

Thanks for reading ...

- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca


Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.

The White Spruce tree (Picea glauca)

For this week's featured species, we're going to look at the White Spruce.  The proper Latin name for this species is Picea glauca.  White spruce is sometimes referred to as "Canadian spruce," although that's not an official name of any sort.


Some people refer to Engelmann spruce as white spruce, but that's a different species.  Engelmann spruce is found at elevation in southern BC at the western US.  Engelmann spruce is often crossed with true white spruce to create a hardy hybrid that is planted all over western Canada.

Here's a photo that I took of a white spruce, which I believe was probably about 30-40 years old:

The white spruce is a very plentiful tree.  It's very healthy, and has a broad range.  You can find this species all across Canada, except for the very southern reaches of BC and Alberta, and the west coast of BC (where Sitka spruce takes over).  Here's a range map from Wikipedia:

Spruce trees, in general, love water.  They typically prefer flowing (aerated) water, although black spruce can thrive in some pretty fetid swampy areas.  White spruce is certainly quite happy to grow in moisture-laden soils.  White spruce, like all other spruce trees, is also a very shade-tolerant tree.  However, it is slightly less shade tolerant than red spruce (red spruce is a common tree in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia).  Regardless, white spruce will do adequately when planted under a canopy, or in areas with high brush and vegetation competition.  However, white spruce seedlings can be susceptible to spring frosts.  Having brush or a mature canopy over young seedlings acts to protect them until they're older.

When I was very young, I thought that all cones, regardless of what species of conifer the cone came from, were called pine cones.  Of course, that was that naivete of a young child.  The cones on spruce trees are called spruce cones.  White spruce has two types of cones, male and female.  Each tree contains both types.  The male cones produce pollen, which floats to the female cones to fertilize the seed.  After the cones are fertilized, it takes about three months for them to mature and open.  When the cones open, the seed is dispersed fairly far from the tree, due to small wings on each seed.  It is common for seed to spread more than 100m from the parent tree, thanks to winds.  Although the number of seeds per cone varies, there are usually at least a few dozen seeds in a cone, and sometimes more than a hundred.
 

A mature white spruce will often live to be more than 200 years old.  Some trees live to be many times older than that.  After the first century, as long as the site and growing conditions are adequate, a white spruce will often reach 30m (100 feet) in height, and can have a diameter of more than a meter (3 feet) at the base.  This species can capture very large amounts of carbon.  Our Walker Road property has some beautiful mature white spruce that are starting to approach this size.

Although we don't harvest any of our trees at Replant.ca Environmental, white spruce is often used in the manufacture of acoustic guitars.

One way to distinguish white spruce from red spruce is by the colour of the needles.  The white spruce needles are a bluish-green shade, in contrast to the more yellow-green shade of red spruce needles.

This year, we've planted many thousands of white spruce seedlings at Replant.ca Environmental.  Here's a photo of some of them:

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca



Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.