Tree Planting Project in Tantramar, New Brunswick (2024)

Here's a post about another carbon sequestration project that we recently completed on behalf of one of our Sponsor Partners.  The tree planting work on this site in southeastern New Brunswick was done in the Spring of 2024.  The work was done at a large site on the side of the TransCanada Highway, just west of Sackville.  The planting on this site was entirely sponsored by One Tree Planted.

 

This site was harvested about a decade and a half ago, by a third party, and our goal was to help rebuild a new forest there.  The site is large and easily accessible, and might be a great site for a public park in the future.  It is fairly close to Sackville's Beech Hill Park, which has some nice recreation trails, and trails on this site could complement those that are already built in the area.

As noted, although we hope to provide future opportunities for public recreation on this site, the primary initial purpose of this project was to support climate stability through carbon sequestration.  As a side benefit, this site will support biodiversity and wildlife habitat.  There were already some healthy trees growing on this site (mostly balsam fir, white spruce, American beech, trembling aspen, red maple, and white birch) so we were able to plant at fairly low density, adding only 33,750 more trees (mostly eastern white pine seedlings) into open areas on this 121.8 acre site.  Diverse forests are healthy forests, and eastern white pine is an especially appealing native tree when considering possible negative future climate change scenarios.

Here are a few more photos taken during the planting of this project, which took place in late April of 2024:
 

 

 

 

 

You can see more photos of our tree planting work at this site by visiting our Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "2024 Planting Photos" folder, then into the "Tantramar Rec Trails" sub-folder.  Start here:

    www.replant-environmental.ca/photos

 

We look forward to studying this site in the coming years.  We will be doing periodic surveys to assess the carbon capture progress of the new forest, and hope to start exploring the possibility of building recreational trails in 2027.

Again, a huge thanks to One Tree Planted, the sponsors and lead on this major project.

 

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!

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 Red Spruce tree (Picea rubens)

For this week's look at various trees that we plant at Replant.ca Environmental, I'm going to focus on the red spruce.  As is common with many different tree species, this one is known by many names.  The other names that I'm most accustomed to hearing are eastern spruce, Maritime spruce, and yellow spruce.  The Latin name is Picea rubens.

Red spruce is an extremely common and valuable tree in eastern Canadian forestry.  Due to its versatility and economic value, it is the most commonly planted tree in the Maritime provinces.  Although it isn't the fastest-growing conifer, it is considered to be a late succession tree.  This means that it "catches up and wins," like the tortoise in the fable of "the tortoise and the hare."  The red spruce can often live to be 250-400 years old.

When the red spruce is young, it prefers to grow in moist soils.  It helps if the groundwater moisture is aerated.  Well-drained soils, or soils that are moistened by flowing water, are ideal.  However, red spruce is quite versatile, and will still thrive in many other types of ground conditions.  Red spruce is quite biologically similar to black spruce (a species which does really well in swampy areas with more stagnant water).  Red spruce is also extremely shade-tolerant when it is young.  This is important, because spruce trees generally grow more slowly than other conifers (such as pine) for the first decade or two.  Due to this slower start, spruce usually fail to get above competing grass and vegetation for several years.  However, they don't usually get choked out by plant competition due to their shade tolerance.

When a red spruce matures, it can be twenty to twenty-five meters in height (seventy to eighty feet).  A mature tree will often achieve a DBH (diameter at breast height) of 50cm to 60cm (up to two feet).  Red spruce often grows straighter than conifers such as red pine and white pine.  Although the red spruce doesn't grow as large as an eastern white pine, it's a beautiful and long-lived species in its own right.  Perhaps this is why the red spruce is the provincial tree of Nova Scotia.

Red spruce is mostly an eastern Canadian and northeast US seaboard species.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Spruce needles and balsam fir needles often look very similar to someone who doesn't spend a lot of time in the woods.  However, there's a neat trick that you can do to distinguish between them.  Spruce needles are four-sided.  When you put a needle between two fingers and try to "roll" it, it rolls easily.  Balsam fir needles are three-sided but their shape is like a very flattened triangle.  Due to this shape, balsam fir needles don't roll easily between your fingers.  This trick can still be a bit confusing.  If you use a lot of pressure, it's still possible to "roll" the needles of a balsam fir.  And if the spruce needles are sticky or if your fingers are rough, they don't necessarily roll perfectly.  However, if you are out in the woods and see two trees that look slightly different, and you think one is a spruce and one is a fir, try the needle-roll test.  Also, try grabbing a branch and squeezing.  Be careful though!  Spruce needles are much more pointy at the ends, so they'll feel a lot more prickly than fir needles.

If you're looking at the trunk of a juvenile tree, the appearance of spruce and fir are quite different.  Spruce trees will look scaly, and usually have a yellowish-brown or reddish-brown colour.  They will also have more needles on the trunk.  Conversely, a juvenile balsam fir tree will usually have grey bark, and it's usually quite smooth with almost no needles, except maybe some spare needles on the top foot or so of the tree.  The bark of each of these trees becomes much more rough as the trees passes the juvenile stage.  Both types of trees will develop vertical furrows on the bark, although the furrows will be more pronounced on spruce trees.

Take a close look at the underside of this red spruce branch.  What obvious colour patterns do you see?

When you look at a red spruce branch on a young tree, the new growth has a yellowish tinge, and the older growth has a brownish tinge.

Here are four interesting facts about the red spruce:

1.  This tree is monoecious.  This means that individual flowers (cones) are either male or female, but both sexes can be found on the same tree.  The cones are cross-pollinated by wind.

2.  Red spruce trees do not do well in areas with high atmospheric pollution, or "acid rain" (rain contaminated by industrial smoke and chemicals).  This is one more reason to keep our earth clean.  There's a slogan that says, "The solution to pollution is dilution."  I think a better solution is to avoid polluting in the first place.

3.  Red spruce is the most sought-after wood for making most musical instruments.

4.  Spruce twigs can be boiled with sugar, and the resulting liquid can be used to make spruce beer.  I think a lot of people would prefer spruce beer to hemlock tea.


As I mentioned, the red spruce is the most economically valuable species in the Maritime provinces, and is planted very frequently in post-logging operations.  Unfortunately, in that type of work, the logging companies generally plant it as a monoculture.  At Replant.ca Environmental, we endorse biodiversity.  Red spruce is definitely an important species within our planting mixes, but we never plant it by itself.  Here's a photo of some of our red 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 Eastern White Cedar tree (Thuja occidentalis)

The Eastern white cedar is known by many names, but the most common alternatives are the northern white cedar, the swamp cedar, or the eastern arborvitae.  The Latin name for this tree is Thuja occidentalis.

You won't often hear rural dwellers referring to this tree as the arborvitae.  That term arborvitae is somewhat confusing.  Many horticulturalists use it.  However, arborvitae really refers to the entire Thuja s. genus, which includes five different species.  The only other arborvitae is the western red cedar, which we plant very frequently in BC's western coastal areas.  Incidentally, the word arborvitae comes from two separate words:  Arbor, meaning "tree," and vitae, meaning "life."  The implication is "tree of life."

When you look at the taxonomic classification of the Thuja genus, they belong to a family known as Cupressaceae, or more commonly known in English as cypress.  That's right, the north American cedars are not even true cedars!  Sigh.  Why is tree classification so confusing?  True cedars are only found natively in the Mediterranean and in the Himalayas.  Let's get back to our "fake" cedar, the eastern white cedar.

Perhaps the most unique thing about cedar trees is the appearance of the needles.  Cedar branches look very different than most other conifers, due to the flattened shape of the needles:

You can see that the needles almost look like scales.

When an eastern white cedar tree develops cones, they are quite small - only about one centimeter long.  Each cone contains approximately eight seeds, however, the cones grow in very dense clusters.  They start off as a yellowish colour, but then eventually turn to a fairly dark shade of brown.  Here's a photo showing some immature cones that are still developing:

This species is not a large one.  These trees rarely grow to be more than 15-25 meters in height (about 50-80 feet).  However, even though they're usually not nearly as tall as many of the other mature conifer species in eastern Canada, their trunks can still grow fairly thick, sometimes reaching almost a meter in diameter (3 feet) at maturity.  These measurements are typical for trees growing in the United States.  When they're found in Canada, they're usually slightly smaller.

Cedar trees taste great, at least to deer.  And that's a big problem.  Deer are especially attracted to these trees.  Exploding deer populations are causing all kinds of problems in many parts of Canada.  In the town that I grew up in, in central Nova Scotia, the deer can be found everywhere throughout town, and ravage people's gardens and shrubbery.  Cedar trees are one of the favorite species for deer to eat, and this is having a negative impact on cedar populations all over eastern North America.

On the west coast, when we plant cedar, we sometimes also install "browse protection devices" over the trees.  A browse protector usually looks like a tall thin plastic cone, about three feet tall.  We place a four-foot cedar stake beside a freshly planted cedar tree, and pound this stake into the ground with a mallet so it is firmly anchored, then place the cone over both the cedar seedling and the stake.  The cone is then tied to the stake so it will remain in place for several years.  The cones are translucent, which allows enough sunlight to reach the tree for photosynthesis.  The tree grows up inside the cone for approximately 3-5 years, then the crew goes back into the plantation to remove the cones, so they can be re-used on another project.  This system seems to work fairly well for letting the cedar seedlings become established until the trees are large enough that the deer start to ignore them (the deer prefer very young seedlings that are closer to the ground).  Here's a photo of a browse cone, protecting a freshly planted young cedar:

Cedar trees can live for a very, very long time.  Here's an interesting story:  There is an old eastern white cedar located on the shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota.  The Ojibwa refer to this tree as the Little Cedar Spirit Tree.  The first known written reference to this specific tree happened way back in 1731, by a French explorer named Sieur de la Verendrye.  The Ojibwa often leave tobacco around the tree as an offering to help protect them on voyages on Lake Superior.  Despite this tree being quite famous, that doesn't mean that it's one of the oldest.  It could be, but some eastern white cedars can live to be more than a thousand years old!  Why would anyone ever want to cut one of these trees down?

Although this species prefers very moist climates, it has managed to carve out a fairly large footprint in eastern Canada by taking advantage of conditions where other larger and faster-growing trees have problems thriving.  These cedar trees can survive on rocky cliffs, and in very moist swampy areas.  In that sense, this cedar is a good species to mix with black spruce when the ground conditions are appropriately moist.  Although eastern white cedar isn't found commonly throughout Nova Scotia or in the eastern half of Prince Edward Island, it has a wide range throughout the rest of eastern and central Canada and the northeastern United States.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

I want to leave you with a few interesting facts about this species:

1.  When a branch falls from an eastern white cedar, it can sometimes lay out new roots into the ground and grow into a new tree, if the conditions are just right!

2.  The inner bark of this tree is tough enough to make into string or rope.

3.  Some people plant this species in their back yards specifically to attract wildlife.  Besides deer, rabbits and many types of birds are also attracted to this tree.


For the 2020 planting season, we included several thousand eastern white cedars in our species mixes at Replant.ca Environmental.  We planted these trees in areas with more moisture or shade, including understory areas, near streams, and in swampy areas.  Even though they are one of the less voluminous conifers in our mixes, and there is a higher risk of some mortality due to deer browsing, we feel that these are a very beneficial species to add to our mixes.  Here's a photo of some of our eastern white cedar 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 Eastern Hemlock tree (Tsuga canadensis)

Today I'm going to talk about one of the longest-lived of the trees on Canada's east coast, the Eastern hemlock.  Some of you also might know it as Canadian hemlock, or even as eastern hemlock-spruce.  I'm not a fan of that last name, because it confuses people.  Eastern hemlock is not a spruce conifer!  But speaking of names, this species has a Latin name which I find easiest to remember of all Latin names:  Tsuga canadensis.  I guess that's because I'm a proud Canadian.

Before I get into too much detail about this species, let's start with a photo.  This is a good close-up photo showing just a handful of the several thousand eastern hemlock seedlings that we planted this year (2019).

There are three types of hemlocks in Canada, although they all have very narrow distributions.  Western hemlock and mountain hemlock are only found in BC, and mostly in coastal parts of that province.  I've planted large numbers of both of these species while doing commercial reforestation work on Vancouver Island.  So despite the fact that eastern hemlock is not widely distributed throughout most of Canada, it is still the most well-known hemlock.  It can be found throughout all three of the maritime provinces, and also in southern parts of Ontario and Quebec.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

It's interesting that eastern hemlock does so well throughout southeastern Canada and the northeast seaboard of the US, considering that most hemlocks thrive in temperate rainforests.  The two west coast hemlocks definitely thrive in the moist areas of the coast, and with the exception of the Ancient Rainforest area east of Prince George, almost all west coast hemlocks grow within a hundred kilometers of the Pacific ocean.

The hemlock family got its name from a perceived similarity between the smell of crushed hemlock (conifer) needles and the crushed hemlock plant, even though the plant is completely unrelated to the conifer tree family.  You may be aware that hemlock is well known as a poisonous plant, but hemlock trees thankfully are not toxic! Incidentally, let me take a complete tangent from this post, in case you're trying to remember where you heard about hemlock plants being poison.  Back in ancient Greece, the famous philosopher Socrates went on trial for corrupting the youth of Athens (encouraging anti-democratic uprisings).  He was tried by an assembly of 500 citizens, the majority of whom decided that he was guilty, and was subsequently sentenced to death by poisoning.  At the execution, he calmly agreed to drink the poison down, and that was the end of him.  Plato and Aristotle, two other historical figures that you might be acquainted with if you've studied philosophy (or are a Monty Python fan), were two of his most famous students at the time.  And incidentally, the poisonous hemlock plant is found in twelve US states.  But I digress.  Let's get back to the conifer.

I mentioned earlier that eastern hemlock trees are quite long lived.  Indeed!  They would make any octagenarian jealous.  It is very common for mature trees to live for 250-400 years, if they aren't knocked down in a bad windstorm.  There is one eastern hemlock in Pennsylvania that is going to hit it's 600th birthday in a few decades.  That's pretty impressive.

On Canada's east coast, mature trees often reach a height of about 30m (100 feet) and the trunk of these trees can often approach 1.5m in diamater (almost five feet).  Our Charles Clark forest reserve property in north central Nova Scotia has a belt through the center of the property with almost twenty acres that hasn't been cut in about a century, and it is full of beautiful mature hemlocks.  This part of the property almost feels like a rainforest when you visit it.  In many parts of the US, hemlock trees are only found at elevations of 600 meters and above (cooler climate), but our Charles Clark property is only about 40m above sea level.

Unfortunately, the eastern hemlock is susceptible to two major pests right now.  The first is an "adelgid" (similar to an aphid) known as the woolly hemlock adelgid.  This insect was introduced to north American accidentally from Asia, and eastern hemlock is not resistant to it.  Canadian hemlocks haven't been hit too hard yet, but the adelgid is really doing a lot of damage to stands east of the Appalachians.  The other problem insect is the hemlock looper, which is a type of moth that eats hemlock (and several other common Canadian trees).  Eastern hemlock is also susceptible to a couple varieties of the Armillaria fungus, which is a widely distributed forest parasite (a small mushroom) that attacks many different species.  However, Armillaria (also known colloquially as honey mushrooms) are generally only a problem for mature hemlock.

Another problem that eastern hemlock have to cope with when they're young is being used as a snack by deer.  Deer populations in urban areas of Nova Scotia have exploded over the past decade.  I don't know if the same holds true for rural deer, but in town, we see them on our front lawns everywhere, and they've caused an enormous amount of damage to cedar shrubs and several dozen other types of small plants and flowers.  Anyway, deer love to browse on tender plants.  They tend to avoid plants with needles (except for cedar, which they love) and they also tend to avoid plants with strong odors or bitter tastes.  Although hemlock is not their preferred diet, they will sometimes snack on young hemlock trees.  Hemlock tea tastes quite bitter, but yet the deer don't seem to mind if they're quite hungry.  Hemlock tea is bitter enough that most tea drinkers would definitely turn their nose up, although it apparently has a lot of vitamin C.

If you're ever looking to plant conifers on the east coast, and the property already has some existing brush or tree cover, consider the eastern hemlock as one of the species to potentially include in your mix.  The eastern hemlock is very shade tolerant - one of the most shade tolerant conifers in Canada.

I'll leave you with a photo of some of our eastern hemlock 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 Eastern White Pine tree (Pinus strobus)

This post will talk about one of our favorite tree species of the east coast, the Eastern white pine.  The Latin name for this species is Pinus strobus.  Here's a famous photo of a giant Eastern white pine tree in Virginia:

Eastern white pine (which is also referred to by some people in the Unites States as the northern white pine), is a beautiful species.  It grows all over eastern Canada and around the Great Lakes, and also throughout the northeastern seaboard of the United States.  Ironically, even though it is sometimes called the northern white, it doesn't really grow well north of New Brunswick, central Newfoundland, or southern Ontario.  Here's a map showing the typical range, thanks to Wikipedia:

Eastern white pine is a powerful species.  In mature forests, it is typically the largest tree that might be found, and often towers well above other species around it.  This tree can very easily grow to be more than forty meters tall (130 feet), and some historical specimens were reported to exceed sixty meters.  Even forty meters is very tall for the east coast!  There are a number of old eastern whites on our Charles Clark Forest Reserve property in Nova Scotia, and I'm going to try to get an accurate measurement of their height soon.  Thanks to the use of drone technology, it will be very quick and easy to get a measurement that should be accurate to within one meter.  A few of these old giants were blown down several years ago by Hurricane Juan, but a number of them survived and still thrive today.  Thankfully, they recently survived the impact of Hurricane Dorian too.

Although height is everyone's favorite metric when it comes to talking about big trees, let's not forget about DBH, which stands for "diameter at breast height."  A mature eastern white can measure between 1.0 and 1.5 meters across (that's about three to five feet, for our American followers).  Stand beside one, or try to wrap your arms around it, and you'll be humbled. What's even more impressive about this species is its lifespan.  Mature trees often live 200-250 years, and can sometimes live for more than four centuries.  Some native Americans referred to this type of tree as the "Tree of Peace," and Henry David Thoreau remarked, "There is no finer tree."

There's a great historical story about eastern white pines.  In the 1700's, these trees were often used as masts for ships.  Government representatives (early day timber cruisers) would search for the best specimens in the forests and etch a special mark (a broad arrow) into the bark of the tree.  These trees were then designated as property of the crown, and anyone who cut one down (and got caught doing so) was ostensibly given a fine for "stealing" the tree.  This lead to a backlash in the American colonies that was arguably even more significant than the tea tax or the Stamp Act, and eventually led to the Pine Tree Riot of 1772.  This incident was significant in the lead-up to the American Revolution.  You can learn more about the Pine Tree Riot at this wiki link:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Tree_Riot

The eastern white pine is the provincial tree of Ontario.  Despite its majesty, it doesn't always grow symmetrically.  If growing in an area exposed to heavy winds, the tree will often have very short branches on the side exposed most chronically to the wind, and large drooping branches on the leeward side of the trunk.  This happens to other species too, but eastern white is probably more noted for it because these trees tower above other species, so this characteristic is more common in eastern whites.  Many of you probably know of Tom Thomson's famous painting, called "The Jack Pine."  You may not know that his first famous Canadian outdoor painting, entitled, "Byng Inlet, Georgian Bay," features three eastern white pine trees.  I won't post the image here due to potential copyright issues, but you can find it easily with a google search.

When young eastern white pines are growing, they can survive in any kind of soil, although they generally prefer sandy soils.  However, they're versatile, and can still survive in moist receiving zones.  They grow best when exposed to significant amounts of sunlight, but they're also very shade tolerant when young.  This lets seedlings become established as juvenile trees in understory plantations.  For this reason, eastern white pine seedlings do best when planted in open ground or in mature canopies with some open space (two extremes), but generally don't do well when planted in dense young stands with thick juvenile brush.

Different pine species tend to have different numbers of needles in their clusters, consistent to each species.  Some pines are two-needle, some are three-needle, and some are five-needle.  The eastern white, like most other white pines around the world, is a five-needle pine.  These needles grow to be as long as fifteen centimeters on mature trees, and stay on the tree for between one and four years before they fall off and are replaced with new growth.

For those of you who are more intimately familiar with forestry and arboriculture, two of the main diseases that hit eastern whites are Amillaria root rot and white pine blister rust.  The biggest insect pest that causes problems for this species is the white pine weevil.  The white pine weevil attacks eastern white pine in eastern North America, but tends to target spruce trees in western North America.

Here's a photo of one of the large eastern white pines on our Charles Clark Forest Reserve project in Nova Scotia.  It towers above the surrounding canopy!  Thankfully, Hurricane Dorian didn't blow it over.

Now you know a lot about one of our favorite tree species.  We'll leave you with this photo of some of the thousands of eastern white pine seedlings that we planted in 2019!  They're a very important part of our species mix when we're building our community forests and creating forest reserves for carbon capture.  You can learn more by going to our website and looking at our progress report page.

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.