Today we continued normal cleanup operations in the Arboretum. This customarily involves cleaning up the paths, picking up fallen limbs, moving gravel around, and today a special task: cutting down some trees and removing stumps.
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First, a water leak in the arboretum, down the slope from Mickle Hall, required a lot of dirt work. This area is in shambles, but there is really no alternative. Our native clay can be quite an adversary. Don't try to walk through this area; just go around.
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Onto the main tasks.... Here is a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) stump, which you can see on an earlier blogpost here. In that post we said "Now all that remains is a two-foot stump which will be removed at a later date." That day has arrived.
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Resprouting, this tree is still alive. This photo was taken after all of the new growth was trimmed.
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Afterwards, we have a more-or-less flat area that will not be a tripping hazard. The roots were not removed, which means that we have not yet seen the end of sweetgum shoots.
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Next we have a highly suspect pawpaw (Asimina triloba), which you can read more about on an earlier blog post, here. This tree has had a broken crown for nearly a decade, which may have led to some health problems. Recently it has taken a turn for the worst, so now we must make an assessment. Before we cut the tree down, let's inspect the specimen to determine its condition.
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The bare pawpaw trunk is pictured center. Louisiana palmettos and titi shrubs are in the background.
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This image becomes more unsettling the longer you look at it. Here you can see fungal pink slime oozing from the bark and forming bubbles. What on earth is this?
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This rotten branch nub was characteristic of the whole tree.
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Scoring thin bark will often reveal healthy green cambium underneath. Scoring this pawpaw revealed dead tissue and only excited the ants and other bugs crawling across it. Snapping a few twigs, which should have been green and springy, verified that this tree is completely dead. Cutting it down released a horrendous mushroom-like smell.
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All gone, and only a few blog posts to tell the tale.
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This cross section reveals a rotten tree. It may not be immediately obvious from this photo, but the inner rings of the tree were sickly green and oozed.
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The lower feet of the trunk served as a nursery for untold billions of fungal spores and the entire surface of the bark had turned green. The white specks were tubular filaments rising off the surface of the bark and ending in a nodule.
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Finally, this undesirable specimen is a hybrid of Morus rubra, the red mulberry, and an Asian species. Since we want to preserve native species, we will remove this one as we have removed other white-berried and black-berried mulberries in the arboretum.
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We see leaves of the characteristically variable Morus genus.
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Our mulberry hybrid was dissassembled.
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This area is already a major tripping hazard due to holes and uneven ground, so we've sawed the stump down as low as possible. Cutting around soil will quickly dull your chainsaw blade, but there's no helping it.
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Autumn is a great time of the year for these kinds of clean-up operations. Look around and you'll find plenty of work to do!
