Fall Tree hugger Post: Early rains fill our creeks

The Japanese maples in town have been spectacular, but we have to mix up our tree hugger species a bit each year.  The early rains have the seven creeks of B'game flowing nicely and the cloudy, rainy days this past week made our gingkoes stand out even more.  Here's a couple on Bayswater and the daylight portion of the creek at Heritage Park that runs through downtown.  We're lucky the rains cleared for Thanksgiving.  Hope you all have a good one.

Comments

[HMB]

I'd like to recommend a delightful book for the tree lovers out there: "The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession" by Amy Stewart, who also did the charming illustrations. I heard about this book from one of its featured collectors, for whom I've done some research for the Trees of Stanford website (https://trees.stanford.edu/).
Thanks for the image of the ginkgo -- such luminous fall color! I once had the magical experience of standing near several ginkgo trees when they began their leaf fall -- it started like a rain shower, just a few leaves dropping, and then they began falling like a golden rain until the trees were bare. Truly wondrous to behold!

[Jennifer Pfaff]

We live on Bayswater (further down from said photo), and the "themed block" of gingkos is a wonder to behold this time of year. Yellow paradise of thousands of fan-shaped leaves; the show is mostly over within about 3 weeks.

If you look carefully, you can see the gingkos under the wires have been altered or "truncated" (not sure that's the right term) from their natural shape of having singular leader, to a forked trunk so that branches go around the utility wires as they grow.

There are a few examples thereof on the wireless, northside of the street where the natural upright form is visible. In that shape, they can reach impressive heights. There is one in GGP in the Botanical Gardens in the upright form that is enormous. Gingkos have been around on the planet so long, there are even fossils of their leaves.

We don't have too many left with the prized, albeit stinky fruit, but the males can convert to female. Unbelievable, but true, we've seen it. That must be how the species saves itself from extinction:) Unfortunately we haven't seen the collectors of the fruits on their ladders for many years, which is too bad.

[Joe]

Here is the blurb on the book HMB recommends:

Fifty vignettes of remarkable people whose lives have been transformed by their obsessive passion for trees-written and charmingly illustrated by the New York Times bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist. When Amy Stewart discovered a community of tree collectors, she expected to meet horticultural fanatics driven to plant every species of oak or maple. But she also discovered that the urge to collect trees springs from something deeper and more profound: a longing for community, a vision for the future, or a path to healing and reconciliation.

In this slyly humorous, informative, often poignant volume, Stewart brings us captivating stories of people who spend their lives in pursuit of rare and wonderful trees and are transformed in the process. Vivian Keh has forged a connection to her Korean elders through her persimmon orchard. The former poet laureate W. S. Merwin planted a tree almost every day for more than three decades, until he had turned a barren estate into a palm sanctuary. And Joe Hamilton cultivates pines on land passed down to him by his once-enslaved great-grandfather, building a legacy for the future.

Stewart populates this lively compendium with her own hand-drawn watercolor portraits of these extraordinary people and their trees, interspersed with side trips to investigate famous tree collections, arboreal glossaries, and even tips for unauthorized forestry. This book is a stunning tribute to a devoted group of nature lovers making their lives-and the world-more beautiful, one tree at a time.