Plant Talk

Why Good Trees Fall Down....Stripe Bark Maple Dies at the Miller Botanical Garden

"Even great gardeners can make mistakes in the beginning," says Richie Steffen, Curator at the Elisabeth Miller Botanical Garden in Shoreline. The crew there is cleaning up a downed Stripe bark maple this week, a once beautiful tree that succumbed after 40 years to its badly girdled root ball.
 
The old Acer grosseri var. hersii fell over unexpectedly, although Steffen had noticed the tree seemed to be declining.  But he had no idea  the roots were rotted away. It's a reminder to loosen and spread roots of any containerized tree you plant, or they'll just continue to circle in on themselves and not plunge more deeply and widely into the soil so the tree can support itself as it grows. 

This stripe bark maple lived nearly 40 years before being downed by rot and roots - it fell across the alpine staircase in the lower garden...

Miraculously, the tree didn't take any other shrubs or trees with it - look at that lucky conifer still standing between the branches/trunks...

Once the base of the trunk was cleared out ¾ of the roots had rotted away only leaving a few fat girdling roots to hold it up.

Torch Tree

My neighbor's maple tree in Langley, still holding on to its flame-red leaves, is a destination, maybe almost a pilgrimage, this time of year. I shot a photo of this statuesque beauty and sent it off to tree guru Arthur Lee Jacobson for identification. The leaves are large and deeply lobed, the tree has a pyramidal shape, and I have to admit it's not particularly noticeable until late October when it's fabulously warm and bright autumn color is a magnet.

Jacobson tells me it's the appropriately named scarlet maple, or Acer rubrum. His wonderful guidebook Trees of Seattle, which I refer to at least once a week and probably more often, says it's a good large shade tree and tolerates moist, even swampy, soil. If you're up for a tree expedition, check out the cultivar 'Red Sunset' used as a street tree along Fremont Ave. N from N. 34th to N. 50th streets, or a big old specimen east of the wading pool in Volunteer Park.

Or drive along Park Avenue in Langley and soak up the glow still emanating from this torch of a tree...for a few days longer, anyway....

Sugar Maple Magic

Want to keep the fall color going as long as possible? Even after last weekend's wind and rain, sugar maples (Acer saccharum) are hanging onto their glorious multi-hot-hued leaves. Giinkgoes, redbuds and silk trees, all known for late fall color, were mostly de-nuded by Friday night's strong winds. But the sugar maples are still burning brightly, as evidenced by these photos taken at Greenlake by my friend Lauralee Smith, who was prescient enough to bring her camera to the lake early in the morning to get these gorgeous shots just as the sun rose enough to shine on the row of sugar maples she calls "the painbrushes". 

A few leaves have fallen into Greenlake already....to be followed by many more in the next week or so....