Big leaf maple fall7/24/2023 Tanner picked up the leaf and brought it to his face, a mask that engulfed his not insubstantial noggin. And yet this felt like any old forest, logged over and regrowing, like the ones we’d both grown up with in our respective home states of Washington and Oregon. Months later we’d learn that the first potential wolf pack West of the Cascade crest in nearly a century was somewhere up this valley. My housemate Tanner and I were standing above Diobsud Creek, which flowed out of the Noisy-Diobsud Wilderness. Bigleaf maples are certainly in this category. However, these monikers seem ridiculous when other names are so apt that you never think twice about them. I don’t blame scientists for this name there is an orange crown and Greenish-grayish-yellow Warbler lacks a certain style. An unashamed fellow in the birdbath, his bill spread slack with rapture, finally spread his head feathers and we had a glimpse of the namesake. It took several tries this spring for me to show Caitlin the orange of an Orange-crowned Warbler. This may aid identification if you’re holding it dead in your hand, or examined under a microscope. Sometimes when an organism is named, it’s for a discrete feature. I’ve spent half of my spring days prancing about their limbs, photographing their changes, bursting with joyful spouts about “bursting buds” and “unfurling racemes,” and “listen, there’s a Black-throated Gray Warbler up there!” She’s tolerant, sometimes even inviting of my jabbering, but I may have found her limit with the endless talk of maples. My partner through this stay home, stay healthy order knew without a doubt what tree I aimed to tackle next. With all the shade they create, bigleaf maples hold their own against the tide of conifers, firm resistance against newcomers, gripping strong to boulder fields and deep river valleys alike.Īs with red alders, I need only lift my eyes out the window to alight on a bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum, quite literally the “maple with large leaves.” Since we moved to Vashon Island, I’ve been peeking at a specific tree that fills one of our windows, anticipating every perceivable change through the long dark gray into the sunshine. They are cool islands of moss, layered canopies of lime green halflight. Maybe not as a specific species, but certainly as shelter. If you have spent time along the Pacific coast of North America, you’d probably recognize bigleaf maples. Where have you sought respite to eat your lunch or read a book? We’ve nearly all done this at one point or another, spread out in cool grass beneath a shade tree. Seventy feet up in the canopy of a bigleaf maple.Ĭast your imagination to a hot afternoon. This tree was the maple of my mind’s eye, the archetypal tree with a spreading crown and cool shade. Something felt different about the licorice fern frilled branches of one particular giant on the southern boundary of Discovery Park in Seattle. How many times have you stopped to gaze at one individual tree? I’ve lost track of the trees I’ve admired over and over, or I was never counting to begin with. But that is far from the reason I chose bigleaf maples. What comes after? Well, by design or chance I chose the next tree in the standard understanding of forest succession. I offered up experiences with the red alder, those ever-cycling nutrient bombs, the first wave. Last week I laid out a plan to pontificate on Pacific Northwest trees, a storied appreciation of the most prominent of plants.
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