Everything went downhill from there.
The friendly people at the Parks Department placed two signs in the park that outline the Hickman Treewalk with locations and names of the trees.
A small line at the bottom of the sign indicates that they updated the walk in 2012. Super duper. Only, our brochures had been printed in 2000. The two didn't match. The trees were supposed to be marked with plaques indicating their number and name, but not all of the alleged trees on the walk had plaques and some of them didn't match the 2012 sign. In fact, one tree was marked with two plaques and two different numbers.
Undaunted, we pressed forward. Here's a picture of me, the intrepid tree hunter, deep in the wilds of Carle Park:
Since I didn't hope to study every one of Hickman's trees this first trip, I chose to focus on a couple unusual trees and begin my study of the local Conifers. Also known as Gymnosperms (which is Greek for naked seeds... that's right, what the Greeks called a gymnasium was a place to get naked, don't get me started on gymnastics).
I've described in more than one post the alarming size of the trees in this part of the country. In case you didn't believe me, I took a picture of Aine next to a Sugar Maple (the tree from which we get maple syrup) for comparison. Behold:
When learning the indigenous conifers of an area, one must first learn to distinguish between a pine, a fir, and a spruce. Here's an easy guide to telling them apart by their needles. You can print this and put it in your back pocket for future reference:
We had an Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) growing behind our slumlord-owned former home on Church Street (Also, a Sugar Maple, which I mistakenly named a Sugar Elm. There's no such thing as a Sugar Elm. Forgive me.). Back before cars and airplanes, people used ships. The British and, later, the American navies used whole White Pine trees as masts. The USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) originally had White Pine masts. You can also eat these things. The seeds are tasty (pine nuts), the needles have more Vitamin C than lemons, and you can grind the wood into flour for baking. The Iroquois called the Algonquian the Adirondack, a name which means Tree Eaters.
Carle Park had three Norway Spruces (Picea abies), but they all looked a little sickly. Get this: scientists say a Norway Spruce in Sweden is one of the world's oldest living clones, coming in at about ten thousand years old. What is this clone nonsense, James? Very well. Some trees have extensive root systems that send up new shoots from the soil. Also known as suckers. So, an individual tree only lives for around six hundred years, but the root system can survive for thousands and grow multiple suckers. With aspens, you can have entire stands of trees that are all one plant. So, to be fair, we should call the one in Sweden the World's Oldest Sucker. The Norway Spruce in Carle Park had the unique privilege of bearing two plaques: #35 from the 2000 Walk and #33 from the 2012 Walk.
Then we stumbled upon a random statue of a panther. Aine gathered photographic evidence:
While the knowledgeable folks at the Urbana Parks department allege that all the Hickman trees are indigenous to Illinois, the indigenosity of this next tree is dubious at best. A Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) is the shrimp of the Redwood family (see also Sequoia, see also Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock), measuring up to an embarrassingly meager 200 ft. fully grown (or almost three times the size of the Sugar Maple pictured above).
We couldn't find any more marked conifers, but we wanted to photograph two unusual trees. The Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), according to the fossil record, lived 270 million years ago (which makes them older than alligators but not as old as sharks). Extract from the unusually shaped leaves helps improve memory. Also, the seeds smell like vomit.
And we got a picture of a Horsechestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) with Ainers doing something next to it. Don't ask me what. If you're ever lost in the woods and are ready to give up, eat some Horsechestnut seeds: they're totally poisonous. I thought the leaves looked really cool, though (note, the entire bunch of seven is considered one leaf).
Then we made it to the car just before it started to rain.
Undaunted, we pressed forward. Here's a picture of me, the intrepid tree hunter, deep in the wilds of Carle Park:
Since I didn't hope to study every one of Hickman's trees this first trip, I chose to focus on a couple unusual trees and begin my study of the local Conifers. Also known as Gymnosperms (which is Greek for naked seeds... that's right, what the Greeks called a gymnasium was a place to get naked, don't get me started on gymnastics).
I've described in more than one post the alarming size of the trees in this part of the country. In case you didn't believe me, I took a picture of Aine next to a Sugar Maple (the tree from which we get maple syrup) for comparison. Behold:
When learning the indigenous conifers of an area, one must first learn to distinguish between a pine, a fir, and a spruce. Here's an easy guide to telling them apart by their needles. You can print this and put it in your back pocket for future reference:
- Pine Needles: round, attached in clusters.
- Spruce Needles: square, attached individually.
- Fir Needles: flat, attached individually.
We had an Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) growing behind our slumlord-owned former home on Church Street (Also, a Sugar Maple, which I mistakenly named a Sugar Elm. There's no such thing as a Sugar Elm. Forgive me.). Back before cars and airplanes, people used ships. The British and, later, the American navies used whole White Pine trees as masts. The USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) originally had White Pine masts. You can also eat these things. The seeds are tasty (pine nuts), the needles have more Vitamin C than lemons, and you can grind the wood into flour for baking. The Iroquois called the Algonquian the Adirondack, a name which means Tree Eaters.
Carle Park had three Norway Spruces (Picea abies), but they all looked a little sickly. Get this: scientists say a Norway Spruce in Sweden is one of the world's oldest living clones, coming in at about ten thousand years old. What is this clone nonsense, James? Very well. Some trees have extensive root systems that send up new shoots from the soil. Also known as suckers. So, an individual tree only lives for around six hundred years, but the root system can survive for thousands and grow multiple suckers. With aspens, you can have entire stands of trees that are all one plant. So, to be fair, we should call the one in Sweden the World's Oldest Sucker. The Norway Spruce in Carle Park had the unique privilege of bearing two plaques: #35 from the 2000 Walk and #33 from the 2012 Walk.
Then we stumbled upon a random statue of a panther. Aine gathered photographic evidence:
While the knowledgeable folks at the Urbana Parks department allege that all the Hickman trees are indigenous to Illinois, the indigenosity of this next tree is dubious at best. A Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) is the shrimp of the Redwood family (see also Sequoia, see also Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock), measuring up to an embarrassingly meager 200 ft. fully grown (or almost three times the size of the Sugar Maple pictured above).
We couldn't find any more marked conifers, but we wanted to photograph two unusual trees. The Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), according to the fossil record, lived 270 million years ago (which makes them older than alligators but not as old as sharks). Extract from the unusually shaped leaves helps improve memory. Also, the seeds smell like vomit.
And we got a picture of a Horsechestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) with Ainers doing something next to it. Don't ask me what. If you're ever lost in the woods and are ready to give up, eat some Horsechestnut seeds: they're totally poisonous. I thought the leaves looked really cool, though (note, the entire bunch of seven is considered one leaf).
Then we made it to the car just before it started to rain.
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