Walking through the woods after a storm, I was checking the ground.
Earlier in the spring, you would see lovely tulip-tree blossoms, which are apple green, yellow and orange. They’re mostly gone.
You always see pine straw. “Evergreen” is a bit misleading. Pines shed year-round. Falling needles get stuck in the canopy and then come down in bales during a storm.
I walked through dozens of downed limbs off boxelders. By contrast, it’s shocking to see a broken limb off a magnolia. It made me wonder if the boxelder, a member of the maple family, is the most brittle tree in the forest.
Foresters say the general rule is that the faster a tree grows the weaker it is. Acer negundo is fast growing, so the wood is light and weak. You can get a rough idea of the strength of a tree by looking at a forester’s chart showing the weight of a cubic foot of a log.
Boxelder isn’t really a forester’s idea of a tree, so it wasn’t on the chart. But maples were generally around 45 pounds per cubic foot. By comparison:
• Red spruce, 34.
• White pine, 36.
• Magnolia, 59.
• Live oak, 76.
My hypothesis that boxelders are the most brittle is not looking good. The possibilities for observer error are myriad.
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