Turning Points

Post Oak

Jeff — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:42:47 +0000

This one was easy for me to initially identify – I knew it was an oak. But which one? There are 7 different oak species in southwestern Virginia. Using my plant identification guide, I was able to identify this one as the post oak (quercus stellata). This tree typically grows on rocky or sandy ridges and dry woodlands – a change from the habitat of the other species that I have found so far. Post oak is said to be intolerant of shade so the specimen shown here is growing in less than optimal conditions.

Post oak is a valuable source of wildlife food. The acorns are an important part of the diet of turkey, deer, and squirrels, of course. The leaves are used for nest building by birds, squirrels, and raccoons while cavities in the tree provide dens for birds and small mammals. Human uses include railroad ties, construction and mine timbers, flooring, fenceposts, veneer, and stair risers and treads. I wasn’t able to find whether there are any folk medicines derived from any portion of the post oak, though I wouldn’t doubt that there are some.

Hawthorn

Jeff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:21:16 +0000

The hawthorn (crataegus spp. L.) family, I discovered, is a large group of shrubs and small trees that are nearly impossible to identify as separate species. Wikipedia says that “a reasonable number is 200 species” but “some botanists in the past recognised a thousand or more species”. When I read that, I gave up trying to figure out which species the one I found on my property belongs to! I just knew it was a hawthorn because of the long sharp thorns on it. You can barely see the thorn near the upper center edge of this photograph:

Another giveaway that it was a hawthorn shrub was the trunk of the tree, seen in this photograph. You can also see a couple more thorns on the twig at the center top:

The fruit of the hawthorn remains on the tree throughout the winter and is a critical source of food for wildlife in late winter, when food sources are scarce. The fruits are eaten by grouse, turkey, fox sparrows, and cedar waxwings. Deer, rabbits, and black bears, and raccoons also love the fruit.

As for human uses, the fruit of some species of hawthorn (the mayhaw) is used to make a very tasty jelly and the berry is said to be useful in treating high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and congestive heart failure.

White Dogwood

Jeff — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:30:42 +0000

Flowering dogwood (cornus florida), as all Virginians should know, is the state tree. Early on, I noticed numerous dogwoods on my property – they are gorgeous in the spring when they bloom! On this trip, a friend told me that his grandfather had told him that if you find a lot of dogwoods on a piece of land that it means that the soil is good for farming. I do know that my property was once a pasture and that it was abandoned sometime in the mid-1940s. A forester pointed out to me the remains of long-dead bull pines, which he said are the first trees to colonize an abandoned pasture. I was also told that my property was once the ball field for the Cannaday School baseball team – they played against teams from Check and Floyd in the 1930s. I wish that I could find some more old-timers who could tell me more about the history of my property.

Anyway, back to dogwoods – the tree is very distinctive and hard to mis-identify, at least from the bark. It has a very unusual bark that has been described as being “gray brown, dividing into small scaly blocks” (from the Virginia Department of Forestry guide to common native trees of Virginia). A perfect description, indeed! Unfortunately, the sole picture I took of the bark came out rather unfocused so I won’t post it. The leaf can be a bit confusing, if you go by the plant guides. Some guides say that the edges of the leaves are smooth or wavy while others say that the edges are finely serrated. Most say that the veins curve and parallel the edge of the leaf. At any rate, the leaf in this picture is finely serrated and is most assuredly a dogwood, because I carefully noted what kind of trunk the branch was attached to!

The Virginia Department of Forestry site has this to say about the white dogwood:

“The brown to red wood is hard, heavy, strong and very close-grained. It was once used for textile shuttles and spools and for handles and mallets, but is seldom harvested today. Although the fruits are poisonous if eaten by humans, more than 35 species of birds and many large and small mammals are known to eat them. Deer and rabbits browse the foliage and twigs. Dogwood is planted as an attractive ornamental tree.”

A fungus, dogwood anthracnose, infects the white dogwood, along with other varieties of the tree. Apparently, some populations of dogwood have adapted to the fungus, because I have a lot of healthy dogwood. But I did see several dogwoods, damaged by the construction of the driveway, which exhibited symptoms of the blight.

Cucumber Tree

Jeff — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:17:33 +0000

Shortly after buying my property, I went out to Rocky Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway and bought a copy of Trees & Shrubs of Virginia, by Gupton and Swope. While browsing through it, I noticed an entry for a “cucumber tree”. “Wow, that’s a funny name for a tree,” I thought. This trip, I found one. The cucumber tree (magnolia acuminata), can grow to a height of over 100 feet in ideal forest conditions. Obviously, this one is nowhere near that height, but if there is a small one that I can reach to take photographs of the leaves, then there must be some larger ones nearby, wouldn’t you think? I was astonished at the size of the leaf, associating large leaves with the tropics, not with Virginia. The tree gets its name from the shape and color of the fruit, which resembles a cucumber. It is also known as a blue magnolia or cucumber magnolia.

I bought my property because it is south-facing (I want to incorporate passive solar in my house design) and was told, early on, that the parcel would be drier and have less diversity than a north-facing parcel. As I identify the trees and shrubs on the property, I am continually amazed that the guides that I consult say that the trees I am finding grow best in rich, moist woodlands, typically north- or east- facing. Very interesting. It doesn’t hurt that the parcels on either side of mine are higher and thus drain into mine, but I’m also wondering if there isn’t a spring 10′ or more underground that is contributing moisture to the soil.

Spicebush

Jeff — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:47:32 +0000

Little by little, I am identifying the plants that are on my property. I took lots and lots of pictures, but when I got home and downloaded them, I found that I didn’t have a very good system for taking pictures. I often just took pictures of the leaves, instead of also taking pictures of the bark of the shrub or tree, which helps distinguish the various kinds of hickory tree, for example. Many times, too, the picture was out of focus, which limited its usability. Oh well. There is always the next trip!

I took pictures of the spicebush (lindera benzoin) back in April, when it was blooming,

and now, in the early summer, it has unripe berries on it. In the fall, the berries will turn bright red – good food for birds. The leaves are browsed by deer and the plant is also the larval food of the spicebush swallowtail butterfly (papilo troilus). I saw quite a number of swallowtail butterflies in my travels, but didn’t see them in the woods – they were out in sunny places, feeding on nectaring plants.

The spicebush berries can be used as a substitute for allspice and are often added to apple dishes for a bit of zest since they ripen at the same time. The bark of the spicebush, prepared as a decoction, was used by the early settlers to activate the immune system and expel toxins by making the imbiber sweat heavily. The indigenous peoples used the plant for treating coughs and colds and compresses made from the leaf, bark or berries was used for treating rashes.

Wingstem

Jeff — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:34:29 +0000

Ah, wingstem! A vigorous plant, indeed. Early on, in the winter, a friend pointed the plant out and told me that it was locally called “stickweed”. He said that it hadn’t been all that common when he was a kid but that now it was everywhere. It is apparently called stickweed because kids play with the dried stems in the late fall and into the early Spring. Wingstem (verbesina alternifolia) is a native Virginia plant and is a member of the aster family. It grows in sun or shade and later in the summer bears a very pretty yellow flower. For plant identification newbies, it is easily confused with the Yellow Crownbeard (verbesina occidentalis). The distinguishing feature between the two is that v. alternifolia, as the name implies, has alternating leaves, while v. occidentalis has opposite leaves. Here is a photograph of the leaf attachment of v. alternifolia:

Note also the presence of the thin membranes on the sides of the central stalk. Presumably, it is called wingstem because of these “wings”.

I have this plant over a large percentage of my property and I really can’t figure out why. I walked on neighboring properties and there is little or none, so I don’t know if this plant is identifying soil pH or minerals or what. Here, it is growing in pretty dense shade – it gets about 4′ tall under these conditions:

Here is a patch of wingstem growing in full sunlight, where it can reach heights of 8′:

This particular area is one where the Bull Hog cleared out a patch of catbrier and multiflora rose one year ago. It is apparent to me that the wingstem plants were there all along, waiting for the briars and multiflora rose to be removed, for they sprang up like mushrooms!

The root of the wingstem is perennial – the stalk dies back each winter and the tuberous root sends up a new stalk in the Spring. In this picture, you can see the remains of the old stalk from last year immediately to the left of the new stalk this year:

I engaged Jason Rutledge, a biological woodsman, to do a forestry survey of my land last Spring. He ultimately decided that there wasn’t enough marketable timber on my property to justify his time, but he did make the observation that the lack of understory trees on my property was because of heavy deer browsing. After seeing the extent of the population of wingstem on my property, I think he was mistaken. I think the lack of an understory is due to the presence of the wingstem, for it shades out any new seedlings of canopy trees. In the areas where I don’t have much or any wingstem, there are numerous seedlings of different species, but where the wingstem is, all I have are a species of bedstraw and virginia knotweed. Using an herbicide to kill the wingstem is not an option – there is too much of it. My current thinking is that I will need to manually remove patches of wingstem and allow seedlings to establish themselves in those areas. Perhaps one day I will learn more about wingstem and the conditions it thrives under. If I can learn about that, I may be able to take some counter-measures to reduce the amount of the plant that I have on my land.

Update, 7/17/2010: After spending a substantial amount of time online doing research on this plant, I finally found a comprehensive account of the plant at the Illinois Wild Flowers site:

The plant’s “preference is full sun to light shade and moist to mesic conditions. Wingstem typically grows in fertile soil that is high in organic matter. … Habitats include moist prairies, moist meadows near rivers and woodlands, woodland openings, woodland borders, floodplain forests, areas adjacent to woodland paths, thickets, savannas, partially shaded seeps, partially shaded areas along rivers, pastures, abandoned fields and roadside ditches. The plant usually doesn’t wander far from woodland areas or bodies of water. The deciduous woodlands where this plant occurs often contain moisture-loving trees as American Sycamore, American Elm, Hackberry, and Silver Maple. Wingstem competes well against other plants in both high quality and disturbed habitats. … The caterpillars of the butterfly Cholsyne nycteis (Silvery Checkerspot) and Basilodes pepita (Gold Moth) feed on the foliage. Because of the bitterness of the leaves, Wingstem isn’t consumed by deer, rabbits, and other herbivores to the same extent as many other plants.”

This description fits my property to the proverbial “t” – I have a very large American Sycamore on the property and I may have Silver Maple, Hackberry and Elm – I haven’t identified those trees yet but now that I have been tipped off that they may be there, I’ll keep an eye out for them. It appears that my strategy of clearing small areas and then planting moisture loving trees will be the best way to reduce the population of wingstem on my property. Wingstem accurately maps the moist and mesic areas of my property – the drier areas do not support the plant. Very interesting. I would hazard a guess that the area of my property that some friends speculate are the remnants of the ancient Little River riverbed are too dry and too well-drained to support a population of Wingstem.

Virginia Knotweed

Jeff — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:33:41 +0000

When Fred First identified this plant as Virginia knotweed, I feared that it was related to the invasive exotic, Japanese knotweed. While both are in the same family (polygonaceae), Virginia knotweed is in the genus persicaria while Japanese knotweed is in the genus fallopia. Whew!! The plant is also known as Jumpseed, because the seeds stick on the stem into the fall and jump when you try to collect them. The leaves have a characteristic dark spot near the midrib and the flower stalk is very long with tiny white flowers arranged along it:

I have a lot of this plant, also, but I don’t believe that it is anywhere near the problem as the wingstem is. I observed a number of seedling trees growing amongst the jumpseed, probably because this plant doesn’t get very tall – I didn’t see any taller than about 12″. Thus, it does not shade out small seedlings and prevent them from growing as the wingstem does.

American Basswood

Jeff — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:51:09 +0000

Most of the trees on my property are really tall and I didn’t have binoculars with me to be able to see the leaves in detail. Some of the trees are very recognizable, like black cherry (prunus serotina), because of the distinctive bark and leaf. But others that I am not familiar with need to be identified by using the leaves as well as the bark. One tree that I found, an american basswood (tilia americana) was short enough that I could reach up and pull down a branch to take a picture of the leaves:

The wood is soft and light-colored (I used some in my second piece of sculpture) and the flowers produce abundant honey which commands a premium price. The inner bark was used by early settlers to make strips of material from which to weave baskets. The American Basswood is a large tree, growing as tall as 130 feet and as large as 48 inches in diameter at breast height. I’ll have to remember, next time, to take pictures of the bark of the tree to which the leaves are attached! Then I may be able to find bigger trees in my woods.

Serendipity

Jeff — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:52:01 +0000

Last year, I worked for two days on a piece that I grew unhappy with and set aside, prophetically writing in a post last year “that I was entertaining thoughts of cutting it in half and using the pieces in a different way.” I reworked the base of that piece for the base of the sculpture in my last post and I used the other piece for the sculpture featured in this post. It seems as though I fall into the same trap every year at Touchstone – the piece I completed the first year, which a friend calls the Tuning Fork, was an attempt at creating movement. It is really hard to create movement and negative space when you are working within the limits of a log that is perhaps 12″ in diameter. I found myself falling into the very same space this year, with a piece that I started working on after I had completed two sculptures but I am starting to recognize the signs on the road and am better able to stop and reassess what I am doing. At any rate, I did exactly what I had given some thought to doing last year: I cut last year’s piece in half. Since I didn’t have a tape measure, I estimated where the mid-point was and, using a very sharp saw, set to work. It turned out to be fortunate that I didn’t have a tape measure, because the resulting pieces were of unequal length, which added to their appeal. If they had been of equal length, I think that would have subtracted from the way the two pieces play off each other. Once I had cut the piece in half, I played with the volumes and found that with a little chiseling, one piece would nest closely to the other. After a bit of trial-and-error fitting (I need to find a class in joinery to take!), the piece was essentially finished:

In this photograph, you can see the small amount of chiseling that I did at the base of the piece on the right. I like the way that the knots in the two pieces relate to each other – the knot at the bottom of the piece on the right is a little bit further from the end than the knot at the top of the other piece.

I used a Sureform rasp tool last year to dress the edges of the piece and I like the way that those surfaces relate to the chiseled surfaces adjacent to them. Thad Mosley, whose work is an inspiration for me, does the majority of his work with a chisel. A few of his pieces, notably Countee’s Leaf – for Countee Cullen and Three Arcs, play with contrasting textures, but most of his pieces are about weight in space and not about contrasting textures. I’m very much influenced by Mosely, as well as Brancusi, Hepworth, and Moore, but I do like contrasting textures. Mosley also uses stone in some of his sculptures, something that I’ve not been able to explore yet. I like the idea of not only the weight, but also the colors available in stone to contrast with the warmth of wood. Ideas to explore in the future!

This shot was taken on my property in Floyd – the base is a little bit too big, but it was all that was readily at hand. I’ll have to come up with a base for this piece in the future. Stone, anyone? I have lots of good-sized pieces of quartz on the property. Now, that might be an interesting contrast!

As is the case with all sculpture, you really can’t appreciate it without seeing it “in the round” – photographs of sculpture just don’t work very well. You have to be there to walk around the piece and be able to touch the surfaces. Sculpture, in my mind, is a very tactile and visual art.

Breakthroughs

Jeff — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:17:02 +0000

This year was the fourth time I’ve attended the sculpture class at Touchstone Center for Craft in Farmington, PA. Touchstone suffered some severe damage during this past winter – heavy snow brought down the roof of the dining hall and the hall had to be demolished. At one time, 7.5 feet of snow had accumulated in the meadow in front of the dining hall and the director of the school was using snowshoes to get to work! Two of the students who were inspirations to me last year were unable to attend this year, so the class was a bit short on students. But we all had a lot of fun and I made a great deal of progress, artistically. The pieces that I left in the little-used building last year were waiting for me and I got off to a running start as a consequence. I won’t go into detail (too long) how the first sculpture that I made came into existence, other than to say that the process involved looking at some of the elements that I worked on last year and “seeing” a sculpture in them. There was a lot of creative play (isn’t all play about creativity?) involved before the sculpture started to take shape. I brought the piece on the left from Floyd last year – it turned out to be a piece of chestnut! The piece on the right is black cherry from Touchstone and the piece on the top is an unknown wood that I found in the creekbed that runs behind the painting studio, where we worked this year. The base is black cherry and was something that I worked on long and hard last year, only to severely modify it this year by cutting off the top and destroying the smooth finish that I created last year, replacing that work with rough chisel marks, which I like better. The piece is pinned together with 1/4″ steel pins kindly supplied by the blacksmith shop and is fastened to the base with 1/2″ steel pins, again, from the blacksmith shop. I wouldn’t have been able to create the sculpture without those pins! Thanks, Richard! Here is the piece in the painting studio, before it was oiled, at Touchstone:

The following series of pictures are of the finished piece. The first was taken at Touchstone and the last 5 were taken on my property in Floyd County.

If you look closely, you will see a “break” in the left piece, just below where it joins the piece with bark on it. Originally, the chestnut piece extended further to the left, but I wanted the negative space to start closing, so I cut the piece off about 12″ from the end and turned it 180 degrees. Then, I went searching for a piece to close the space in and found the ideal candidate in the creekbed. I don’t know what kind of wood it is, but it is hard and dense.

This is the “back” of the piece, if there is such a thing in sculpture! You can better see the individual pieces that are pinned together to create the sculpture.

My property is heavily wooded and this shot was taken early in the morning, before the sun got up very high.

I very much enjoyed the play of light on the surfaces of the sculpture as the day progressed. I was fascinated with the shapes that the sun created on the surfaces of the sculpture!

The possibilities of creating patterns with the chisel marks opens up new and complex ideas for the future. I let the cherry dictate how it wanted to be chiseled in this situation, but what would happen if I didn’t “listen”?

This last shot looks a little foreboding – the mass of green surrounding the sculpture seems to overwhelm it, but photographs are deceptive. Sculpture needs to be appreciated in person – photographs really don’t do it justice. I’d love to leave the sculpture outside, but the contrast of the finished surfaces with the raw power of the natural setting is one of the appealing features of the “installation”. If I left it outside, the surfaces would weather and start to blend with the natural environment, lessening the contrast that I so enjoy.

I brought some unfinished elements with me to Floyd and hope to do some work on them there before taking them with me for another session at Touchstone next year!