Oaks of My Past

A big red oak at Pittsburgh Seminary

One of my favorite trees has always been the oak. Of course, it's so common in our woods in southwest, PA. And there are so many varieties - Red Oak, Black Oak, Chestnut Oak, Bur Oak, Pin Oak and White Oak, to name a few. And it's a favorite of wildlife too, deer, bears and squirrels all rely on oaks for fall and winter sustenance. On the edge of my parent's suburban property lived two twin oaks when I was growing up. They were the only oaks "owned" by my family, but just beyond them, in the woods, were hundreds of older giants. None were so perfect as the twins on the corner of our lot where the woods began. They were the offspring of another tree, probably the oldest one in a hundred yards. That one was hollowed out at the base and up through the trunk for probably thirty feet. The dark entrance looked like a portal to an imaginary land to my six year old imagination. The hollow ran up the truck and into windows where big branches has cracked off years before, making for perfect nesting spots for owls, squirrels and whoever else could claim those dark caverns. For a long time that old tree marked the entrance to the deep woods where the canopy was thick and houses could barely be seen. That old tree was lucky when the bulldozers came in and flattened the hundred or so acres behind our house when I was about ten. It was the last standing tree on the edge of the thin strip of woods between our old house and the new ones being built. Today it's remnants lay on the forest floor barely noticeable for what it once was.

The Forest Garden Under the Oaks

The twins in our back yard were the biggest and healthiest trees around. They were still young, in their prime and getting taller every year. They were only a foot apart and each trunk was near three feet in diameter. Surely the roots intertwined, sharing information about disease, soil health, insect pressure. Those intertwining roots and the beneficial fungi made them strong for over a century, but would also be their demise. In the 1980's, when they were about 80 years old, they hadn't reached their maximum height. But a decade or so later they became an ever increasing source of shade for my mom's vegetable patch. As they grew her garden moved from once side of the yard to the other. Still the garden got bigger and more diverse. Under the oaks' canopy where her garden once was soon became the spot for the chicken coop and soon after the chicken hotel and now probably more of a chicken mansion. My mom loves raising chickens!

Part of Mom and Dad's Forest Garden (annual veggies, cold frames, apple trees)

Last year, mid-summer, something happened to the trees. I didn't know enough to recognize why the leaves all began looking pale and thin. Ceratocystis fagacearum had infected the wood of the trees and was rotting the cambium layer from the inside out. Insects could easily enter the bark and eat the living layer of wood even as the trees attempted to survive. Their intertwined roots shared everything, even the fungus that would kill them both. Last spring it was obvious they were both dead. Those trees were a constant companion to my parents' permaculture forest garden for over forty years. And before that they'd stood for eighty years. They had begun their lives seventy years before our house, or any houses in the area, were ever built. They were lucky just like the big hollow tree a stones throw away, when the bulldozers left them alone on the edge of the clearing for new suburban houses.

The wood inside the tree is perfect. So straight with no rot or injury. The trees were cut down and left on the edge of the property for my dad and I to split for firewood. There's so much it'll heat my house for years to come. We don't use natural gas anymore. While wood isn't the long term answer for getting us all off fossil fuels, it serves me quite well as a biogenic source of heat. The carbon cycle of a tree can be measured in decades, while the carbon cycle for fossil fuels is measured in hundreds of millions of years. For the past ten years I've used wood to heat our house, reducing our carbon footprint and our reliance on fossil fuels. I almost always use wood from dead falls around the city, scrap wood from my friend's saw mill business or small invasive Siberian Elms

Lots of Work to be Done

from Garfield Farm. Never have a burned a tree that I lived with for so many years, a tree that set the backdrop for all of my childhood fun in my backyard, trees that seemed the perfect specimen of their species - tall, straight grained and broad. Now, a tiny portion of them, probably around a thousand pounds, sit next to my sore body as I write this in my living room. Three logs in the fire warming me.