To Me, Pignut Hickory

 

My wife and I took out a rake and a broom and went up the driveway to all the branches on the drive way.  Immediately we had different ideas.  I ranked the twigs and the leaves into the yard.  She wanted it all carted into a wheel barrow.  Ah, I suggested the twigs would all be ground up the next time the lawn was mowed and this wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

 

An oak up the way had dropped a few branches and I got lost it trying to identify it.  I am hoping to find an oak species somewhere on the property that I haven’t seen around yet.  Out on the trail I’d found a “scarlet oak” with an evocative name that had me thinking of what the leaves must look like in the fall to generate such a name. 

 

I saw one golden leaf, long removed and then some green leaves from the same tree.  They looked like large aspen leaves and looked up into the tree tops trying to find the tree they fell from.  It was much harder than I anticipated.  Many of the trees were bound with poison ivy vines and their deciduous like toxic three-leaved pattern.  Eventually I saw the tall tree with the spade-like leaves and after a lot of angling managed to make the app tell me that this was an Eastern Cottonwood.  I wondered if someone thought to plant this tree or if the giant, which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the neighborhood, despite some methodical searching had just sprouted there, au natural. 

 

At the top of he driveway I found another twig of dead leaves.  This time I labored in vain to find the tree it fell from.  Nothing quite matched.  I wanted to know as it had a marvelous name, new to me, “Pignut Hickory.”  Walking back down I spied another tree that I didn’t recognize which turned out to be a “Small-leaved Lime.  The pictures of it on line make it look grand. 

 

In the afternoon, my stepdad and my mom visited.  The prior and I were out walking around looking at trees.  I showed him that we have five different oaks, all right there in the front yard.  No scarlet oak though, until, miraculously, a tree that has grown up near the shed and which we would certainly have otherwise torn down, turned out to be one of these Scarlet Oaks. I’m curious to see what it looks like in the fall and from whence the name comes.  

 

 

 

Wednesday 08/05/20