Photo courtesy of Western Carolina University Southern Appalachian Digital Collections
A small poplar seedling; A forester or Ranger indicating toward a poplar seedling on the forest floor.
I’m always amazed by the amount of tree seedlings I find this time of the year when I clean out my garden beds. I most often find oak, maple, and pine seedlings.
It’s easy to see how the oak and maple plant themselves.
In the fall of the year acorns fall directly into many of our garden areas. And in spring of the year the maples surrounding our house send down showers of helicopter like seeds.
As I pull up the seedlings I always think about what would happen if I didn’t pull them up. Eventually the trees would grow right up close to the house like they were trying to erase us. I suppose that is their very nature. To take back the land we’ve hewn out of the mountainside so that they can propagate their descendants.
Using the word eventually makes it sound like it would take a long time for nature to take over our progress, but in reality it wouldn’t take that long at all.
Every year I’m amazed and awed by the jungle of growth that happens during one growing season here in the southern mountains of Appalachia. If I didn’t have a front row seat for the annual show I would have a hard time believing it.
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It’s the same here. Every year we fight the growth of tree seedlings and briars. Saw briars in particular. It seems they want to take over the world.. well at least in our neck of the woods. Persimmon and mimosa seedlings are the bane of our existence. Birds and animals drop the seeds and they come up all over. To as lesser degree we have maple and pine tree seedlings to deal with also.
Right now I’m worried as I am every spring. Our farm is surrounded by timber company pine tree plantation. Every year their planes spray some sort of poison to control deciduous undergrowth. The planes make huge circles around and across our land. We’re always afraid the spray will drift or could accidentally be sprayed onto our planted crops. It has happened a time or two where we lost planted crops or fruit trees. Also we know the spray gets in the creeks and springs we use for our back up water supply. The main spring we use has been dug out, curbed and is covered, but I can’t help but think the spray gets into the creek, soaks into the ground and ultimately into our spring water supply. We have a Berkey water filter for our drinking water, and a whole house filter on the incoming pipe for this very reason. Just this past weekend we had terrible storms that knocked out the deep well pump. It was replaced yesterday by our son, hubby, and grandson. In the meantime we had to use the spring. So glad the spraying didn’t start until this morning. We were blessed in how fast the pump could be replaced since it had to be ordered. It was delivered in one day. The order said it wouldn’t come until this Friday. An answer to prayer. The Lord is so good to us.
When I moved to Iowa, I had the helicopter seeds everywhere. They were fascinating to me because I had never seen them growing up in San Diego. My parent’s yards had only pine trees and another tree with spikes on the ball seeds (Tipper, you have talked about them before on this blog, but for the life of me, I am drawing a blank on that tree’s name right this minute – gum something maybe ??). When I moved to Iowa, it was like moving to a whole different planet for me – peonies, lilacs, sugar maple trees, thunderstorms, snow, four seasons, seeing the northern lights occasionally, and big old harvest moons. I was in awe of everything new there! This Southern California city girl was in love with being outdoors every chance I got! It is amazing how fast the little trees grow all over your yard from the wind blown helicopter seeds! And those little sprouts are hard to pull up if they get even a tad established. Even though I live on the edge of town, about a block from the woods, I have just one medium size tree in my yard here in North Carolina. There use to be a towering tree that had been here for probably a hundred years. The year before I bought the house, a bolt of lightening demolished that big, old tree. The guy that mows my lawn fights the large bowl shaped dip in the yard where the tree use to be every time he mows. I don’t have the heart to fill it in as rabbits use the remaining tree roots for their babies every year.
Donna. : )
Hey Donna, I think you are talking about the tree called “Sweet Gum” by most people in Appalachia. There are six varieties and some are used for furniture and cabinet making, others are used for a medicine called “Tamiflu.” We used different colors of metallic paint to spray the gum balls to make Christmas decorations. Hope this helped, God bless.
Hi Kevin! Yes! Once you said the name, I knew that was it! Thank you!! When my Mom decided she was tired of picking up all those seed balls under the tree each year, she had it removed from the yard. Before it was, I gathered a huge bowl of those seeds. I wonder if I am the only person to use a bowl of Sweet Gum spikey seeds as a center piece on a table?!
Donna. : )
When I first move here there was a hay field bordering my property to the west. I made my garden out beside it so that it could get full sun for most of the day. Well, eventually the old farmer who owned the hayfield died and his heirs wanting no part of farming and stopped cutting the hay. It grew up into a thicket of nothing but briars and pine trees. Every year those pines would grow two or three feet taller, eating away at my share of sunlight. Now they are forty feet tall and completely block the sunlight after 4:00 PM.
It seems that pines that self seed into an open area, so close together, that nothing else can grow. They grow fast and so close that they support each other and never establish much of a root system. They grow long and spindly ever reaching toward the sun. Their limbs overlap their neighbors’. Their shallow roots grow interlaced with each other. None of them is capable of standing on their own. They are each dependent on the whole for their support.
Then comes a heavy wet snow or an extraordinary wind. The weakest one falls. The next one is exposed so becomes the weakest one and down it goes. Like dominos they go, one after the other until there is none standing tall and straight. All that is left is a twisted tangled mass of useless tops and trunks.
It’s not the fault of the pines. They have their place in nature but once established in an unnatural place they don’t know how to act. Kinda like people, don’t you think?
I agree with Randy. I have seen pine seedlings growing in cracked asphalt down the side of a street here in town. Also, there is a house not far from here that the owners have not kept up and there are rain gutters on the house full of pine straw and the seedlings are growing in the gutters. These folks are more than able to get out and clean them but just don’t care. It’s a sight to see but sad also.
When so many men went to war in WW11 and didn’t return fields became overgrown. My Dad cleared many fields for neighbors in exchange for growing a crop there. Some allowed him to plant and harvest 2-3 years until their sons were old enough to take over the task. As a teenager I cleared several in the Summers for 35 – 50 cents an hour so pastures could be sown or crops could be planted and harvested. Some of those are woodlands again now.
We have pine trees and them Gum ball trees that reseed themselves in our yard. We are constantly pulling up little sapling, at least that’s what we call them. We don’t mind the pines so much, but them gum ball trees are the worse. You can’t go barefooted out side and even if you wear shoes them little hard balls can trip you up and almost fall. I remember Tipper you collected yours to make Christmas ornaments out of them gum balls. I thought about it for a minute but then thought I’d rather have the tree cut down, but it’s not on our property, so we can’t. At least we can prevent other saplings from growing and I’m okay with that.
I am heartsick. Two gorgeous redbud trees I planted 19 years ago (the first spring we were in our home) got badly damaged by the horrible ice and then exceedingly heavy snow storms we got a few weeks back. One of the redbuds was completely laid over – no saving it. The other may be able to be saved, but she lost so many limbs. We also lost a blooming crabapple and two of our serviceberries. It was so bad that a tall (30 ft) cedar was laid completely over, as well.
The only thing that gives me hope for my beautiful flowering trees is that the redbuds managed to throw off enough seeds that I’m finding seedlings around the yard which I can dig up and move to spaces now bare from the loss. On the other hand, I have more rose of sharon seedlings than I could possibly ever use. I keep giving those away because I hate to pull them up without knowing they can be appreciated somewhere.
Tipper, here in my area we have to plant trees after building our homes. I’m always surprised when I visit your area and see trees being removed to build. ❤️
Several years ago, there was a program on earth without man and it showed how fast nature would heal the earth. Even skyscrapers would fall apart without the constant maintenance that is required. Chernobyl area is another example where without human intervention, life goes on and that is with significant radiation.
I transplant 20 or so black walnut trees every year from garden and flower beds. I learned to keep a close eye on them as the squirrels love to dig them out of my pots for the easy nut still on the end of the seedling
Tipper, sometimes it’s uncanny how your thoughts are like my thoughts. I too have stared at little seedlings of the oak, maple, poplar, pine, scrub hickory knowing they had to be stopped and at the same time thinking about what if I didn’t and they just took over. I find myself wondering about daffodils on roadsides and if there once stood a home nearby. Surely within a decade tree seedlings close to the house would breach the foundation and encroach upon the structure itself in quick time- nature tree time. I hope the garden is perking right along and the chickens are laying well for you. Really doesn’t our cup runneth over filled with wonderful thoughts and things!!!
Makes me think of what the settlers found when they arrived and began to explore as moving westward… just to see what was over the next hill and around the bend. Trees. Millions of them! All generating pure air!
In movies, sometimes they show scenes where nature has reclaimed ground. Guess that’s why folks say that nature abhors a vacuum. It’s just life doing what it does best. Surviving.
I live in the suburbs and am exhausted by the continual fight. I can only imagine what rural folks have to go through!
In our area the Bradford Pear trees are spreading in the woods . These are very invasive and I’m sure not a good thing
Beginning on Jan 1st 2023 the state of Ohio has made it illegal to plant, sell or grow Bradford Pears.
That law should spread to every state in the Union!
SC has done the same with the Bradford Pear, you can keep the trees if you already have them but can no longer but them.
This time of year there are thousands upon thousands of tiny seedlings in the woods. Nature is always striving to plant something in any and every place where it can survive. The annual proliferation ensures no opportunity to try is lost. When I worked in the woods I would see little spidery-looking seedlings of pine about an inch tall in April as just one example. More than 99% of them would die when their seed energy had been spend and the roots had not reached mineral soil for nutrients and water. We take and hold land to our use. Nature wants it back and (as you said so well) is erasing us in the process. It is both humbling and a bit sad.
Jungle is right, especially with all the rain we’ve been getting for the past few years in Southern Appalachia. Our biggest job right now is taking down all the wild grapevines. Next we’ll have to clear out some acreage that we cleared out about 28 years ago. The trees have overtaken it again. We were able to keep it mowed for awhile until our age caught up with us.
The trees that are the most prolific at reclaiming our yards and fields are referred to as pioneer species.
In my area, I think both pine and sweet gum would sprout up in the middle of a Walmart parking lot. I have a red maple in my yard and will have a lot of sprouts or seedlings around it. Squirrels will bury my pecans and black walnuts and I will have them sprout up in unusual places. A field left uncultivated for a few years will soon be full of pine and sweet gum. I guess the wind blows the seeds from other areas. This morning it is 34 degrees and a big frost here as I write this, hopefully the last one until fall, suppose to be about 10 degrees warmer tonight.
For sure out homes would be taken back by nature if we didn’t. Thanks for the insight. God Bless.