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Some young trees were planted close to curb outside school playground. I wondered what kind they were, and found a site that can help one find name of a tree by the characteristics of its leaves. All varieties listed are those of Ohio. I was able to find a picture of leaves very similar to those of the young trees I was interested in. Perhaps other members might enjoy browsing the site. http://www.oplin.lib.oh.us/products/tree/
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great site, Dr. Bill! thanks for sharing! 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Bet you'll love this site!
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Fun. I did grit my teeth and snarl over damned ailanthus being listed first, not even a true North American tree. Its common name, tree of heaven, I've changed to tree of hell. It might be positively splendid in Asia, but it is taking over the edges of the woods over here--and it comes up through concrete in the city. Other than the damned ailanthus, I like the list, wwh. Why don't you send me a leaf sample?
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Thanks Bill. I love those type of sites.
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I just finished reading a new novel, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, most of which takes place in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. Thanks to WW's input, I now understand the frequent references to ailanthus, which form a kind of subtext within the story. The ailanthus trees keep cropping up in this derelict part of the city, one more depressing aspect of the lives of the people who dwell there.
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Pooh-Bah
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I had heard of the Tree of Heaven, but only as a name, so I googled for sites with both the tree and UK in their text and found that although a few UK sources issue warnings about the invasiveness of the tree, there are many more that are selling it as an attractive exotic.
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Dear slithy toves: Remember "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"?
Was it an ailanthus?
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Good catch, Dr. Bill. Googling, I found this about Betty Smith and her wonderful novel:
The Real Tree That Grows in Brooklyn
There were some aspects of the novel that Smith would not change. When Smith submitted her novel, the title was They Lived in Brooklyn. Harper & Brothers was not satisfied with this, so Smith discussed it with her associates in the playmaker group. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was probably suggested by Josefina Niggli, a writer and friend of Smith's. Although at first Saxton [her editor at Harper] was against using a full sentence as a title, he finally agreed. It was a wise decision since it set off a chain reaction of imitative headlines in the press; even today, most people are familiar with the title. Then Smith wrote a preface that made the metaphor, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, distinct:
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.
She was also very specific about what tree it was: when she first received a copy of the dust jacket, the artist had painted a generic city tree. Smith made him change it to the ailanthus tree, that ubiquitous growth visible on railroad trestles, in empty lots, and in any crack that has accumulated dirt in New York city. Then the artist painted an ailanthus, but it was surrounded by an iron fence. Smith wrote:
Brooklyn trees are considered noxious and people chop them down, burn them and put poison on them to kill them off. No one would ever put a guard around one of those trees, no more than would fertilize a field of dandelions . . . . it grows on neglect the way the children of my neighborhood do in the book .
Smith was firm in her commitment to this metaphor. Her instinct on this matter was correct: the tree that grew in Brooklyn became an American icon.
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Thanks slithy. Sad that what should be a revered manifestation of the power of life to survive has become
anathema.
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Every ailanthus that I see taking a square foot of space from the dogwoods and redbuds of Virginia makes my blood boil. I'm all for survival and survivors, but I have no romantic inclination to embrace the ailanthus after seeing what it can do to a broad expanse of land in very short time. In other words, the metaphor is only a metaphor; trying to get rid of ailanthus is difficult. I can spot the ailanthus from half mile away any season--their winter fishing-pole-like spikes coming up out of the mountains fingers of death. And they propogate viciously and with unusual speed. Tree of hell; at least for Virginia woodlands.
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Dear WW: Since the ailanthus has been in US for over two hundred years, I wonder why it has only recently become such a problem.
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We could offer various theories:
--perhaps expansion of the highway system; there seems to be an abundance of ailanthus taking over I-81 from NY south to VA at least
--perhaps something in acid rain and pollution of water tables; ailanthus seems to thrive in conditions other living plants languish in
--but something dynamically different must have happened during the last 30 years because we saw very little ailanthus in the Richmond area in the early 70s; there is a great deal of ailanthus today all over the city and even out here in the countryside 30 miles from Richmond; we found our first ailanthus on the farm year before last and immediately destroyed the copse. We've been looking out for it ever since because it takes off like wildfire.
It's different from kudzu; kudzu covers everything and eventually kills what it covers. Ailanthus simply occupies any space available--any empty available space--and then grows very swiftly upward, thereby blocking out light of species that do not grow as tall, such as dogwoods and redbuds.
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Maybe a scheme such as is used to clear land for soybeans, of get rid of mesquite in Texas. A big thing like a huge tractor drawn flatiron cuts all bushes at goung level.
Of course, the mesquite is turned to charcoal, and peddled as barbecue fuel. Maybe some ingenious entrepreneur will find a way to get make use of ailanthus.
I still get a chuckle out of a bigshot in Georgia braggin about virtues of kudzu when I was stationed there in WWII. Here in S. California, there are Hispanics with herds of goats that eat bushes to keep them from becoming fire hazard. They would do a good job on kudzu, and maybe on ailanthus also.
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What to one would be an invader, crowding out the rightful native, to another is a symbol of persistance in an unfriendly environment.
In my youth we had a tree of heaven growing in a crack between the garage walkway and a cement wall. I thought of it as exotic, romantic and proof of the strength of the slow patience of life over the cold, implacable, soulless concrete.
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re:Maybe a scheme such as is used to clear land for soybeans, of get rid of mesquite in Texas. A big thing like a huge tractor drawn flatiron cuts all bushes at goung level.
that will not work for ailanthus, since one of the characteristics of the tree are large, graceful branches...
the tree has a very lightweigh upperstucture, with fern like fronds, and it puts most of its energy into the root system..
cut off the top? no problem, it grows a new one.. kill the root? almost impossible! these strong roots are the ones that 'break' the concrete, as they work there way down.
they also break sewer pipes, and water pipes too..
mow them down, and you get several new shoots growing from root system, like a hydra, cut off its head and it grows 2 new ones!
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The eucalyptus is doing the same in Spain when I was there a couple of years ago. It had been planted as a quick growing source of pulp and paper. Without its natural competitors it took off, growing both from the root and from the thousands of seed each tree produces and gradually taking over the native forests. Arboreal Frankensteins.
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Dear Zed: I think it was in the fifties, that Daniel Keith Ludwig, who was then the richest man in US, got interest in developing a source of paper pulp wood. He got a huge tract of land in Brazil, not far from mouth of Amazon. He had a papermill built of a huge barge in Japan and towed across the Pacific. But the expert he had advising him talked him into limiting trees planted after clearing rain forest to only two varieties. All the other experts predicted that such monoculture would invite disease to wipe out the project. Apparently it did. I've never been able to learn the details, but the whole multibillion dollar project went down the drain. If eucalyptus is suitable for paper production, a shame he didn't try it. I am still trying to find out details about the failure of the project.
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But if he had tried it it would have taken over. It can't be confined as the seeds have little wings and glide. On the other hand Eucalyptus grows where it is hot and dry, what is the cllimate in Brasil?
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Dear Zed: As I said, rainforest. I didn't know what environment eucalyptus required. Incidentally, I just found a new URL about Daniel Keith Ludwig, but it is in Portuguese, so I have begged AnnaStrophic to read it, to see if it tells why the project failed.
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Ludwig acquired the project in 1967; it has been under way as a mining project for some 50 years prior to that. The Jarí project under Ludwig ultimately failed because of public outcry. The story doesn't tell us what kind of trees were planted (I would suspect eucalyptus, non-native to the area and not easily adaptable to a rainforest setting, though it is grown commercially with great success in more temperate zones of Brazil), but the main problem was the vast amounts of rainforest that had to be destroyed in order to build the cellulose pulp plants, the waste treatment operations, the railroads (which is what Dr Bill's link is really about) and all the other infrastructure necessary to maintain such an enterprise. In 1982 Ludwig finally sold out under pressure and the area is now used by a consortium of businesses. They're still growing trees (coals to Newcastle?), but in a less invasive way and to a much lesser extent. The project continues to be highly controversial. Here's the link Dr Bill provided, if anyone is interested. The pictures tell the story of devastation, even if the text doesn't: http://www.vfco.com.br/ferrovias/Jari/projjari.htmNow, then, back to words in English. 
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I know about those winged seeds, and have, too, seen the beauty in the trees--but almost immediately my blood runs cold, in spite of the beauty, because I realize how many of those seeds will take roots--and, once having taken root, will send up huge copsulations of ailanthus. Invasion of the Botany Snatchers.
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Invasion of the Botany Snatchers.
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Dear WW: I have read that beech trees somehow secret a hormone (I guess that's what it should be called) that inhibits the germination of beechnuts that fall close to the parent tree, which conserves nutrients for the parent tree.
Perhaps some clever research might devise a hormone that would inhibit germination of ailanthus seeds.
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That's fascinating, wwh! And, oh, how true! We have many beeches that grow abundantly near water here in Virginia, and it is true that they do not grow right upon each other. I had assumed that the young beeches wouldn't be able to grow because the older, larger trees blocked the sunlight. This hormone information is news to me.
Here's a bit of beech trivia:
If you were to come across a very young beech in the winter--one so small that it had not developed the quite distinctive bark of the beech--you could immediately identify it by its bud. The bud on the beech looks just like a tiny cigar. And the mnemonic you use to recognize this bud is:
"Smoking on the beach."
It really works. I can spot an infantile beech every time by that cigar-dead-ringer bud. A doctoral candidate in dendrology taught me this bit of beech trivia.
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You understand that the damage caused to the environment by the ailanthus isn't a pimple on the butt of the damage caused by this continent's ultimate invasive species.
H. sapiens
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this continent's
one might say this planet's...
actually, somewhere once I saw an article about humans as cancer. anybody else see that, or did I make it up? I'm not trying to bash us all, but there are some interesting parallels of resource usage.
sorry, don't want to hi-jack this thread...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Dear etaoin: hijack every time you have an inspiration to, if you have something that may interest others.
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We dress it up and mess it up. Depressing.
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Dear WW: better a little refreshing chaos, than stultifying etiquette.
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Refreshing chaos, wwh? Have you been in my car recently?
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Yes, I like the black gum tree very much. The leaves are oval, rather thick and shiny, and they turn a gorgeous deep red in the fall. Ever since learning that they are sometimes called pepperidge trees, Pepperidge Farm has become a bit more intriguing as a place to me and I've wondered whether there are many black gum trees there.
We only have one black gum in our grove, and it is as tall as our tallest 150-year-old white oaks, but its girth is definitely smaller. However, the woods is peppered with very small specimens of black gum.
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I thought Pepperidge Farm was a company that made biscuits and lovely swirly bread. What is the one that you are referring to, WW? Is the company named for a place? And talking about our environmental callousness; last month's cover issue of MotherJones, was on, the 'Ungreening of America'. Totally worth a read. I don't know that the articles are available online in their entirety, but I shall post a link... http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2003/09/we_531_01.html
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Dear etaoin: a phenomenon that might interest you. I can't remember the name of the town, but it is about halfway from
Boston to NH border,where I saw a large area containing small saplings of the edible chestnut trees that had tops killed a hundred years ago by an imported disease. The trees were huge, and roots did not die, but put out saplings that cannot grow more than a few feet before the disease kills them back.Tragic.
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yyes, pepperridge farms is a now commercial bread company.
it was started by a woman who moved from NYC neighborhood with lots of small bakeries, and fresh bread, to Conneticut a place of grocery chains with 'wonderbread'crap bread.
she started a bakery at her home, and it grew into a big company.. PF bread is still different, (better) than most 'store bought bread'-though not as good as bakery or homemade bread.
her company took its name from her 'farm' which was named for the pepperridge tree at the front gate.i don't know if she sold the company, or built it up herself. the company started middle of last century.
i had a pepperridge tree on my property (last year when i lived in house). i loved the beautiful color it turned in the fall, a lovely crimsom, and it held the leaves for a while. i had, long ago, a smoke tree-- which had lovely color.. -golden leaves- for about 7 minutes. the leaves would color one day, and drop the next! i didn't like where it was planted (it blocked a view) and it never flowered (which was supposed to be its 'value') and its fall foliage, while beautiful, was much to ephemerial for my taste.
i lived on Beechknoll Ave-- and the short (1 block long) street did have several beechtrees. and a lovely 'sweet gum' tree, too. queens has a lovely variety of street/landscaping trees.. an early settler (a Mr Parsons) specialized in exotic trees. many of the original stock have self propogated, so that weepy beech, (normal a rare variety of beech) is a almost common(i know of at least a half dozen grown in a small part of queens)
Libernium trees are also 'common'--(these are sometimes called 'golden chain trees' they have flowers that look similar to wisteria, only they flowers are golden yellow. the seed pods, smell almondy, they are full of cynide, and poisonous.
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Can anyone tell me how to judge ages of palm trees? I see many 40 to 50 feet tall, but have been unable to find any local resident who has been here long enough to have any idea of the ages of the palms. I've had no luck searching on Internet. Here is a URL treehuggers might enjoy: http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/topics/oldest.htm
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My sisters and I often give the trees hugs while out hunting for morels. As long as you ask them permission first, they don't mind a bit. 
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