Marescence

To keep Alzheimer’s at bay, learn a new word every day. Or perhaps one every month. This month’s word is marescence. It stems from the Latin for marescere, to wither or to shrivel. The subject presents itself every fall, but the energy to dig up the facts is not present every autumn. This time I went on a search to discover why it is that virtually all deciduous trees loose their leaves more or less on schedule—thus, hereabouts in the Midwest, they are mostly down by today. But some hang on for dear life. And some keep them until well into the coming spring. Such species, among them Oaks, Witch-hazel, Hornbeam (musclewood), Hophornbeam (ironwood), some species of Willow, and American Beech display marescence, meaning that their leaves turn color but remain attached to the branches until new budding pushes them off. The evolutionary value of this tactic is debated but not resolved.

To get this list I had to find a helpful post (link) at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Endless blogs and chat rooms go on and on about leaves, but all are incomplete and rarely roam farther than the nearest oak.

Well, in the center of our large back yard rises a rather young American Beech. It still has all its leaves although, at the tip, they are beginning to turn brown. Finding the name of a tree merely by looking at its leaves is very time-consuming. You have to be retired to do it. One step leads to another. The images you see displayed above are the leaves of some of these species, in the order listed above. They suggest that my Fall raking will have its Spring complement as well. My images are courtesy of Wikipedia commons.

The Elms Rain Seed

The elms rain seed. They’re feather light, have oval wings.

The merest breath of air now carries these zooming

High or, when it fails, it lets them fall by lightly

Twirling undulating beats down on the grey concrete

To make it look like modernistic carpeting

With speckled gold. Clusters lie on chairs, on the summer

Table’s dark green metal grid, waiting there for broom

Or stick to sweep them down. Longingly downward bound

They are, the little would-be elms. They hope for a

Salvation that they picture as black ground, and in

This man-invaded space that consummation,

Devoutly to be wished, seems from the elm’s perspective

Unreachably distant and hard to realize.

Conference Tree

A while back, here, in a post on flocks of birds, I mentioned the tree on which they gather. It’s visible from our back yard. The tree died two or three years ago. It is bare all through the spring and summer. Until the city finally gets around to having it removed, the only life it ever sees is in the fall when swarms of birds turn its branches into a living multitude. They swarm, they settle, they take off again. Why do they do it? Is fall the season when, to echo Chaucer, they “longen … to goon on pilgrimages”? A week or so ago, trying to snap some photos of the last moments of a sunset, I glimpsed a relatively young moon in the sky and took its picture too. In that image, we later noticed, I’d also captured an image of the Conference Tree. With the moon at the center of an imaginary clock face, the Conference Tree is at five o’clock.

Arborum Amicus

I feel a mighty resonance with posts by Michael Gilleland
Who loves all trees and weekly sings their praise on his resplendent blog.
Arboricides he doth despise; his quotes excoriate the firebrand.
Before green trees he bows in awe and mourns each sawed and lifeless log.


To check on the latest about forests in Merry Old England, see his post today.

April Dress-Up

Ridge Avenue, Grosse Pointe Farms, about a week ago.