Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Monday, 4 April 2011
Currant Bush
A Reminder to anyone who wants to keep their white pines healthy - pull out all the currant bush on your property. The best time to do this is early spring. Why? Because gooseberry, one of the two plants in the RIBES family, will be the first shrub to go in leaf. It sticks out like a sore thumb in early May. By mid-summer it can be hard to see.
New Orleas to Lake of the Woods
If they don't like the new site, and there is a high transplant mortality, it will have been an expensive experiment. In terms of money and time.
But they needed to be moved, the spacing at the Allan's farm would have either killed them or made them too spindly.
Friday, 25 March 2011
Reforesting White Pine - A call to action for Lake of the Woods
First published in 2002 in Area News Magazine. Published a second time in 2009
White Pine Reforestation on Lake of the Woods, Seedlings in Action
CJ Conway
“The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
This spring, a battle gets underway on Lake of the Woods. There will be 40,000 seedling soldiers, fresh from the nurseries near Prawda, frozen and arrayed in boxes. These little plugs are the front-line shock troops, sent to fight against 200 years of over-harvest, neglect and a virulent world-wide plague. The hope is that this salvo can turn a trend around. If it can not, it is back to monitoring the constant, however slow, death of our lake’s finest trees. The future success of the white pine on Lake of the Woods is in our hands.
The Lake of the Woods Cottager’s Association has contracted to bring these seedlings here for us to plant as a safe-guard against the white pine’s extirpation. It is a grand idea. And like any grand idea, flawless execution and Herculean effort will be required to fulfill its promise. Toward that end, to help inform our energies, articles will be published about the tree and its nemesis, white pine blister rust. Further issues will feature information on planting site preparation, seedling planting techniques, methods for keeping older trees healthy, and tips on maintaining robust and disease-free seedlings. In this issue, we will focus on the history of the tree and trace the progression of events that led us to its current plight.
The white pine is the monarch of our forests. It is eastern Canada’s largest tree, regularly topping out over 25 meters. Historically, when the tree occurred in near limitless, unbroken stands from Newfoundland to Manitoba, much greater heights were recorded. In the early 1800s one gargantuan stood 80.5 meters. The tallest living white pine in Canada grows in the Muskoka area and is 45.1 meters tall.
White pine needles are soft, flexible and bluish-green to silver-green in colour and are regularly arranged in bundles of five. The needles are usually shed at the end of the second growing season. Both male and female flowers occur on the same tree, with pollination occurring in spring. The cones mature at the end of the second season and give off a fragrant gummy resin.
The bark of young trunks and branches is smooth and tends to be greenish-brown in color. On older trunks, the bark becomes dark gray and is shallowly fissured.
White pine is intermediate in shade tolerance. It is found on many different sites including dry rocky ridges and wet sphagnum bogs, but its best development occurs in moist sandy-loam soils.
Eagles and ospreys often nest in the tops of white pine.
The tree, so important in this country’s development, stirs something deeper in us. A wind-swept white pine, shaped by the elements and modified by nature makes the water’s-edge white pine a favourite of painters and photographers alike. Before the Group of Seven turned the tree into an icon, it had a dramatic role in the everyday lives of Canadians.
The first French settlers used white pine for their immediate lumber needs, but this barely accounted for the trees they cleared to make farmland. The same was true of the early English colonists, up until a signal historical event. Napoleon, at war with England, blockaded the Baltic and denied that great seafaring race access to the shipbuilding materials her navy required.
The square timber trade was born. This was our country’s staple export until the middle of the 19th century. After the American Civil War, we were blessed with a second ready market for our timber.
The growth of railway and sea transportation was largely a response to these needs. Pine, besides being the main economic factor behind the political formation of Canada, also paid for the development of the country for many years. Until the beginning of 20th century, the tolls and levies on pine timber were more than the total cost of the governance of Canada.
In Ontario, generations were rocked in pine cradles, housed in pine homes and buried in pine coffins. A fine local example of the wealth produced by this industry is the home of Keewatin lumber baron John Mather. He milled Lake of the Woods white pine into square timber for export and to help extend the Canadian Pacific Railway across the treeless prairie. Logging methods were focused on bringing as many trees to market as quickly as possible. The fact that natives called one of the Barrier Islands Shammis, their word for bald, speaks volumes about early technique.
In 1874, one and half billion cubic feet of pine were cut on Canadian Crown land. From 1900 to 1976 another 16 billion would topple to the lumberjack’s saw.
Early on people began to be concerned about the loss of the resource. Sir John A MacDonald wrote long letters asking if something might be done to protect the species and reserves of timber were left as a result. Algonquin Park was originally created as a pocket of unassailable timber.
The first documented attempts at reforesting occurred in Ontario in 1889 on experimental farms near Ottawa. In 1914 a private plantation near Rockland consisted of 20,000 white pine and 16,000 red. This demand led to early importation of nursery stock from the United States and Europe. From 1904 to 1909 eastern white pines of German origin were imported into Ontario. During that period over a million seedlings passed through the nurseries at Guelph and St. Williams for distribution. This was the stock that contained white pine blister rust. The disease was first identified by JE Howitt of the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph in 1914.
Meet the enemy. This disease, thought to originate in Asia, has circled the globe. It attacks the tree through its needles, but does its damage in the branches and trunk. The most obvious sign is the red or flagging limb, but girdling, weeping sores can be seen on many of our trees as well. More sobering than the creeping destruction of our stately old trees is the decimation of young populations. The juvenile trees, already having trouble with faster growing competitors like spruce and balsam, are best suited to seed in large tracts of mature white pines. Unfortunately, that opportunity was lost years ago. Now they try to spring up inside the ‘remnant’ populations of pine, and because of this and the disease, they generally fail. Take a walk through our forests. Or even a slow drive in the boat. You can see plenty of big trees, albeit many of them sick. There are some seedlings, but most troubling, there are almost no five to eight meter trees. To make matters worse, the seedlings you see will probably die too. Blister rust is a tough opponent, and given our scattered and thinned tree populations it will be difficult to ensure a healthy Lake of the Woods white pine very far into the future.
This is how blister rust works. It starts out as a yellow spot on the underside of the leaves of a gooseberry or current bush, a family of shrubs known as ribes. (Rhymes with rabies) Once there, it grows spores that will spread to other ribes, producing a build-up of rust. As fall approaches, the spores on the underside of the leaves change from being infectious to ribes and attack white pines.
The cycle of white pine blister rust typically lasts 3-6 years. Usually the source plants are within a few hundred meters of pines that become infected, but patterns of air movement can carry infectious spores several kilometers. Spores germinate on wet needles, and the parasite enters there. The only symptom initially is a yellow to reddish spot at the site of infection. Infected needles turn yellow and drop prematurely but often not before the fungus has grown down the needle and entered the twig or young mainstem. This occurs late in the year of infection or early in the next season. The rust fungus grows intercellularly in bark and in the rays of the outermost sapwood. It grows along the branch approximately 8 cm per year. Rust can be found in bark 1-5 cm beyond surface discolouration. Swellings are most apparent on twigs and small branches. Spores are produced on the pine in the summer of the first or second year after infection of the bark, and are then airborne locally and over long distances to infect ribes and start the cycle over again.
The disease is not always lethal to the white pine. Many trees are resistant. Infection in susceptible trees is often halted by the death of diseased twigs or branches before the rust fungus reaches the trunk. Small trees are at the greatest risk of lethal infection because in them the path from needles to mainstem is the shortest.
The main problem after trees attain crown closure is “top rust.” Spores from sources outside the pine stand cause infections on branches above the canopy. Since these branches often remain alive, the fungus eventually reaches the trunk and kills the top part of the tree.
In further articles we will describe steps to both preserve the health of old trees and methods to keep the disease from attacking the even more vulnerable seedlings. A prudent first course of action for all concerned would be the systematic eradication of ribes, and the removal and burning of infected white pine limbs. We will talk to experts, both from our area and abroad, to find out the latest techniques to do battle with the blister, but most importantly, we need your help. This spring, when these seedlings arrive, we all need to give them the best fighting chance we can. White pine take about ten years to reach chest height, a time in which they need careful stewardship to survive. If we can each get a bunch of seedlings past that point and work at saving the older ones we already have, we have a decent chance to save the species. If not, we can add these 40,000 little seedlings to the long list of dead white pine.
END
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