Trees III

I am reading Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s new novel, and will review it for a newspaper, and already the experience, just a few pages into the book, has triggered unexpected memories. At the start of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s perennial protagonist, lives alone in the Berkshires, the beautiful, humanly scaled, heavily wooded mountains of Western Massachusetts. For 19 years I lived across the state line, in Albany, N.Y., and environs, and often visited Pittsfield (where Melville wrote most of Moby-Dick), Lenox, Stockbridge and other towns in the region.

In the fall of 1987 I took a day off in the middle of the week to visit Williamstown. I wanted to see a Rube Goldberg exhibit at Williams College and browse the bookstores. That morning, along the north side of Route 2, having already crested the mountain that marks the state line and begun my descent into town, I noticed a copse of poplars at the far end of a field, perhaps 300 yards off the road. The leaves of the poplars had turned vividly yellow, and against the brown field looked more like flowers than leaves. On my way back to New York that afternoon, I pulled over for a closer look.

Poplars (or trembling aspen, or quaking aspen, because of the appearance of their leaves in a breeze) are an opportunistic softwood and often are judged the vermin of trees. They are tough, take root anywhere and grow quickly – a triumph of adaptation. I discovered the the brilliantly yellow copse was growing in the foundation of an old house. Wind-borne seeds had germinated in the rectangular hole, taken root and now stood 25 or 30 feet tall. The roof and walls were gone, and only stones remained. In the weed-choked hole were bottles, broken window glass, rusting cans and a galvanized washtub – all that remained of the lives of the anonymous former residents. Like flowers on a grave, the butter-colored leaves of the poplar marked their absence. Without the conspicuous beauty of the foliage, I would never have suspected someone had once lived there.

In A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Donald Culross Peattie explains the successful propagation strategy of poplars: “From the flask-shaped, thin-walled seed pod escape the minute, short-lived, innumerable seeds, which are borne on the wind by their cottony down.”

And he notes the colorful foliage that attracted my attention: “In autumn the foliage turns clear gold, brilliant even on a dark day, but when the sunshine slants through the Aspens they blaze with yellow light. In Colorado people are so rich in Aspen gold they can forget how poor they are in all the other hues of the eastern forest.”

The poplar has an ugly side. About 10 years ago I spent a day with naturalists, students and volunteers in the Pine Bush, a threatened ecosystem once lepped by Vladimir Nabokov. Read about the Pine Bush and its endangered Karner blue butterfly here. As a newspaper reporter, I accompanied the crews as they “girdled” some of the thousands of poplars that had invaded the Pine Bush. The procedure involves stripping bark off the lower portion of the trunk, which quickly kills the trees and permits them to be cut down and removed. As of last year, more than 40,000 invasive trees had been destroyed, giving native species a chance to thrive. It’s always unpleasant to watch the destruction of trees, but the girdling makes good counter-intuitive sense. Peattie addresses the poplar’s mixed reputation:

“Despised once as the veriest weed of a tree, Popple, as the lumberman prefers to call it, has in our age of paper come to the fore as a valuable pulp source, not, like the Spruce, for newspapers, but for magazine stock. Deflated boom towns of the worked-out pineries are coming back where Popple grows. When it has been cut, it reproduces itself within 50 years by its unaided exertions and fertility. And so what seems like a shallow-rooted, frail vagabond of a tree may prove to have more value than many a species with a more solid reputation. All that – and charm as well!”