Fall 2001

Teaching Our Eyes to See Trees

White oak. The Illinois state tree, it’s the commonest large old tree in most of this region’s finest woodlands.

White oak (note the pale, flaky bark) can have three rather different shapes. It can be a wide, roundish tree, with broad spreading limbs, as in one that grew up in a pasture or a lawn (though white oaks tend not to do so well in lawns, in the long run). It can be a tall tree, with just a few branches at the very top, in situations where it is densely surrounded by other trees. But white oak doesn’t continue to reproduce once a woods becomes this dense, because oak seedlings die within a year or three of germinating in heavy shade.

Or a white oak can look like the specimen shown here. This healthy individual grew up in its sustainable natural habitat, an open woodland.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but there is something like a Platonic ideal of beauty in a healthy ecosystem. To truly appreciate the beauty of trees and their plant and animal associates, we have to be able to distinguish sickness from health.

Notice how smallish horizontal limbs occur well down below the middle of the trunk. This is a tree that has – for a great long time – gotten enough light to retain its lower limbs. Of course there’s more to this picture. Sadly, we can also see densely packed invasives closing in around the oak. Those skinny, pale, opposite-branching twigs on the upper left belong to a maple or ash. And those dark green leaves below likely belong to alien buckthorn, a tree that stays green later than the natives. Invading sugar maple, green ash, and European buckthorn are major threats to survival of the oak woods. In the absence of fire management, these denser, more heavily-leafed species shade out the lower limbs, wildflowers, birds, butterflies, and most other oak woods species.

At Bluff Spring Fen in Elgin, stewards Leon Halloran and Doug Taron recognized that the woods needed thinning and fire. Working with the Illinois Nature Pres-erves Commission, they not only brought back the health of the trees, but Taron midwifed the return of a beautiful moth, which requires large quantities of bottlebrush grass, one of the components of the classic sunny understory.

Today at Bluff Spring, visitors see the birds, wildflowers, dragonflies, even darting rare fish where the trail crosses a crystal clear stream. These multitudes are central to nature at its most beautiful.

To date, restoration is restoring only a very small proportion of our oak ecosystems. But in those forests, beauty is on the increase, as land managers restore the natural health that underlies true beauty.

Photo by Mike MacDonald. Words by Stephen Packard.
More about oaks and about Doug Taron’s beautiful moth

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