Tree Hike at Belmont – August 2016

I volunteered to lead a tree hike at Belmont Manor and Historic Park last weekend. I went out the Friday before to walk the route I’d planned. Even though the hike was in the morning – it was going to be a hot day so I wanted every part of the hike to be worth the effort. The river birch would definitely be the first stop – with it distinctive curly bark.

Some Norway Maples had been planted near the cottage – and I decided that I’d point them out to encourage people to plant native maples instead if they wanted a maple tree in their yard.

I decided to not make the down and back (with no shade) hike down to the pond to see the bald cypress that is the tree with the rounded top to the left of the pond. I pointed it out to the hiking group from about where I stood to take this picture.

We didn’t walk over to the magnolia either. It was enough to view it from further away and talk about the history of large magnolias planted in front of the manor house and the possibility that the large specimen there now is missing the large English Elm that grew uphill until about a year ago when it was cut down before it succumbed completely to Dutch Elm Disease.

On my pre-walk, I walked all the way over to the horse chestnut. The tree is not in good shape. The top was rotten and it broke last spring. The leaves are distinctive but looked pretty battered already.

I opted to go in the direction of the dawn redwood and talk about it being the second example of a conifer that loses its needles at Belmont (the first was the bald cypress mentioned earlier).

We saw two kinds of nut producing trees: a black walnut

And a pecan.

The row of white pines has a few pine cones but the ground crews have thoroughly cleaned up any that fall to the ground.

On the way back I noticed a mushroom under a sweet gum – with bits of dirt clinging to its cap.

There were other trees along the route. The hike on Saturday was almost two hours and we saw something I had missed on my pre-hike: A large English Elm that was being treated for Dutch Elm Disease. The injection ports for chemicals were all around the base of the tree. I hope the tree survives!

Natural History of a Place

I went to Belmont Manor and Historic Park in Elkridge, MD frequently enough over the past year to observe it in every season. Last summer a large English Elm on the front lawn of the Manor had to be cut down (Dutch Elm Disease). I took this picture shortly before it was cut down - the picture taken from an angle that the dead part of the tree didn’t show too much. A month later the tree was gone, the stump and exposed roots dug out, and new sod put over the wound. A month later and it was hard to tell where the tree had ever been. The episode stirred some thoughts about the natural history of a place and the significance of our actions on that.

The English Elm was planted – a non-native to North America. Whoever made the decision to plant an English Elm may have been wise in the end because this one lasted longer than most of the American Elms against Dutch Elm Disease.

The pond further down the hill was probably dug in the 1980s. It was probably always a wet area. There was probably a vernal pool there in spring. Lots of wood frogs would have successfully laid their eggs there and new frogs would have emerged. Now the pond has fish – that eat frog eggs.

In the 1900s – the area in front of the house was open. For some of those years it was pasture for horses. The forest would have been different. At the beginning of the century there might have been American Chestnuts in the forest. They would have been noticeable for their size and their nuts would have been gathered every fall – by people and squirrels (and other animals too). There is no tree that has quite filled the niche of the American Chestnut that was wiped out by the mid-1900s by the Chestnut Blight.

Earlier in the 1800s, many of the trees would have been cut for fuel. There were a lot of ironworks. There were massive erosion events when the forests were cut and the Patapsco River – downhill to the north of Belmont – received a lot of sediment changing it from a navigable river to a shallow, easily flooding river by the early part of the 1800s.

Prior to anything being built on the hilltop where the Manor House is today – the area was forested. The chestnuts were the big tree and the Europeans were impressed by the richness of the life in the rivers.

There is so much that we did not preserve…and that we still don’t quite know how to sustain.