While some of us might be swapping our shorts for jeans, or reaching for a favorite beanie, trees around Ohio are beginning to exchange their summer green for the vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows of ... The hardiest trees rely on physics more than on chemistry to make it through the winter. When the seasonal chill begins to reach black or white spruce, for example, the sap leaves their living cells and flows into intercellular spaces.

Understanding the Context

Paleobotanist Jack A. Wolfe of the United States Geological Survey at Menlo Park, California, has found a number of tropical rain forest fossils along the eastern Gulf of Alaska. These include several kinds of palms, Burmese lacquer trees, mangroves and trees of the type that now produce nutmeg and Macassar oil. Why take a chance with exotics, when native trees have proven their ability to survive?

Key Insights

Several reasons prompt testing of foreign tree species. Human activities often create and maintain new, sometimes artificial habitats that native trees are not adapted to. Exotics may have strong wood, large fruits or straight boles that are lacking in the ... The trees have told him that giant weather systems like the Aleutian Low seem to have persisted despite human-caused warming. During winters when the Aleutian Low is strong, warmer temperatures and southerly winds create icy, stormy conditions that increase the likelihood of trees being damaged.

Final Thoughts

A swath of dead, tilted and broken trees now makes obvious the trace of the Fairweather fault that broke in July 1958 to devastate Lituya Bay and nearby parts of southeastern Alaska. Sagging or tilting of the ground along a fault trace causes trees there to tilt or even fall. The elderly trees still produced seeds, but none of the seeds gerrninated, even when carefully tended under ideal nursery conditions. It was tempting to think the old trees were incapable of producing healthy seeds, but Temple didn't accept that reasoning. For one thing, the seeds (and their encasing fruit) looked fine. The range of the feltleaf willow, probably the most numerous tree in Alaska.

From Alaska Trees and Shrubs by Les Viereck and Elbert L. Little, Jr.