Vermont State Parks

This red oak wolf tree is a great place to hang out! My daughter and I enjoy our outside exploration time even more these days as our apartment has seemingly grown smaller, and we have new requirements to log into online classes several times a day. The breaks in nature are essential to deal with some of the stress of adjusting to new routines and our new reality of staying close to home. Luckily, we have plenty of nearby nature in our yard and beyond into our neighboring yards.  One of our favorite places to explore is a small strip of woods in between an apartment complex, and an abandoned pasture. Earlier I wrote about some cool mushrooms we found in there. Some of the mushrooms were growing on dropped branches from a huge red oak tree I referred to as a 'wolf tree'.  Look at out the trees you have growing in your yard, on your street, or in a nearby park. Trees that grow out in the open, on their own, not close to other trees grow in their perfect form. These lol...

Christmas tree farm with fir, pine, and spruce.  As people head to the woods to pick out their perfect Christmas tree, check out this excerpt from  Woods Whys: An Exploration of Forests and Forestry  by Michael Snyder.        Ask any young child to draw a Christmas tree and chances are he'll draw something close to a triangle. If the kid is particularly tal­ented, she'll draw a cone. Indeed, the cone-shaped tree is as traditional as the holiday itself. Sure, there are the Charlie Browns among us who will settle for a less-than-perfect Christmas tree. But most of us look for a fir or spruce with just the right taper, symmetry, and conical form.      That conical shape is certainly the norm at most Christmas tree farms, and the short explanation for it is that the tree farmer shears them that way. Of course, there's more to it than that. Even if you are wandering afield in search of a wild Christmas tree far from any shears or knives,...

A park visitor emailed us this question today: Hi, I was walking in the woods behind my house in Fairfield, Vermont today and I noticed white foam on a number of our trees especially most of the yellow birch and also some hemlock. On some of the trees there was quite a bit of this foam. Is this something that we should be concerned about? I don't remember ever noticing it before. Thank you for your help. Rebecca Phelps, our Conservation Coordinator, replies: You are very observant, and what you were observing was Chemistry in action! What you saw on the trunks of these trees was the formation of a crude soap. It has been really dry for awhile in Vermont, and when it is dry particles from the air deposit themselves on the surface of tree bark (like dust). This dust includes bits of salts, acids and other particles in the air. When it rains, these particles dissolve into a liquid solution. Soap is essentially a chemical mixture of salts and acids formed into a molecule, and tha...