Into Restoration

"I was driving through Minneapolis one winter night with my five-year-old daughter. She looked out of her window and spied the moon. 'Oh!' she exclaimed. 'That's why we haven't been having a moon at home. It's been up her in Minneapolis!'" – Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year









When working with real naturalists, you find out there are still many mysteries left in the natural world to provide questions that lead not only to pleasant debate but, most importantly, set them off in the direction of clue hunting out in the field. In fact, I can now plainly see, as we worked through winter twig identification, and then soon after took our tour through the Longenecker Garden and into the Gallistel Woods, that this was the very motion of spirit for restoration naturalist: raise a question or point of interest in the classroom, then go find out the answer in the woods. What a good life this is. The question was whether the particular twig we had in front of us, a slender, nearly yellowing, somewhat bent at its center point and definitely bent at the terminal bud, was a hackberry or not. Briefly looking through the hand drawn twigs list, only one showed a "strongly angled" terminal, but other features were not certain. The Hackberry is an interesting tree, no least of which for its name, derived from 'hagberry,' meaning swamp berry, a name used in Scotland for cherry. Maybe most interestingly, it is written that a fully mature Hack can become similar in size and shape to oaks in open savannah, and oh how the birds love the free sweets of the edible berry.

Walking through Longenecker as a novice would be a sheer exercise in mystery if it weren't for the convenient rusted metal tags found dangling by branches at the southside of each tree or shrub planted. A naturalist had off handedly admitted to self that this street scape line of experimental plantings was a veritable hodgepodge, but in that also the seeds, literally, of one of the great sweetshops for naturalists known anywhere. The Pawpaw tree was blooming fruit. Who had ever seen such a thing? This particular single tree (usually paired) had been hand fertilized, was blooming its fruit in October, and could be picked and eaten for it's small banana shape comes out the flavor of custard! Small mystery one. What about bizarrely scraggly and spiny open husk creatures at the floor of the tree ahead?  The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum on tag), is an ornamental tree that relieves itself of heavy duty fruit "2-2 1/2 " in diameter; a brown spiny or warty capsule, splitting into 2-3 parts; 1-2 large rounded shiny brown poisonous seeds; maturing in lat summer," and coveted by the turkey crew that roves Longenecker cooks hawking an early morning city market. Looking left and right for the next naturalist moment, we had walked directly under the hackberry without noticing much the fairly non descript bark color of the tree. It still carried green leaves though, and in among the cluster, the small purple berries which we tried and spit out the tiny seeds within the fruit. Pulling down one of the leafed twigs, I pondered whether this terminal bud was angled as the one inside the building. Yes indeed. The color of the skin of the twig, however, was not quite the same. Could age transform color to some degree? I couldn't say. Nor was the tree as large, yet anyway, of an oak in the immediate area. We slowly moved on to the conifers upfield. I never received my definitive answer. I tried a hackberry for the first time. We will have to return sometime further examine.