Trees are coming back to life
Trees work hard in the growing season; they take in the sun’s energy and make sugar to use and store throughout the tree. They earn their winter’s rest. After their leaves fall off, trees go into a kind of hibernation, moving the sugar to their roots.
Trees are tough. They don’t get a vacation. Trees hunker down, weathering the worst of wind, ice and snow. Sometimes unusual storms, such as Fiona, cause an unusual amount of tree damage. Luckily, that is unusual and happens infrequently. It is amazing to witness how resilient trees can be.
Come springtime, trees wake up from their long winter’s nap. They welcome warmer weather, ready to flourish. The arrival of warming temperatures and increasing day length induces trees to open their buds. Each tree starts to move sugar, dissolved in tree sap, up from roots to branches, to provide the energy the tree needs to grow new foliage.
The tree at this point functions as a kind of pump. On a cold night, air and other gases in a tree shrink, creating suction that pulls water into the tree. The warm sun of morning causes positive pressure to build. For maple syrup producers, this pressure presents opportunity. The syrup makers scurry to drill small holes in the trunks of sugar maple trees. From these holes, they capture some of the sugary sap on its way up the tree. Boil this, and the result is maple syrup.
Pruning trees is possible in spring when sap movement is at its highest, but it is important to be selective in the species and number of pruning cuts you make. Excessive pruning on the wrong tree can lead to a significant loss of that important sugary sap needed to grow flowers, leaves, and new branches.
As well, be careful at the base of trees in spring. Melting snow turns the soil around trees to mud. Ruts caused by a truck, tractor or ATV can alter the natural pores in the soil leading to soil compaction. This can damage the all-important tiny feeder roots that trees use to suck in water and nutrients. The ruts might also alter drainage patterns and encourage erosion.
In spring, most trees burst into flower, the first step in providing the seed that will grow their next generation. Tree flowers provide a crucial early source of pollen; bees kick into action to move pollen from flower to flower. Along with the flowers of apple, cherry and pear trees, for example, willow, maple, horse chestnut and linden trees offer important sources of spring pollen. As you can picture, a big tree, with its spreading branches high above streets and houses, offers a huge feast for the bees.
As the days get longer, songbirds return from the south; robins, sparrows and warblers build their nests in the branches of trees. Chickadees, nuthatches and woodpeckers snack on insect eggs and larvae in tree bark.
Sap flows to branch tips, and buds open; the unfurling leaves begin to soak up energy from sunshine and use this energy to combine their sap with carbon from the air, to produce sugar. If you can imagine, all the structures and tissues for the following year’s branch growth are preformed in microscopic scale the year before in each tiny bud – another miracle of nature.
The trees’ winter rest is over; it is time to go to work. The amount of growth and development of a tree is dependent on many variables such as the growing conditions created by moisture, sunlight, and heat. Other influences include; insect damage, tree damage from human trimmers, root damage and soil compaction from vehicles or human cutting/digging, flooding roots, salt damage, and frost.
Anything we can do to aid the life of a young tree is well worth it. That may mean deep roots watering every week during very dry conditions. It is also a good idea to create and maintain a mulched bed around the base of the tree to keep the lawnmower and trimmers away from the fragile stem. It may also mean surrounding the tree with a barrier if it is suffering from repeated deer browsing.
Considering what has transpired inside the young tree, and the future potential it possesses, it is well worth taking good care of it.