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low-impact tree distintegration
Tuesday, July 21 2009
Today in the greenhouse I dealt with several minor carpentry issues, mostly related to the two hinged east-facing windows, the only windows that can be opened (the door can also be opened, though there are five panes of glass, three of them enormous, that are fixed in place, as are several glass blocks atop the west wall). I needed a way to latch these windows, which had been roughly secured since December with a screwed-on piece of plastic. Today I glued on pieces of wood to their frames so I can later attach hardware. (I'd tried to attach hardware directly back in December, but the frames had proved too thin.)
While I was working in the greenhouse, rain was falling steadily outside. This was coming from a warm front and would take a whole day to play out. Suddenly I heard a complicated series of noises - cracking and roaring. I went outside to see what had happened and saw that the top had just fallen off a large dead White Pine about thirty feet to the northeast, tearing some branches off a small nearby White Ash. This pine had been dead a long time and was now just a barkless skeleton, but it hadn't caused me much concern because it was east of the greenhouse and thus unlikely to fall on it. The fact that its top had fallen off, leaving most of the rest of it undisturbed led me to wonder if this is a normal way for dead White Pines to disintegrate in the forest. I've experienced two live White Pines falling down, and those always cracked off at the roots and fell down all at once (one avoiding the house, the other snapping the Dug Hill Road power line, both ending up as firewood for our stove). But this long-dead pine had clearly rotted most at the top (were rain can most easily soak in), and it was the top that had weakened and fallen off. The resulting destruction to the surroundings was minor, amounting to a few small branches stripped from that small White Ash. If the whole tree were to disintegrate in this fashion, very little damage would be inflicted on the surroundings.
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