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tree of heaven, catalpa, and sugar maple
Wednesday, September 10 2025
After I got home from work, I took the dogs for a walk (both came) down the Gullies Trail, which has become increasingly difficult to get to due to large trees that have recently fallen. The character of the forest itself along this trail is also now wildly different from what it had been. All the caterpillar-caused defoliation and tornado (or quasi-tornado) blowdowns have opened up the forest floor to thick blankets of plant species that hadn't been there only three years ago: Japanese stiltgrass and American burnweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius). The ferns have also grown lusher, making the process of hiking through them more challenging. I didn't know about the edibility of burnweed and so tasted some. It had a somewhat unpleasant flavor but was also surprisingly sweet.
I had a landlording chore at the Downs Street brick mansion that I had to attend to next: removing all the tree saplings sprouting out of the foundation. Gretchen is, as is her wont, freaked out about the sudden appearance of invasive non-native spotted lanternflies. And, since lanternflies are especially attracted by tree of heaven (also invasive and non-native), she has now decided she wants to eradicate all tree of heavens on property we control (including the large tree of heaven just east of our dining room window, one I had wanted to chop down 20 years ago but which she, at the time, thought was pretty). She's read up on tree of heaven and knows it is impossible to kill without herbicide, since it keeps sending up sprouts, sometimes as far as 50 feet from the original tree. So she has made an exception to our generally all-organic approach to horticulture, and told me to get some herbicide containing triclopyr. This was what I was looking for when I stopped at Herzogs on the way to Downs Street. Of course, triclopyr is a chemical, and appears only in tiny writing on bottles whose largest word is a stupid brand name. But it turns out that Roundup (or at least some version of Roundup) contains triclopyr, so I bought a bottle of that and a paint brush to apply it with.
But over at Downs Street, there weren't actually all that many tree of heaven saplings. Catalpa seemed to be more of a problem, and there were also some sugar maple sprouts that had to go. I chopped all of these things down and loaded the debris in the back of the Forester. As I worked, I noticed that catalpa has a strong unpleasant smell similar to tree of heaven. (I also noticed that most of the passersby on the sidewalk nearby were Spanish-speaking Hispanics, usually accompanied by small Spanish-speaking children.)
One thing I did not do while there was apply any herbicide. The idea is that you paint a little triclopyr on the cut end of the tree of heaven stumps, and this gets sucked back into the mother tree and kills it. But I just don't see the tree of heaven being much of a problem at Downs Street (despite the large tree in the back). Some lanternflies were evident, but it didn't look like the plague that others have been posting pictures of on social media.
On the way home, I went out of my way to get some electrical boxes at Home Depot. Unfortunately, I found that a kind of plastic conduit bracket that folds over and is secured with a single screw no longer seems to be on the market. I want more of them, but they're proving impossible to find. (Maybe it has been banned for some reason.)
Back at the house, Gretchen had bought tamales at the Woodstock Farm Festival, so that was what I had for dinner.
On Monday I'd talked to my brother Don for the first time since his visit, but for some reason he hasn't been calling as often as he used to. This is a good thing, since the less I have to listen to him stammering through the details of things that interest him, the happier I am. (I'm almost never interested in the things he has learned from a book or on YouTube, though I have mild interest in the expensive Lego kits he buys, and I have genuine interest in the state of his local human support network, including government-mediated social services, though he only ever tells me about that last one as an afterthought or when something crazy or terrible happens.) Still, I find that when I'm taking a bath (as I did this evening) I find myself worrying that he will enter one of his loops where he calls me every 15 minutes in what seems like a desperate attempt to reach out to a fellow human being.
The big news item today was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a far-right organization that demonizes immigrants and abortion providers while trying to remake America as a Christianist ethnostate. In the United States, most political violence targets leftists or (perhaps as often) mainstream Democrats, but this was a rare incidence of political violence targeting someone on the far right. President Donald Trump, who never said a word about the recent politically-motivated killings of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, was immediately flung into a rage, promising retaliation and God knows what. I have a feeling things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Morning fog on Hurley Mountain Road, looking south. Click to enlarge.
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