Category: Summer

Leaves by the number

Warning: Rough estimates ahead.

Every summer I’m amazed at the height, width and fullness of our large birch tree in the back yard after its spring rebirth from winter’s bareness. It is the biggest birch I know of, though I don’t go on searches for big birch trees.

As I stare at this old, mature tree, which hides all kinds of birds and squirrel nests and has some dead spots for the pileated woodpeckers, I always ask the question with the impossible answer: How many leaves?

I finally came up with a formula to estimate the number of leaves on the mighty birch with its three trunks from which several hefty horizontal branches spread. The formula may be flawed, but I go with it.

I stepped off the widths, north to south and east to west, and they were fairly even at about 40 feet. Knowing the tallest birches in Wisconsin are 65 to 70 feet, I conservatively topped my tree out at 60 feet.

Those measurements gave me 96,000 cubic feet of space. Accounting for open spaces in the tree, I halved that to come up with 48,000 cubic feet of leaf area. Then I counted 55 leaves in one cubic foot. Multiplying 48,000 by 55 gave me about 2.6 million leaves.

Am I even close? I did some research of other folks with the same leaf question. I found one estimate of 2 million leaves on a big oak tree, so that’s close to my number. However, another leaf counter came up with 200,000 leaves on a large mature tree, so that’s not close.

One thing I am sure of is how much I, along with the birds and squirrels, enjoy this big birch, no matter how many leaves.

The queen lives

I had feared the Queen was dead, or at the least, trampled by the natives. That would be my transplanted Queen of the Prairie wildflower, and the natives would be everything from tansies to raspberry bushes to milkweed.

But after the Queen disappeared last year after a few seasons of modest reign, not to mention a season of modest rainfall, I’ve found the Queen lives! On a muggy July morning in the meadow, between the farm fields and the woods, the color pink caught my eye in midst of all the green. Could it be? Yes, the Queen of the Prairie, at least two plants, was beginning to bloom.

The balls of pink atop amber stems, with large, pointed and deeply divided leaves below, had not yet burst into flowers. They will; the Queen is a beauty in August. But I was thrilled at the sight, the transplanted prairie flower in a meadow where perhaps this North American native once bloomed a century or more ago before part of the small clearing met the steel blades of a plow.

Let’s back up to the city, where we were given a Queen of the Prairie years ago. The plant likes sun and moisture, we later learned, but the shadow of the house kept it from sunshine in the morning, and a spreading maple tree took up the shading task in the afternoon. We could give it moisture, but not sun.

So I proceeded with my plan of most things that won’t grow on our city lot: transplant it in the country. Would not a prairie plant flourish in the small meadow clearing that juts out from the field? It did, for several years, joining the other blooming wild flowers, some of which I haven’t identified. I like to think they are prairie plants, as free as wild horses, plants that are centuries old, found nowhere else for acres around.

The Queen joined the masses and bloomed, until last summer, inexplicably absent except for maybe the lack of moisture. The kingdom lived on without the Queen. And while her disappearance is the stuff of royal mystery, she has now returned to her throne, where the leaves of birches and maples wave in approval.

Summers of spittlebugs

There are spittlebugs in July’s alfalfa and flowerless tansies. And there’s a memory in the spittlebugs of a country boy and a hay field, the dew-soaked morning after a first quarter moon.

Today’s summer breeze plays once again on the tall grasses. It plays like the breeze through the fields of my boyhood days, the bobolink’s rolling notes riding the waves I still feel.

And the wild roses that begged the fence line for bit of space have now surrendered in darkened, fallen petals, giving way to potato vine, cocklebur and prickly ash … Which I cut and hope the bitter smell provides some respite from mosquitos.

It’s early July again, as cluttered in green as my mind in worry. A month of new beginnings for prairie plants and fledglings of the grassland birds. I should know this, and let the wild columbine nod away my fear.

Fear should be lost in the small bush hiding the white sparrow’s low nest. Or lost in reverie of a creek gone dry, where frogs once rippled the water, of fields of meadowlarks and in my teasing of killdeers as I briefly claimed the pasture as my own.

And when I was a boy I saw spittlebugs in the fields of green. I knew not what they were, only that it was July and breezy, warm freedom. I know spittlebugs today, but too often look past what I feel and see.

How long true darkness?

Darkness comes slowly now, hanging behind the new leaves, waiting patiently in the wake of the summer solstice. It’s as if night is reluctant to disturb the bustle of early summer, respecting the need for extra daylight so birds and animals can nuture their young, so flowers and bushes can burst with bloom, and so the stewards of the earth can tend their young crops.

When do you see the last hint of light before the late June evening finally slips into true, total darkness? On these last days of June are the latest sunsets of the year. By the Fourth of July weekend, sunsets will come a bit sooner each evening.

It’s 10 p.m., and the last bit of murky sky still hangs in the portals of the birch tree’s branches. The sky to the northwest, where the sun slipped below the horizon an hour ago, still has an amber glow. I’ve read that total darkness doesn’t occur until 2 hours after our eyes can no longer detect light in the sky. So that would mean the dark of night, the true darkness, doesn’t surround us until midnight this time of year.

And is that true as dawn approaches, when a soft ripple of light is sent out shortly after 4 a.m., more than an hour before sunrise? If so, true darkness has already lifted. That leaves us with perhaps only 3 or 4 hours of total darkness in the days after the summer solstice, and it explains why birds are chirping before our eyes pick up the first light of dawn.

Though the summer solstice on June 20 this month was the “longest day” in terms of daylight, neither the year’s earliest sunrise nor latest sunset occur on that day. The earliest sunrise is a week earlier, and latest sunset is over the final days of June, when the sun finally slinks away just minutes shy of 9 p.m.

As nights now descend upon us slowly and gently, sending birds to their roost, morning is not far off, beginning with a single chirp of a bird detecting the ripple of a light wave. The first ripple in the waves of long summer days.