A biology professor buys 300 acres of Maine woodlands with money he doesn't have and spends the better part of his life exploring it. This book is a collection of essays musing upon his experiences over the years, as he brings the reader along on a tour of all the bugs, birds, trees and fungi in the forest ecosystem.
This work will seem very familiar to readers of Edward Abbey, Paul Gruchow, Henry David Thoreau and other important environmental advocates. It has the same flowing and at times convoluted style, the same gentle lecturing of what happens and why on the trail and in the forest, and the same subtle misanthropy as he tells us all the things we're doing wrong by having the temerity to live on this planet.
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The author takes evident pleasure displaying his expertise as he names all kinds of plants and animals, and shares some of the downright weird things that happen in the forest.[*] It's relaxing and calming to read works like this, and the reader really learns.
Footnote:
[*] The author also makes some rather interesting logic errors and leaps of epistemic arrogance. See my notes for Chapter 19 below if you're into studying that kind of thing.
[Readers, what follows here are all my notes, quotes and reactions to the text. They are meant to help order my thinking and help me remember--there's no need to read any further! Your time is valuable.]
Notes:
Introduction
xiff On the author's "arboreal" childhood, playing and climbing in trees; on his parents, who used manual crosscut saws to cut trees for a local paper mill; a rambling discussion of trees and their genetic likeness to other creatures on Earth; and then a serendipitous chance back in 1977 for him to purchase 300 acres of forestland near where he grew up, with money he didn't have. This land revives his interest in forestry; the book is about his reflections after owning this land for 20 years as a biologist, owner and caretaker.
Chapter 1: A Forest Ramble
8ff Interesting side-by-side comparison here of aerial photographs of his forestland from 1966 and 1992; the 1966 photo shows a patchy mix of forest along with fully cleared fields and sections of clearcut forest; by 1992 the entire acreage had returned to totally unbroken forest canopy. [I've noticed the same over the course of my life over many years driving through upstate New York: much of the land in the entire region has reforested to a shocking degree.]
14ff Comments here on "largely foreign-owned" logging companies who brag about all the tree planting they do; the author calls this an exercise in pointlessness because for every tree they plant they have to destroy more than 8,000 seedlings (the author goes through the math of how many seedlings are scattered by the existing forest already) to ensure the tree they plant makes it. He further criticizes logging companies for only planting species selected for "immediate commercial potential" whereas if left alone, the land itself selects the best tree for any given area of the ground. "...the eliminated seedlings contain the best competitors for that area, which is of course precisely why one needs to go to extreme lengths to try to kill them off if one wants to grow something else."[Also a quick comment on the expression "foreign-owned": keep in mind that technically a company may be domiciled in another country but much of the share ownership--and thus ultimate control of the enterprise--is likely to be in the hands of USA-based investors. So the ownership may not be as "foreign" as it may appear.]
17 The author comments here about "acid rain" coming from the Midwest causing red spruce to decline in New England. [Note that this book was written in 1997 when the de-industrialization of the USA was already in full swing. By now, in 2025, that de-industrialization is long over! And one can't help but go back to those side-by-side photos and see how the land has completely reforested to this beautiful, nearly total canopy.]
Chapter 2: A View from the Top
20 "My ramble takes me to the top of the red spruce next to the boulder. Carrying a clipboard with paper in one hand made the climb a little slower than normal. I passed through a few spider webs built close to the trunk of the tree. A basking mourning cloak butterfly took wing from near the top." [Heh, this is a great example of the onanistic style typical to environmental writing. Borrowing a phrase from Deepak Chopra, you simply have to practice "not minding" this style in order to enjoy and get value from this genre. It's almost all like this.]
Chapter 3: Whispering Pines?
25ff The author develops a worrying hypothesis that this year the white pines weren't going to flower or produce seed; he quotes Nietzsche that it is less important to have convictions than have the courage to attack them. And then on a drive to Vermont he sees white pine trees laden with cones. "It was disconcerting to have worked toward a seemingly well-tested conclusion, only to have it proved wrong down the road." The rest of the chapter offers hypotheses for the behavior of white pine flowering and cone production patterns.
Chapter 4: Trees?
29ff On ground pines and club moss that are like trees but yet not. Also on wood, which evolved independently at various times in ecological history.
Chapter 5: Getting By on Less
36ff Discussion here of trees' strategies: reaching high and wide versus staying on the ground; tall trees have to support and feed a massive and costly structure that then may experience icing and snow loads; on the advantages of leaf shedding; discussion here on lycopods that live on the ground and get a very brief window of light energy each year and operate on a low energy budget; on spring flowers that poke through the leaf cover; on lycopods escaping leaf cover by "running" (having runners) that essentially root and clone themselves repeatedly.
Chapter 6: Trimming the Deadwood
43ff On the "arms race" of wood production: on how some trees produce tremendous amounts of wood at great cost so they can get tall enough to access the sun for its leaves; other plants don't even bother with wood, like lycopods; also getting tall as a method for protecting your leaves from being eaten by herbivores; also in a prehistoric environment with large plants and large herbivores like dinosaurs, you could evolve to be small and survive better because you're too small to bother with; thus small disperser-type plants may find a niche.
Chapter 7: Evolution of Small vs. Big Trees
49ff On the American elm tree; on the progression of Dutch elm disease ("probably a native of Asia"), starting with beetles that carried a fungus that blocked the trees' nutrient tubes, and then other insects and birds would gradually consume the dying elm. [It's interesting how so many "invasive" species seem to come from Asia isn't it?] The author later discovers that elms are still quite common in a smaller, juvenile form, even growing on the roadsides near his home; the elm survives in a smaller form; discussion here on some of the bets involved in a tree growing large: there might be an advantage to size (but not if there's a parasite that kills you before you reproduce), thus there might be an advantage to reproducing early; further, in the long run a symbiosis might develop between the parasite and the tree to the point where the tree "could evolve to require the fungus as a signal to tell it to bloom."
56ff Now a discussion of various symbiotic relationships, like those of chloroplasts (originally algal parasites) and leaf cells; mitochondria which were symbiotic bacteria brought into the cell; algae-infecting fungi became lichen; various fungi infecting plant roots became symbiotic by helping the plant absorb nutrients from the soil; blue jays and squirrels are symbiotic because they disperse tree seeds, etc.
Chapter 8: Construction for Strength
59ff The author loses a temporary aviary building after an ice storm in 1995, also his favorite white birch tree lost several limbs; he then wanders the forest looking at the "superior design shaped by natural selection" of the various trees unscathed by the surprise ice load; on how buildings can be built with a margin of safety above any kind of expected stress; on trees however having a smaller margin of safety because extra mass or robustness is obtained at a price, thus trees and other animals in nature tend to pay for "just enough" protection from average-level stressors. [Interesting dichotomy.] The author muses on what principles are at work; on some trees having vertical twigs and a candelabra shape, versus other trees having a bending down shape with many twiglets that helps them hold water: but this "advantage" turns into a disadvantage when they are subjected to weight during an ice storm; also on leaf shedding which also removes ice loading risk; also on a 1996 spring ice/snow storm that happened after the trees had put out their leaves; the author muses on how relatively little weight brought down many branches all around the forest.
66ff On coniferous trees and their conical shape which lets them shed ice and snow like an umbrella; each layer of limbs gets some support from the tier of limbs below as the upper tiers droop under the snow/ice weight; the whole tree functions like a closing umbrella, making the tree even more conical, and so the more snow the tree takes on the more snow slides off.
Chapter 9: Wood
69ff Musings about wood and its components; on the "water chain" that makes an unbroken connection between water at the root tip all the way up to evaporation from the leaf surface; this water chain moves the water column upward; on cellulose, which gives wood its flexibility; on lignin, the bonding glue of wood cells which gives wood its strength.
73 On different types of trees that serve different purposes; on paper which works best with wood with a minimum of lignin because the lignin needs to be extracted; on the black locust tree which has so much lignin that it can be used like a nail as pegs for bolting planks.
Chapter 10: Trees as Individuals
74ff Interesting discussion at the start of this chapter about replanting a tree: the author and his son picked a red oak, cut the lateral roots about a foot and a half away from the 2-in trunk, and also pulled off half the leaves so the tree would not lose too much water given its need to regenerate a root system [probably worth filing this tidbit away, you never know when you might want to replant a tree!]; on the various idiosyncrasies of trees, based on where they were planted, what kinds of branch or ice damage they were exposed to, what other branches then grow in compensation, etc.
Chapter 11: Vines
83ff Vines use the scaffolding of other trees to get to the light much less expensively: also on maple trees that do something similar, climbing against another tree and investing much less effort into its trunk, with a trunk that's maybe two to three inches in diameter but 20-30 feet tall, leaning against successive pine branches on a nearby tree.
85ff On true vines with their grappling hooks, aerial roots, as well as their stems themselves, all of which enable climbing:
Chapter 11: Tree Geometry and Apical Dominance
89ff The author asks why and how tree growth is regulated to achieve a tree's shape; on various environmental constraints like load from ice, sun, on animals that eat a tree's leaves like giraffes, shade tolerance or light tolerance; also interesting comments on how tree rings grow thicker on the side of the tree that's exposed to bending stress so the wood acts as a support to straighten itself up, like a buttress.
95 Thoughts here on stunting or starving trees (like in bonsai) that show a tree's flexible response to circumstances.
97ff On a fir, pine or spruce tree where the central bud at the top is the tree's "leader" but if by some accident it gets destroyed, a remaining limb bud or limb will alter its course to become the tree's new vertical leader; somehow the tree "knows" to have one "head" only ("apical dominance"); also on things that screw up apical dominance, like a beetle killing the lead top of the tree causing it to send up several heads afterwards, creating a "bush tree" that grows in all directions, and thus stands no chance against competitors growing straight upwards.
100 Note here experiments done by Charles Darwin and his son Francis to discover apical dominance in other plants like grass seedlings; on the plant's tendency to bend and grow towards the light, but when these grasses were covered with a small black cap they still grew straight even when illuminated from the side; thus the Darwins concluded that something in the growing tip of the plant "sees" the light, causing it to bend towards the light source.
Chapter 12: Time to a Tree
108ff "Trees apparently also have schedules. They have times of flowering suited to make use of insects and wind for pollination, and their fruiting is scheduled so as to enhance seed dispersal by birds and wind." Musings here on "bud dormancy" in summertime, and instances where trees sometimes break dormancy in the summer.
113ff The author muses about how trees and plants measure time; circadian rhythms, seasonal rhythms with cues from environmental temperature; also on the "photoperiod" or the relative length of light versus dark in a given 24-hour cycle.
Chapter 13: Sex in Trees
118ff "[T]rees can't be attracted. They are rooted in place." On various pollination "parters" with trees, like bees, bats, various insects; trees mostly use wind for pollination, however, thus showy flowers are not necessary.
122 The author is disturbed to find that the two American chestnut trees he planted produced only empty chestnut shells--basically sterile offspring--so there aren't enough chestnut trees in the region to successfully pollinate the ones he planted.
Chapter 14: Apple Trees
125ff On fruits having a reproductive advantage if they have a rich color, this is basically like a sign that says "food's ready!" to seed-scattering birds and other animals; on the Cornell apple orchards in Geneva, NY where some 1,100 apple varieties are cultivated over 900 acres, "a Noah's ark of apple varieties." On the grafting techniques used to maintain specific apple types so they propagate "true to type": clipping buds from a dormant tree in late winter, then storing the buds in liquid nitrogen, then graft the buds onto any apple rootstock. On the anatomy of an apple tree, its flowers, how it produces fruit, etc.
Chapter 15: A Wild Apple Orchard
137ff [Interesting phenomenon here] The author attempts to save an old apple orchard by cutting the other taller trees around them that had been shading them; he had been convinced the apple trees would definitely die within 10 to 15 years, but he was shocked to find that after doing this cutting to give the apple trees more light, they all died within two years. They had adapted to living on "less energy" and were unable to handle the resumption of sun abundance. The author speculates as to why. "Sometimes a little knowledge is more dangerous than none."
Chapter 16: The Dying and the Dead
141ff On the author's property are sugar maple trees more than 200 years old, with barbed wires sticking out of them. This suggests that the land was once cleared, as these trees were along field boundaries where they held up fences to retain livestock; musings on the various insects that he sees; comments on bug zappers that don't actually kill very many of the blood sucking mosquitoes they're intended to; how a dead or dying tree can nourish all sorts of life for decades.
Chapter 17: Seeds and Seedlings
155ff On seed dormancy: seeds that can wake up even after decades and sprout when conditions are just right. On seeds that carry a lot of food/energy, like acorns and beech seeds, versus aspen seeds that are tiny and have very little nutrition; in the case of aspen trees, they release billions of seeds but very few are going to make it: and the seeds will need near-perfect conditions right from the get-go. In contrast, with their excess energy stored in the seed, a beech or acorn seed can sprout and grow for a while, even under a canopy. On the various trade-offs at work here: nutritious seeds invite predators to eat them, also the seed's mobility is lower. Another nuance: some trees will produce nut crops ("masts") that are massive in certain years, but then produce far fewer nuts in other years to try to starve out the seed-eating predators.
Chapter 18: Acorns
166ff The author drags his 13-year-old son out for an acorn picking project; he weighs the nuts, finding a wide range of variation. "Variation is a substrate for natural selection to work on, if it turns out that conditions change and one or another size becomes more adaptive."
170ff He decides to eat some of his acorns; all oak acorns can be eaten, but white oaks acorns are preferred: they have less tannin, so the nuts taste less bitter. He experiments with "sweetening" (basically soaking/boiling) the acorns to leach out tannins. "I think I could eat them, if I were very hungry."
Chapter 19: Of Birds, Trees, and Fungi
175ff Comment here on how the Ruby-throated hummingbirds will investigate anything red, even people with red in their clothing; they also will eat sap from holes made by the sapsucker bird in Birch trees. On how the sapsucker chisels off bark on a birch tree to create a "sap lick."
178 Brief comment here on [infamous malthusian] Paul Ehrlich, known for his work on butterflies and the red-naped sapsucker; on research observing the large number of birds and insects that harvest the effort of sapsucker holes in trees. A discussion of this sapsucker "pseudo-ecosystem" and comments here on the risk that a disappearance of any one element of this complex "could cause an unanticipated unraveling of the community." The author then leaps to assume from this that the entire forest is fragile to the existence of the sapsucker bird. [Fascinating to see the fear and loathing here in an a priori assumption of fragility, when nature is robust. Note the almost certain likelihood that all of these animals have many additional food sources; the fact that they interact in a "sapsucker hole ecosystem" does not mean they are all therefore fully dependent on it. The author makes multiple unjustified leaps here, all predicated on the assumptions of fragility. I love the environment, but one thing I genuinely can't stand--in myself and others!--is epistemic arrogance]
179 The author goes on to assume that the sapsucker is a "keystone species," further assuming the whole shebang will collapse if this bird experiences any harm. [Again, he assumes system dependence on one component when nature generally does not work that way. It is far more likely the system is robust in ways he doesn't see; nature tends to look more like a web with multiple instances of tensegrity. This is a really interesting logic error: it's as if he can't (or doesn't want to) hypothesize a three-dimensional or four dimensional model of interrelations and webs of inter- and independency; it's a type of WYSIATI error.]
Chapter 20: Mushrooms
180ff On hyphae, long filaments that compose most of the body of the mushroom-forming fungus, reaching underground in all directions; they are the working part of the organism, while the mushrooms we see are only temporary structures for dispersing reproductive spores. Also on the symbiotic relationship they have with trees, breaking down dead trees so the new trees can grow; also on the mycorrhiza ("fungus root") that helps the tree roots extract far more nutrients from the soil. This allows certain trees to evolve to much larger sizes.
182ff On truffles, and the 1885 discovery that there's a connection with trees; see professor A.G. Frank's work calling fungus a "wet nurse" that literally nourish the tree; this revolutionized our understanding of symbiosis in general, and "the ecological importance of fungi to forests specifically."
187 Interesting comment here on how fungicides are sprayed on apples because the fungal apple scab makes an apple unattractive and therefore unsellable; the author says that he actually chooses these apples (if the scabs are small) because it serves as a fully truthful "fungicide-free" label. Smart!
Chapter 21: Ants and Trees
188ff The author shares his fascination with formica subintegra ants [these ants sure seem to be a favorite of biologists: everyone (understandably) is fascinated by how they "milk" aphids]; also on how these ants also drive off tree leaf-eating insects; attack other ant colonies and take them as slaves, etc.
191ff Aphids are not damaging to a tree except in huge numbers; in fact, the tree might prefer to tolerate aphids and ants at the cost of some of the tree's fluids, as the aphid-farming ants can also help the tree by fighting off other insects; thus it's better to have this sort of symbiosis/parasitism instead of being eaten alive by all the other insects out there; on thinking of this system as a sort of "ant guard."
194ff The author observes the various jobs and relationships the ants perform: some ants milking aphids, others acting as runners, some acting as "tanker ants" carrying aphid milk, etc.
Chapter 22: My White Pines
196ff On Maine's original virgin white pine forests; which led to a boom in lumber exported globally beginning in the 1600s; on the destruction of the virgin pine tree stands but also the fact that this tree thrives on disturbance and clearings; its preservation actually depends on pastures, burns and logging; seedlings cannot grow under their parents or under any kind of heavy forest canopy because the trees are shade-intolerant! Thus the settlers who clearcut in order to farm inadvertently and indirectly made new white pine plantations with these actions.
202ff Note also how in the 1950s when the white pines fully recovered, they essentially crowded out and shaded out all the other plants as well as many of the animals; the author brings in a logging company to take down many of these trees to help make the forest more biologically diverse. Then he describes certain things he does with trees, like pruning certain side branches, on preventing the growth of a double trunk, leaving certain trees in clusters etc. [Very intriguing here how we can justify intervention when we think it's justified, but in general you'd think you'd want to bias towards non-intervention, and leave it up to nature.]
210ff On how pine trees can grow up without a lot of branches, or laterally grow lots of branches as needed, all based on competition from other trees for sunlight, or based on the amount of space the tree may have around it. The tree knows to "invest" or "disinvest" in limbs and branches as needed, or it can self-prune in order to grow tall and straight if in a sunlight-competitive environment.
212ff Discussion of George III of England claiming all trees above a certain size for the Crown; basically they were to be used for masts or for shipping; the British bombarded and burned Portland (then Falmouth), ME in 1775 because Maine opposed this exclusivity to England, preferring to sell trees to other countries--which the Crown saw as selling to England's enemies. And then the author concludes this chapter worrying whether our fossil fuels will soon run out and whether "fossil fuels will become so expensive that we will turn back to the tall pines to hold up the sails to harness the winds?"
Chapter 23: A Celebration
217ff The author thinks about his economic windfall he received by buying his land 20 years ago: his cash profit already has twice exceeded his original purchase price, including all of his property taxes and expenses; this was from selling aspen logs for paper, spruce and pine logs for boards, and birch logs for veneer. The author makes sure to tell the reader here that the money he got was "only a very small percentage of the total dollar value of the timber, which largely benefited others" including work for nine local loggers and work for local sawmills.
Appendix A: The Trees for the Forest
[This section makes an aggressive argument against tree "plantation" planting.]
221 The author originally wanted just a cabin site and was going to sell off the forest acreage, but later he became attached to the woods. He also cites a recent Maine law that requires him as a landowner to submit a forest management plan to the state forestry office.
222 He's surprised by aspects of the logging operators he hired: he expected the most damage from the loggers who were the most "mechanized"; it turned out to be the opposite, when he hired a horse logger [!] the man had to actually bulldoze a full road so a truck could haul the logs out. [Things are not always as they seem, modernity isn't always a shitshow 100% of the time]. But then the author tries to epistemically resolve this back in his favor by presuming that the mechanized operator has to be worse, somehow: he assumes the larger operator has large financing costs, thus he has to "cut huge amounts of timber quickly just to see out a profit above and beyond paying for his equipment"; he assumes that a larger company would take away jobs from local people. [Milton Friedman would respond to this by saying, you should just give everybody a handsaw, this would minimize overhead and maximize local employment! We all see what we want to see, and resolve our arguments accordingly, don't we?]
224 Now the reader learns that the forest management plan provided to the state results in the author getting a tax break for using the land to grow wood. [The author left this part out when was talking about the economics of his forestland earlier in the appendix.]
225ff The author criticizes the tree plantations grown by paper companies, the companies show these plantations off and say it is "sustainable forestry"; the author is not convinced, he prefers natural forests [uh, well, except when he logs/plants specific trees on his own land to change up the tree population...], he considers plantations a step above clearcutting: "Unlike a tree plantation, my forest contains an integrated highly interdependent mix of species that grows best at all the different climactic conditions and aspects of drainage and soil that are unique to my hill. The hill selects them. [Wait, does it really?] The forest contains tens of thousands of species of insects, thousands of fungi, dozens of birds... A tree plantation grows wood as a crop. Period. Crops such as beans, wheat, and corn are genetically altered plants that can no longer exist in ecosystems. We have destroyed a major portion of the Earth's ecosystems--prairies, wetlands, forests, to grow crops. So far trees have not been genetically altered much to make them pure crops. I shudder at the thought of more progress in this direction, because in the long term it would mean they could no longer survive in a natural forest. Progress in this direction ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, spells obliteration of even more forest to make more plantations." [Another standard feature of environmental writing is a climaxing lecture like the one you just read--including the words "I shudder." It's on the genre's bingo card. Again, you have to "not mind" this kind of writing in order to enjoy this type of literature. I knew this author had it in him! Note that this is a style comment only: I fully agree with his opinion here.]
228 "Herbiciding for 'forestry' is a deforestation technique adapted for creating lebensraum for a given species." [The use of the word lebensraum is extremely interesting and an example of excellent rhetoric. This is of course the word the Nazis used to justify Germany's territorial expansion in the 1930s-40s.]
228 "...tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling." [Again, good rhetoric here.]
229 The author cites Finland using "gross vice presented as a virtue" by calling what they do sustainable forestry, but in reality planting trees such that 98% of its tree growth is even-aged monoculture of exotic trees; the author calls this "permanent deforestation": even though technically there are trees everywhere, they aren't trees in any way in the sense of a natural forest.
231 [Another environmental writing bingo card square hit here: misanthropy! It can be found in subtle/subconscious form (as in this instance), or in blatant form (like in Paul Gruchow's openly misanthropic writing).] The author here discusses the Sundarban forest, on the border between India and Bangladesh, which is populated by man-eating tigers. The author writes, morbidly: "To use the Sundarban forest in India you must pay a tax--the perhaps one-in-a-thousand chance that you'll be eaten by a tiger. A suburban person in Boston using the forest (say by building a house, using a shopping bag, buying a book or a newspaper) is too far removed from the cost of maintaining the forest to pay directly..."
Appendix B: The Trees and Shrubs of My Forest
[This contains a list of all the different plant types in the author's 300 acres of forest land, coniferous trees, rare trees, shrubs, introduced plants, etc.]
To Read:
Bernd Heinrich: Bumblebee Economics
Bernd Heinrich: One Man's Owl
Bernd Heinrich: A Year in the Maine Woods
Charles Darwin: The Power of Movement in Plants
David Attenborough: The Private Lives of Plants
Michael F. Allen: The Ecology of Mycorrhizae
Ian Ferguson: Sustainable Forest Management
Sy Montgomery: Spell of the Tiger