The sugar maples I climbed there in the late 1950s were about 10-15 cm in diameter and perhaps 8-10 m tall. I got to know the species intimately as a pre-schooler by shinnying up some young specimens on the grounds of the Sharon Temple in Sharon, ON. I whisper a prayer for whatever is the afterlife of trees, and hum a favorite hymn, “Ein Feste Burg,” singing a sad goodbye to what was, indeed, a mighty fortress.ĭaryln Brewer Hoffstot’s book “A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests” will be published by Stackpole Books in April.It would be impossible to grow up in a rural area of the Maritimes (and the southern portions of ON and QC) and not be aware of the sugar maple ( Acer saccharum Marsh.). I thank the tree for its contribution to this farm, for standing by my family in good times and bad. I say how grateful I am to have spent a third of a century under its gaze. Now when I close the chicken coop at night, I stand in the altar and give a eulogy. I feel as if I am losing a member of the family. “Standing people” is what the Cherokee called trees. “Once it colonizes the root system and displays visible mushrooms, the fungus is well progressed within the tree,” Crooks says. Individual trees and entire forests are becoming less resilient against pests and disease because of climate change.įor our old maple, the Armillaria fungus is a death knell. Sudden periods of wet and then dry increase stress on the tree and allow fungi to more easily infiltrate a tree’s root system. He tells me that while Armillaria fungus is not new, western Pennsylvania is becoming more favorable for fungal development. I don’t know how large ours is, but I do worry about it encroaching on a nearby tree, a large red oak that is a favorite of my husband’s. ![]() A patch of Armillaria was discovered in Oregon in 1998 covering 2384 acres. I learn that the Armillaria fungus is the world’s largest known organism, bigger than the 200-ton blue whale. If I remove the bark, I might see bright, white mycelial fans. Black, stringy rhizomorphs grow through the soil into the roots and trunk of the tree and attack the wood. The Armillaria fungus affects many hardwoods and conifers, especially maples, oaks, and elms. The giveaway, he says, are the small honey-colored mushrooms at the tree’s base, which indicate the maple has a fungus: Armillaria root rot. Maples are prone to many diseases, such as anthracnose, verticillium wilt, and powdery mildew, but I am still confused, so I call Brian Crooks, a forester with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. I do not know why the tree is dying, so I do some research. For the first time, I see three woodpecker holes, so beautifully aligned they look like Orion’s belt. More plants grow in the tree’s crevices: purple blackberry canes, spiky grasses and red-tinged euonymus. It faded slowly at first, but last summer it began to go fast, its lichen-covered limbs snapping and falling to the ground, the gray bark covered with dark green moss. The maple’s gnarly roots protrude out of the ground like those you’d see illustrated in “Alice in Wonderland.” We hung maple samaras, those winged seeds like helicopters, on our noses. I remember our son climbing into the hollow that formed, where ferns now grow. ![]() Sometime, long before we arrived at our western Pennsylvania farm 34 years ago, the main trunk split into four. The maple lives at the bottom of a hill where our children used to ride sleds in winter and jump into colorful leaf piles in autumn. ![]() ![]() I don’t know if it ever provided sweet sap as other maples have in this valley, but a friend who grew up here and has tapped sugar maples for fifty years says he’s never seen a bigger Acer saccharum. Young, perhaps, for maples, which can live up to 300 years. My husband and I guess the tree is about the age of our old log house, circa 1860, but we’re not sure. I can stand underneath the tree in the rain and barely get wet. Our maple, no record-holder, is smaller, about 90 feet tall with a 70-foot canopy, but still of a size one doesn’t see every day. That tree was a national champion: 19 feet in circumference, 101 feet tall with a canopy that stretched 100 feet. Not as large as the maple that was felled in New Hampshire in 2021. I measure its girth: 13.5 feet in circumference. Its tall branches tower above me like flying buttresses, its wide canopy is a sanctuary. Standing under the old sugar maple, I want to sing a hymn.
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