Northern Red Oaks
Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”
Growing Up with Oak Trees
I have loved oak trees as long as I can remember. When I was a kid growing up in Rhode Island, we lived in a Cape Cod house on a quarter-acre lot that, like all of the other lots in our little village, had a half dozen or so oak trees. The large ones in the front yard produced mammoth crops of acorns, and in the fall, we raked their fallen leaves into large piles so we could run through and roll over in them. These stately specimens, without any branches lower than ten feet off the ground, were too big to climb. The ones in our back yard were tall enough to provide summer shade, but too small to climb. Since my friends and I preferred climbing trees to raking leaves or gazing at the noble, inaccessible limbs of an aged oak, we had to venture further afield to have some fun.
[1] Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountains. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.
Fortunately, we had many choices in our neighborhood. Several proper climbing oaks were at the end of a vacant lot just down the street. We could jump up, grab the lowest branch, and hoist ourselves up to a spot where we could reach other branches and work our way up into the canopy, visible only to the resident robins and squirrels. When we were old enough to explore the other side of the school yard, we found a spot where a half dozen medium-sized oaks ringed a hole about eight feet across. We could easily climb any one of them, then go from branch to branch all around the little circle. Naturally, we called this delightful place “Monkey Tree Island.”
One of the few pictures I remember drawing in elementary school showed a robin sitting in its nest in a crook of a branch of an oak tree. When we vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard or visited Cape Cod, I discovered many different kinds of oaks, some well-suited for the sandy soils close to the water and some better off on the hillsides. When I joined boy scouts, we camped and hiked through forests dominated by oaks, and I probably figured that was what forests were supposed to be like. When I went to college in Cambridge, Mass, I walked to class under a row of immense oaks that lined Memorial Drive. After we were married, we lived next to Arnold Arboretum, where majestic pin oaks lined the road that we followed to the top of Peter’s Hill for its splendid view of the city.
In short, for most of my life, I have lived, gone to school, or worked in places where I was never more than a few feet from the nearest oak tree.
Are There Oaks in Foss Woods?
We bought an old farm house in Sugar Hill in 1997, and I soon made a rough trail into the nearby woods, which were filled with vast amounts of pine, fir, maple, poplar, birch, ash, and beech. I was too busy exploring this fascinatingly diverse forest to notice or comment upon any shortage of oaks.
A couple of years later, when an 80-acre parcel within this forest was surveyed for house lots, we joined our neighbors in an effort that eventually conserved this land, now known as Foss Woods, as the first property acquired by the newly-formed Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust (ACT).
When ACT hired a forester to plan a series of patch cuts in Foss Woods, our neighbor Harry Reid was surprised to find that the forester included northern red oaks in his pre-cut inventory. Harry and I had, by that time, created rough trails leading from our yards out into and through the woods, and we had each spent a lot of time along these trails. Harry asked me, “Did you ever see any oaks out there?” I hadn’t, and we both wondered what the forester was talking about.
That was enough impetus for me to take a closer look. I soon learned that finding oaks requires considerable time and effort when there are only a few of them dispersed here and there amidst the other trees. The youngest seedlings will be covered by the underbrush, which is often so thick that you really don’t want to press too far off the trail. A lone oak sapling doesn’t stand out much in a forest that is densely filled with other green-leaved trees. Even the largest trees can be hard to spot, because they rise for ten or twenty or more feet before they have any branches. Unless you look straight up, you won’t even notice that you’re walking under just what you’re looking for.
October 7, 2006. An oak sapling stands out in an opening in a blow-down area in the Lower 40. Dozens of downed trees covered this opening with what seemed to be a giant’s set of pick-up sticks. Neither the deer, the moose, nor I had any interest in making a trail through this chaos – which let oaks like this grow with no fear of browsing.
The late fall is the best time – and the only good time - to find oaks that are just starting to gain a foothold in a forest like Foss Woods. After the colorful foliage has mostly fallen, the woods open up, and the leaf-laden oaks and beeches can easily be seen from a distance of fifty or more yards. The oaks can be distinguished from the beech trees, because their leaves are generally larger, darker and redder than the more delicate, lighter, yellowish beech leaves.
October 26, 2009: Is that an oak? Can I zoom in for a photo that shows the leaves standing out against the sky? Yes! So take the photo. And yes - those are indeed the reddish-brown leaves of an oak doing its best to add to the late fall foliage.
For several years, I crisscrossed Foss Woods each fall, wandering up and down the hillsides hoping to find more oaks. This took quite a bit of time, but time spent in the woods is always time well spent, and I eventually documented the size and location of more than 250 trees. A majority of these were seedlings less than 30 inches tall, but more than a dozen large, acorn-bearing oaks were found on the north slopes of Bronson Hill.
So I eventually was able to answer Harry’s question. “Yes, there are oaks in Foss Woods, but not very many.”
October 7, 2006: When the light is right, oak leaves can be quite beautiful, especially in the fall. Since Foss Woods and most other nearby forests have so few oaks, I am always quite excited by a chance to capture the unexpected shades of greens and reds just emerging in the leaves of a young oak.
Foss Woods, a Typical North Country Forest
In a classic oak forest, the ground will be covered by acorns, not every year, but in the best years. There will be so many that all of the squirrels and blue jays and little boys and girls will never pick all of them up to hide for winter food or to make little pipes. In those areas, little oaks thrive, and you can find dozens of two-foot oaks within a few square yards.
There are some such forests in the North Country. I can recall walking through one of them near the beginning of the trail up Blueberry Mountain, which is a couple of miles south of Long Pond in Benton. Friends in Shelburne tell me that oaks dominate the forests and mountainsides on the north side of the Androscoggin, and there likely are many similar bands of oaks found throughout the White Mountains.
However, we are close to the northern edge of the range for northern red oaks, so what I have found in Foss Woods is probably typical of many forests in the North Country. While you will find a few oaks wherever you walk, most of them will be small, and nearly all of them too young to have any acorns.
From Acorn to Sapling
Oak trees are in no rush to produce any acorns. Twenty years ago, when I spent a lot of time in the Lower 40 documenting the locations of the largest firs and pines, I also looked for oaks. While I did come across several dozen, I only found two oaks that were at least six inches in diameter and at least twenty feet tall, and they were too young to produce acorns. Since the nearest mature oak is probably a quarter mile away, all of the oaks in the Lower 40 have emerged from acorns brought in by blue jays, other birds, or by me. I haven’t managed to convince any squirrels that they should spend more time spreading acorns, and even if I had, I suspect they’d be too lazy to bring them a quarter mile from the nearest mature oak down to the Lower 40.
October 16, 2022. These are the two largest oaks in the Lower 40. The dark leaves of the closest tree have the characteristic shape of a red oak. The brilliant sunshine highlights the yellows and reds of the leaves of the distant oak, which is doing the best it can to emulate the fall foliage of the maples. This moment of color won’t last, as all the leaves will soon turn brown.
Gaining a Foothold
What we see in and around Sugar Hill is the vanguard of oaks pushing north as they adapt to the warming climate. Since you and I are much more mobile than squirrels and blue jays, we can perhaps speed up their advance. So, when I do happen upon an oak-dominated forest, I pick up some acorns for distribution along trails through places like Foss Woods and the Lower 40.
I now recognize that the tiny oaks I come across are much more than an inconsequential few of the thousands of small trees found in the woods. They are young pioneers pushing northward, and I am happy whenever I across one, no matter how small. Oaks are not known for their colors or their beauty, but in early spring or late fall, if the sun is right, you may get a chance to take a fine “baby picture” for what will become, long after we’re all gone, a mature grove of northern red oaks.
October 16, 2022. I came across this lovely, tiny oak while walking along one of my trails in the Lower 40. Will this tree mature as part of a majestic grove of northern red oaks?
