Trees

My routine varied this morning due to a shortage of time. Lib starts work an hour later, at 8.ooam, every second Thursday when her day isn't working with patients, but catching up on documentation. So when I woke a little later than usual at 6.30am it was too late to get my walk in and still be around to make a cup of tea and discuss the day before she left at 7.30.
After she left I bundled both dogs into the van and drove up to the town, parking at Puffing Billy station and taking off for a short walk along the railway line. This was a quick easy option without the need to have them on a lead. I've been taking young 'Pip' on my walk for the last 10 days now and I have to admit it has tested my patience. She's turning out to be an excellent little dog, but taking two dogs instead of one has detracted from the sheer joyful relaxed bliss of the walk. It's OK on those stretches where I let them off the lead but otherwise both my hands are full and it's hard to stop to pick up a can or other litter without a juggling act. And young 'Pip' changes direction erratically, stops and starts, and even barks at passing cars and leaps at them, and wants to chase every bird she sees. Today
with 'Snowy' and 'Pip' free to run, but still follow me, I was free to look at the trees or the views. A mist hung in the valley, clinging to trees and dripping to the ground. There's a variety of tree types around the station and railway line, evergreen and deciduous, including bhutan, baltic, and radiata pines, cypress, fir, spruce, oaks, elm, planes, tulip trees, poplars, holly, bay, and of course messmates and peppermints, and they enjoy misty mornings. The ground round the base, under the canopy line can be quite wet yet bone dry away from the tree. They're expert at trapping moisture from the air.
Where would I be without trees to keep me sane. I have realized it so forcefully, trees are my major interest in life. The great thing is that just about everywhere you go there are trees to look at and try to identify. They're wonderful things. They give us timber for building, fuel for heating, fruit and foliage for food and beauty, and they suck carbon from the air and produce oxygen.
I'm reading James Michener's 'Texas' and I came to a part where Jubal and Mattie Quimper came across a new tree on their journey through the wilds, a tree with large thorns and rough large fruit, an osage orange. Immediately I remembered seeing a row of trees, unfamiliar to me, along a road out the back of Bendigo some years ago. After some investigation I found out they were the osage orange, Maclura pommifera, a native of Nth America. It's exciting. Apparently the fruit is useless to man and beast but because of the thorns they can make an impenetrable hedge and the hard, flexible timber is prized for making archery bows.
Last week I was in the garden under two Nyssa sylvaticas we have in the back yard and the hum of bees on the inconspicuous flowers was extraordinary. The Nyssa is also a native of Nth America and produces good honey crops in the south of USA, known as tupelo honey. The Quimpers stopped travelling and took up land and built a 'cave house' when they found a place on a river with a lot of bee trees and honey. As coincidence has it I'm currently applying for a grant from the Cardinia council under the shire beautification scheme to purchase and plant 6 Nyssa sylvaticas in Nobelius Heritage Park. The price from Established Tree Transplanters is $187 each for two metre tall trees next winter. I touch wood that the application will be successful. The Nyssa has spectacular autumn foliage, as good as it gets, all the reds through to bold yellow.