University Place

How Trees Built the Midwest

– Welcome. Today we’re gonna talk a little bit about How Trees Built The Midwest. My name is Jay Dampier, and I’m with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. I have a background in trees, I got a bunch of degrees in trees, I have some training in social sciences, but I’m gonna warn you, I have no training in history, and I figured we’re gonna talk about history today, [laughing] so we’ll see how good I do. So we’ve got five trees that we’re gonna talk about; for sure we’ll get to four, depending on time, I’m watching my watch, I don’t wanna upset the people at PBS or Garden Expo; if you don’t know, you do not wanna upset those folks at all, so I wanna keep in their good graces. So five trees, but we’re definitely gonna cover four today. The first tree is oppositely-branched, so this is the main stem here. Opposite-branching are trees and shrubs that have branches that come directly from, the lateral branches come directly off that main stem, okay, not to be confused– that’s opposite, and my writing is not very good. Not to be confused with alternate-branching, which those branches will come off at separate spots. So with opposite-branching, you will have two lateral branches coming from the same spot.

So by a show of hands, and if you’re watching this at home, you can raise your hand too, it’s okay, who here has heard the term, raise your hands, “MAD horse” as it’s related to tree ID. I see a few hands, not too many, okay. So “MAD horse,” M-A-D and then the word horse. Opposite-branching trees are MAD horse: maple, ashes, dogwood, horse chestnut. [audience murmuring] Everything else, everything else is alternate. So the first tree, the first hint of the first tree that we’re talking about today is it is one of those MAD horse trees, so one of those four trees. The next little bit of botanical terminology I’m gonna share with you is simple versus compound leaf, compound leaves. A simple leaf, if you consider a simple leaf, it’s basically, here’s that branch again, and it has one leaf stem and one leaf blade. Doesn’t always have to look like a weird oval, it could be different shapes, but it’s basically one leaf stem with one leaf blade. Compound leaves have that leaf stem, that leaf stem so to speak continues on, and it has little leaflets which come off of that main access or that main leaf stem.

Now some people may confuse this as perhaps a branch with a bunch of little leafs on it. The way you can tell that a compound leaf is in fact a compound leaf is because when fall comes around, that whole structure drops off here, just like if you have a little single-leaf tree or shrub, that leaf comes off, so it’s a compound leaf. So we’re talking a plant that is oppositely-branched, compound leaves. Are there any guesses? Ash, you read my notes. [laughing] So the first tree we’re talking about today is the ash tree, and this particular one here is a green ash. These ash trees are widely planted throughout much of the Midwest, they’re a really tough tree, they do incredibly well in urban settings. Also, this particular species of ash is also used for wildlife values, like wildlife like deer like it, which I know as somebody who’s trying to grow plants, that may not be a good thing. It also is great in parks and in street tree plantings because it provides a nice shade, and like I said, they’re really tough in the sense that typically urban settings are a little bit harsher to the trees, and they do well under those harsh conditions. Another ash tree is the white ash, and white ash are probably best known or one of the things they are best known for is this beautiful fall color that you get, this bronze, purpley fall foliage. The trees are again used in parks and street trees, and they’re again, they’re a very beautiful tree.

When it comes to products, there’s a number of forest products that are used by ash, like bats and various other, like tool handles and things like that; also ash trees, because of the structure of their leaves, they tend to allow some light to come through, which allows turf grass to grow a little bit better under ash trees relative to you know, other trees. And probably some of you are thinking, “Why is this guy talking about ash trees?” [laughing] Because we have a problem, don’t we? Okay I’m getting there, I’m getting there, and yeah, we’re getting there. But the story of the ash tree starts off by the story of this tree. This is the American elm, and these were widely planted in the early part of like the 1900s, like 1928, sorry, the late 1800s early 20, late 1800s, early 1900s. And these were again, they were planted for their beautiful structure. You can see here this cathedral-type look, they did well in urban settings, they were a tough tree. In 1928, there is this little virus that came in called the Dutch elm disease, which again, many listeners will understand, will know something about Dutch elm disease. First of all, it wasn’t from the Netherlands, you may not have known that, [chuckling] it’s actually from Asia, but this particular disease came in in late 1928, but it didn’t really start decimating the urban elm population till probably like the ’50s or so. So it was in North America, it was kind of there, some trees were dying, but it really took off sometime around the mid ’50s, and one of the big things that made this disease so successful were that there were two primary vectors that were involved in the decimation of the tree. Vector number one, or yeah, we use the word vector, basically these little beetles, elm bark beetles would travel from tree to tree, eating the trees, doing their thing, and the virus would hitch a ride on them and go from tree to tree that way.

Secondarily, you saw that picture with the street trees, right? They also traveled under the ground. So if you have elm trees that are relatively close to each other, those roots will come together and graft together, and that disease will go from one individual tree to another individual tree under the ground. So it’s just a matter of time before you had street trees, if you had one or two trees on a street that had that Dutch elm disease, even if there wasn’t a lot of beetle population, there’s a good chance over time, as those roots start to graft, that you’re gonna get some serious problems. So Dutch elm starts to die, everything’s going along just fine, the elms are dying and we’re deciding “Okay, we need to replace “these dying trees with something else. ” Ash steps in. So we start overplanting ash trees through many of the communities in the Midwest. This publication from the Arnold Arboretum in ’82 lists twelve trees, and guess which tree is on that list? We kind of repeated history again here, so we overplanted an elm tree that was great for its time, then a disease, yeah disease came in, then we say, “Hey, we need to find another replacement. ” Some communities overplanted ash, and now we’re facing that same problem again. So this would be a you know, me kind of advocating for urban foresters and a lot of urban foresters are doing this now, is really planting very diverse forest settings. So now you know, if a disease, some exotic disease or insect comes in, basically it’s not gonna take over you know, 40% of your urban tree canopy, it might take out 2%, which is a lot better to deal with.

So going back to the ash, this might be a little critter that some of you may recognize, the emerald ash borer. It came into the U. S. in 2002 in, let me double check, yep, 2002 in Detroit, Michigan. They’re not exactly sure how it came in, but it came in, and by 2008 we found it in Wisconsin, this is a photograph of an adult. The adults are typically about half an inch by about an eighth of an inch in width. The adults aren’t the major destructive life stage of the critter, it’s actually the larval stage. So this here’s a photograph of an elm tree that was, this is dead now as you might imagine, what happens is the elm– the Dutch, what am I talking about? The emerald ash borer, [laughing] the emerald ash borer larvae will feed underneath the bark, eating that conductive tissue, and you see all these little, little trails, so each one of these trails represents a larva that has went through and fed this conductive tissue. Now these conductive tissues are really important in plants as you might imagine, because that’s where the water nutrients move up and down the tree. So when you block that ability for the tree to move fluids and nutrients up and down the tree, that tree eventually ceases to exist.
So just to give you an example of how serious this insect can be. This photograph was taken by Dan Herms, who’s one of the leading emerald ash borer researchers. He was at the Ohio State, now he’s at Davey Tree, and this was taken in 2006 okay, this is before we really had a good handle on this particular critter. That’s the after picture. In case you’re wondering, no, that isn’t in October or November when the leaves have dropped. That’s August, and that’s only three years later so, and again, this is before we really had any good treatment strategies you know, available to us at the time, so and it caught us off guard as you know, tree care people and urban foresters. So within three years this critter can, if it goes unchecked, knock out local populations of ash, so it is a really serious, serious problem. So this is the point of the conversation where if you own an ash tree or perhaps you live near a park where there’s an ash tree, this is where you start feeling a little depressed, all right, so what can we do? Well, one thing is we can cut it down, that’s a legitimate response. In some municipalities, they will pick and choose winners and losers, and if there’s maybe an ash tree that’s in decline, they might tag it to be removed, and then in other cases there might be some really brilliant, beautiful ash trees and they may decide to save it. And there are some things we can do to save ash trees.

Another option some municipalities use, this is a photograph from Princeton, Wisconsin is they just wanted to raise public awareness, so the idea is that– and there’s a few different reasons why you might wanna do this. This particular campaign happened prior to the insect arriving in Princeton, it’s there now, but it wasn’t there a few years ago. And this has to do probably a little bit to do with politics, because if one year you have the urban parks and rec budget being this, and then all of a sudden you have 80 ash trees dead and you got to do something with that, it helps get the tax payers ready as well as the local government decision-makers ready for that, and gets them thinking about “How are we gonna deal with this pest “prior to it actually coming?” The other thing too I do wanna mention, I’m not gonna give any recommendations right here, but there are chemicals available, so tree care professionals do have a couple tools in their toolbox. One is soil drenches, so they can treat the ground right around the base of the ash tree, those chemicals then get drawn up through the roots into that conductive tissue we just mentioned, and that prevents the insect from continuing on. Also, arborists can also inject the trees and they directly drill and inject the tree, and then that chemical will get into place and protect the tree.

And depending on the formulation, you could get multiple years of protection prior to having to go in and treat again. So here I’m putting on my horticulturalist hat now as a UW-Extension person, we have tons of resources available, so if you have an ash tree, we have a great little two-page fact sheet, there’s a QR code here, so if you have your camera, feel free to take a snap of that, or you could just simply search “Is my ash tree worth saving, UW-Extension Madison,” something like that, and you’ll get that fact sheet. And we have a bunch of other resources available as well, one of my colleagues, Laura Jull, has created alternative trees to ash, so there’s a number of really good resources available that we have through UW-Madison. Let’s move on to tree number four, or maybe three. All right, so this one here is also opposite-branched, right, so we know that it’s what? We know it’s MAD and then horse, right.

So I’ll tell you right now I’m not gonna give you another ash, so it’s A, D, or horse. All right, the leaves are simple. So remember what I said about simple leaf? So it’s a little leaf stem and a blade. Now this particular tree’s blade does not look like that, it’s more like this, and this is a test of my inability to draw. [audience murmuring] And I think I heard it. [audience murmuring] Is it– [laughing] Somebody said it, okay, I’m not gonna subject you to any more of this terrible drawing. It is a maple, [laughing] sugar maple to be exact, our state tree. So the sugar maple was, became our state tree in 1893, okay, and it was put to a vote with Wisconsin school children, and other trees in the running were, I need to double check my notes here, oaks, pines, elms were also some other favorites, but the maple tree won out. During the state’s centennial in 1948, the tree was put to a vote again. This is kind of a local politics joke, it had a recall vote, and it won. [laughing]

I know, maybe that’s a bad joke, I know, I’m probably gonna get in trouble for that, don’t write me nasty emails. But it won again because in 1948 the legislature also came up with some other symbols as well. So the state bird and there was the state flower, and a few other symbols of the state, and at that time the state tree was put up to a vote again, and it was again accepted as the state tree for the state of Wisconsin. It is a main component in the hardwoods of the Northeast U. S. , but also a key component in parts of different forests throughout Wisconsin. So if you go to the Driftless area, if you go to areas of Door County, there’s parts of the Northwoods, many counties throughout the state. I know of people who tap sugar maple either just for themselves as farms or for selling as kind of a side cottage business, so sugar maple is truly in many parts of the state. It is an excellent park tree for parks, it’s an excellent tree for you know, either specimen trees or lawns, it’s a shade tree. And sometimes people will ask, “Well, what’s a shade tree? “Like, aren’t all trees cast shade?” Right, so it’s a shade, every tree is a shade tree.

One of the kind of general definitions that we use for shade trees are they’re roughly as tall as they are wide. So you know, where if you think of a nice little narrow, columnar tree, sure that produces a little bit of shade too, but it’s not something you’re going to drag a lawn chair under and sit under the shade, so shade tree: beautiful. And also, certainly it has beautiful fall color as well. So how do you think sugar maple built the Midwest? So we kind of hinted at it a little bit. There’s the urban plantings, you know, in certain situations urban plantings are great. Sugar maple, you have to be careful in urban settings though, ’cause they don’t do well in where the soil is compacted, they don’t do well if there is salt nearby, and if you happen to be in an area where there’s a lot of pollution, they won’t do real well there either. So if those conditions aren’t met, sugar maples can be a great park tree or great specimen tree if you have enough space to house one of them. So that aside, I think I heard somebody whisper. Mapling, sugaring right? Maple sugar is an incredibly important industry in the state. So in Wisconsin alone, there is $7 million in sugar maple production per year, these are numbers from the USDA.

We don’t really think of ourselves as a sugar mapling state, but there are pockets where it is commercially viable. When you add up Wisconsin with Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio, and you add up all those productions with Wisconsin, we’re now looking at about $20 million in production, so it’s not insignificant. Perhaps we’re not Vermont, but it’s not insignificant. You know, Vermont hits around 140 sorry, 400, 540, sorry, $54 million in production. And then when you compare that to the entire U. S. production, we’re looking at 141. So our region, about 20, I wanna make sure I got that right, about 20 million, Vermont, 54 million, and 141 million for the entire nation. So we certainly contribute into that overall supply. So how did we learn about sugar maple in the first place? Absolutely yeah, the First Nations people of the U.S. And depending on where the settlers first learned this information, they may have learned it as settlers in New England, learned how to do it, and then brought that knowledge with them to the Midwest when western expansion and we started moving west, or if they didn’t have that knowledge, there is a good likelihood that they may have learned from the First Nations people in Wisconsin or other states, which are states now in the Midwest.

So what are some other economic contributions sugar maple make to the economy? Other ways that sugar maple builds the economy in Wisconsin? – Audience Member: Hardwoods. – Hardwoods, tons of yeah, there’s tons of products that come from maple wood. So you think well, hardwood flooring is often one that comes to first to mind, furniture, veneer, gunstocks, tool handles, there’s a number of things that we use sugar maple wood for, instruments is another one, guitars and various other stringed instruments. So it really is an important tree species for some of our you know, products that we use, our wood products. There’s one other one. Have you ever heard of the term leaf peepers? – Audience Member: Yeah! – I see a few nods okay, leaf peepers. Fall color. Tourism is an important industry in this state, very important, like 13 billion with a B dollars important.

I wasn’t able to find any estimates as to how much of that is used in leaf peeping, but it is an important piece of the overall tourism expenditures in our state. When you add up you know, day trips for gas and hotels maybe and restaurants, often, I’ve talked with some bed and breakfast owners in areas where there’s a lot of fall color, and there’s certain weeks where they’re packed solid and it’s largely due to the leaf peepers. I wanna point your direction, point you to this website, this is a fantastic website by the Department of Tourism here in Wisconsin. It’s travelwisconsin. com/ fall-color-report. And this tracks the progress of fall color during the season. If you go to the website right now, it’s gonna be all brown. At some point they’re gonna, because it’s past peak right, you see that on the screen, at some point late summer they’re gonna reset that, probably the late summer, and that’s gonna be all green, and then as the fall color happens during the season, those different counties light up different colors. So you can plan your day trips, or if you wanna do a weekend getaway and you want to coordinate that with fall color change, maybe do some hiking, that’s a great little resource to you. So if you’ve never used that before, I highly encourage you to check that out.

Moving on to tree number, next one, three. We’ll see. [chuckling] So the first two trees were opposite-branched, right, this one is alternate. So as I mentioned, MAD horse trees, pretty much everything else is– The deciduous trees are not that, so we know it’s not a maple, ash, dogwood, or horse chestnut. So that leaves pretty much everything else, right? So it’s opposite, sorry, it’s alternate-branched, I might have said opposite before, I misspoke. And their leaves are simple, okay, so it’s one leaf stalk, and it’s a leaf like that. Now I’m gonna attempt to draw it sort of the way it’s supposed to look if I don’t mess up here, there we go, and it’s double sawtooth, so you think of double serrated, double sawtooth leaf and it’s not a good drawing. If you’ve figured that out, let’s talk after. Probably the most showy characteristic and probably the most important characteristic of this particular tree is that it has a white bark. Yeah, you guys are good, yeah I know.

And there’s a white exfoliating bark that’s very beautiful for winter interest [laughing] yes, white birch. White birch is an important tree in the Midwest for a couple of reasons. One, it does provide really beautiful winter interest in your yards and gardens. One of the challenges with this particular tree is it really is a more Northern species, and when I say Northern species I mean like Northern like, zone two Canada Northern species. There are cultivars that are a little better suited to do well here, whereas if a natural-growing white birch up in you know, maybe Northern Minnesota may live 60 to 80 years, here you might get 20 years. They just don’t do as well in the warmer climates. But they are beautiful, and they are a really nice tree if you’re willing to deal with the problems that come with birch, and there are some. There’s the borer and there’s different leaf miners, and there’s different things that just create a few challenges for somebody who wants to grow a birch. Let’s take a little jump back in history now. I’m gonna play a little picture association game with you.

So we have the state of Wisconsin, very good, [audience laughing] you’re paying attention and I’m very happy to see that. That’s a birch tree. Top hat. I’m hearing a rodent’s name, whispers from the audience. Beavers, badgers yeah, oh I wish it was a badger! [laughing] Beavers. So are we seeing the connection yet? Well, we’ll get to it. So back a century or two ago, one of the primary economies in many parts of this part of the world, in the Midwest is the fur trade. So French voyagers would work with the First Nations people, the original inhabitants of the area, and they would trap beaver, which would then be processed into top hats. The reason why top hats were really important back, and we’re talking like the 1650s to the 1850s roughly, so for about a 200-year period is when fur trade was a really big deal in parts of the Midwest, also in large, vast areas of Canada as well. Birch or sorry, not birch fur, beaver fur can be shaved from the pelts and pressed into a felt, which then is able to be made into these beautiful, historic-looking top hats.

One of the main reasons why this was such an important technology of the day was that those hats were waterproof, and this was in a day before Gore-Tex or these fancy new chemistries that we have these waterproof clothing. This was one of the very few things that they could use to keep their heads dry. And if folks were farming, if folks were– We think of top hats now as a very fancy smancy thing that people wear at, I don’t know, like weddings or something. They are, well I don’t know if anybody wears top hats anymore, but back then, they were used to protect their heads from the rain, also that brim would keep a little bit of the sun off too and that sort of thing. [audience member murmuring] The comment was, “Maybe those folks are wearing beaver hats. ” Yeah, I don’t think so in this case. They should be though, dang it. The voyagers were a poor class; the likelihood of them wearing top hats, it’s probably a little lower, yeah. Yeah, so this is not an original photograph, this is pre-digital photography, and actually you can see that little pull cord, you can tell also back then they didn’t have the life-saving air inflatable thingies that these guys, these reenactors have. So now we’re building the connection now, so back during this time period, we didn’t have highways, we had rivers.

And rivers were the highways of the day. Back then, we didn’t have cars. They had canoes made of, everyone, – Audience: Birch bark. – Birch bark, you got it. So this was a massive industry. So what would happen is they had the primary location in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and that may not be exactly where it is, but it’s somewhere in there. And then the voyager canoers would go through the Great Lakes and canoe, canoe, canoe, canoe, canoe, and they would, there would be some that would come to Green Bay. There was a trading post in Green Bay, others would continue on and follow the north shore of Lake Superior, and some would go into the Duluth/Superior area, and then also some would– And then often, this wasn’t gonna be one group of people. Like they would be trading things off and different people would be the long haul, some would be the interior in the forest and that sort of thing. And then from what’s now current day Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada there was another route, and they would go through all of Canada, like they’d just be just everywhere.

And I have to give you disclaimer, this map may not be exactly accurate, [audience laughing] but you get the idea. So within the Midwest, we saw areas of fur trade happening in the Duluth/Superior area, you’d certainly seen it in the Northwoods, so Green Bay, Minocqua, even through here, and then also along the route you’d also see some through what’s current day Michigan and along there, so a really important industry that was occurring. If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about the fur trade, the Wisconsin Horticulture– Horticulture? Historical Society. [laughing] The Wisconsin Historical Society, sorry, that’s. . . I got horticulture on the mind, has a really great resource and if you just either searched it, “French fur trade Wisconsin Historical Society,” you’ll find some really great resources that get into the more of the stories. Not a whole lot on birch trees’ role, but just some really neat general knowledge and it like gives you a real sense of, you know, what’s been happening on these lands for many, many, many, generations. So let’s move on to tree number, we’re at four now right? Okay, and hopefully not the last one. So this next tree, again is alternately-branched, which really tells you nothing.

The leaves are simple and my drawing ability will tell you nothing, but it has fruit on it and the fruit, this is a cross-section of the fruit, and it has five little chambered compartments with typically one or two seeds in there. Any guesses? [audience murmuring] Apple, you got it! Apple is an incredibly important species to the Midwest, believe it or not. All right, so. . . [audience member laughing] but the question I have is where did the domestic apple originate from? This is– from an apple tree? [laughing] There’s always somebody in the crowd. Yeah, the apple originated from the apple tree, yeah. This is the first and only tree on this list that isn’t a native of North America. Central Asia, Kazakhstan yes. So it originally, that’s where– and it’s a pretty big thing out there, like I’ve seen photographs, they have apple festivals, it’s a huge thing.

That’s where the origins of our current apple come today, come from today. And the really interesting thing about the apple’s genetics is that it is incredibly broad, we’ll say. So if you take a seed out of that apple that you purchased at the store and plant it and you were able to germinate it, are you gonna get that same thing growing? Like if I get a Red Delicious, I don’t know why you’d eat a Red Delicious, but let’s just say you eat a Red Delicious and you plant it and it comes up, are you gonna get a Red Delicious? You’re not, and it’s because of that genetic variability. It’s just so broad, which in some ways, if you’re an apple breeder, could be kind of handy because what you can do is as you plant those trees, some weren’t gonna germinate, some aren’t gonna do well in your geography, but some are gonna do really well, and those are ones that you can then select for your local geography. Maybe they’re cold hardy or if you’re in a warmer area, maybe they just deal better with the heat and that sort of thing.

And so for example, just to kind of give you a little illustration here of where you find apples in the world today. You all heard of Fuji apple, right? Do you know where that was developed? It’s Japan, Japan, right. How about Arkansas Black? Now you may not see that everywhere in the grocery stores, but I know there’s some growers in the state that grow Arkansas Black, it’s a great apple. Ida red? Idaho. [chuckling] How about this one, this one I bet you nobody knows this one, the Bloody Ploughman.

That’s Scotland, I don’t know why. Those Scots are just a tough, I don’t know. [laughing] Actually, I think that particular one was named– if you cut into it, I’ve never actually seen one in person, but if you cut into that apple, it’s a white flesh fruit with all this red kind of bloody-looking design and it’s really quite striking and slightly creepy, so that genetic variability really does help breeders in finding species that could be good for your local area. That being said, if you’re trying to breed a really delicious apple, it’s very tricky. So the way breeders and propagators and those kind of folks deal with that is by a term called grafting. Some of you I’m sure are familiar with grafting, some maybe not.

So the way we propagate apples is we will have a rootstock, so basically the roots, cut off the top so to speak, and then whatever apple we want, we’ll take a cutting from that apple. So if I want a Liberty, I’ll take a little bit of wood with the bud on it, graft it on, attach it to a rootstock, and then over time, if I’m lucky and the graft takes, I will then have in many years from now or a few years from now, I’ll have a tree producing that Liberty apple, which is a really great thing if you feel like Liberty apples. Now when you go to the nursery, you will often see apples with the tag something like semi-dwarf, dwarf, standard. And that is really pointing to the rootstock.

So we select rootstock for a number of characteristics. One of them is controlling the size of the tree, also there’s other things that are going on, such as disease resistance or certain soil. Some rootstocks tend to do better in sandy versus you know a little more loamy and that sort of thing. So the dwarf rootstalk tend to go, tend to grow somewhere, again these are all ballpark, somewhere in the 8 to 10 foot range. So dwarfing stalk– And typically you’re gonna need to stake them to give it some sort of support because when they start to bear, those apples are so heavy, it’s just gonna pull it to the ground and snap that little plant. Semi-dwarf tends to be somewhere in the 12 to 15 foot range, something like that, and then standard is like the full apple. It is pretty much what you would expect a full apple to grow. A lot of homeowners, the semi-dwarf is a pretty popular one because they’re big enough that you might get a little bit of shade, but you don’t have to deal with staking and making sure that the staking and their connections aren’t girdling your tree and that sort of thing. Standards are also pretty nice, but they take up a lot of space, and they also take a heck of a lot of time to bear fruit, whereas with dwarf, it might be two or three years after planting, you might get your first apple. Dwarf might be a little bit longer than that, I don’t know, maybe five years, and then standards could be somewhere in the ballpark of well, a lot longer, maybe 10, I don’t know the exact years.

So you see the two Y axis here. So on the left, here you see the feet, and then on the right you see the percentages, so if you have a tree that generally grows really big, it might be a little over 20 foot even on a standard, or it might be a little bit bigger on the higher end of that range for the semi-dwarf. Make sense? I had to get that horticultural stuff out of me, now we’re gonna talk a little bit about the history, okay. So I got a couple questions for you. I’m gonna name some apple varieties and I’d like you to raise your hand if you’ve ever had one, okay? And at home, feel free, it’s okay. Rave. First Kiss. Yeah, those ones are coming to the market, they’re new. Snow Sweet. Okay.

Zestar. Yeah, that’s one of my favorite early varieties. Sweet Tango. There’s one, I believe there’s one grower in Wisconsin that grows them. Frostbite. Sweet Sixteen. Carlson. And Honeycrisp. That’s what I expected. [laughing] Almost all the hands went up.

We can thank the breeders, there’s some apple breeders in the Midwest. We can thank them for those species or those varieties and many, many, many more. The University of Minnesota has a very robust and strong apple breeding program, and if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have those apple varieties today. I reached out to the breeder of the Honeycrisp, and so I got in a bit of an email dialouge and I told him what I was doing here, so he shared a little bit of information with me, and so the story of the Honeycrisp– and I wanna talk about that because it’s, depending on the numbers you look at, it might be the fifth top-selling apple in the nation or sixth or fourth. It’s a pretty popular apple because it’s crunchy, it’s fairly sweet, there’s certainly sweeter ones out there, and it’s just an all-around real nice apple. So back in the ’60s, the Minnesota breeding program, they crossed a few apples and they had you know, basically they had the Honeycrisp on their lot, but they didn’t know it. This went on for about 20 years. Then in ’79, David Bedford, this is the breeder that I was emailing, he started in ’79, and those trees were actually– The Honeycrisp trees were actually slated to be cut down, to be removed because it wasn’t performing well, they weren’t, it just wasn’t doing what they were expecting it to do. But for a couple years he said, “Let’s just wait, let’s just wait,” and then in ’83 he had his first chance to taste this apple, and often breeders, they’ll give little codes, they won’t actually give you the name of it. They don’t know if it’s gonna be a commercially viable plant, so if you ever go to the grocery store, if you go and you ask for a MN1711, First of all, the clerk’s gonna think you’re a weirdo, second of all, that was actually what the Honeycrisp name was before it became market, before it was put on the market.

So at that point because those trees would have been bred by seed right, they were doing crossings, they started the asexual grafting production of it, “We have a winner here guys,” and then they started ramping up and trying to find growers to then produce the Honeycrisp. And back then, we’re talking like in the ’80s, and you know basically a lot of grocers would say, “We want the red one, we want the green one, “and we want the gold one,” and that was good enough, right? So our apple diversity, like when I was a kid, I hated apples, like apples were not my thing. Now they’ve become my thing because there’s so much variety that is now entering market, and there’s a lot of orchardists who are really getting into you know, providing these various varieties. So in the email exchange with David, I wanted to ask him ’cause I’ve seen some numbers and I was curious what he was gonna say. So I asked him, I said, “So for every time “you do one of these crosses right, “where you’re trying to think well, this apple “and this apple might work,” I asked him, “What’s the probability of “actually getting something, getting a winner? “Getting something that will be market-viable?” He says, “It’s one in 10,000, roughly. ” And that’s in a controlled breeding situation, so they’re controlling a lot of things. If you tried that at home and you planted a seed and you got something that tasted good, you just won the lottery ’cause I’ve seen numbers as high as like, and I don’t know how accurate these are, but I’ve seen numbers high as 1 in 60,000. Again, I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I’ve seen numbers that high. But in their controlled situation, 1 in 10,000. So it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of failing.

And once in a while you hit a home run. I did wanna share a video with you, but I wasn’t able to get the rights because this is being recorded, but what I did provide is there’s the link to, the YouTube link to it, or if you just simply Google “Have we engineered the perfect apple?” And it’s kind of the story of the Minnesota breeding program as it’s centered around the Honeycrisp apple. Gets into a little bit of history, it’s just a really wonderful little four-minute video, and I encourage you to take a look at that at some point ’cause it really is a nice little video. All right, now we’re gonna go a little farther back in history now. Johnny Appleseed was: a fictitious character, a Disney character, a man, a myth, and a legend. I’m hearing a lot of yeses for the third one, okay, yeah, but he was a Disney character too, wasn’t he? [laughing] He was, there’s that 1940-something little cartoon of Johnny Appleseed, yeah. So he was actually a real person, it was kind of surprising to me the first time I realized it wasn’t just some fable of this person who brought apple seeds wherever he went. I wasn’t able to confirm the image of Johnny Appleseed as having the rights to use it, but I will tell you, if you can imagine, if you do an image search and you type “Johnny Appleseed” and you see a little line drawing of a guy with a hat, with a little ball cap standing, very lanky guy, line drawing, black and white, that’s the tree, that’s the image I wanted to put there, so. [audience laughing] Just imagine that, and he’s very happy looking and being an apple guy, and yeah, it’s a nice little picture. So as we established, apple seeds don’t propagate true to their parents, right? Now this guy’s name is Johnny Appleseed, not Johnny– or his nickname is not Johnny Apple Graft, right, so what’s up? Why didn’t he just do some grafting and he’d get some really good apples, right? That cartoon from the late ’40s that shows Johnny Appleseed dancing around in the trees and apples going here and there and you know, singing nice little songs and there’s birds, that’s false.

He didn’t bring these lovely, table-ready varieties to the frontier; he brought seeds that were germinated, and who knows what you got, maybe you got some that were palatable, maybe you didn’t. What Johnny Appleseed brought to the frontier was booze. [audience laughing] He brought the primary ingredient to hard cider, you got it, that’s right. And with the hard cider, now you think, “Oh, hard cider, oh puritans,” but here’s the thing: hard cider would be healthier for you– and I tell myself this all the time. [laughing] That’s a joke, hard cider is healthier for you, well, this is true, than creek water. I’m not gonna go drink some creek water, you know, across the street from where I live. So back then you know, our ideas of clean water sources and things like that, they aren’t as far developed as they were today. So if you were making a tea on the frontier, you’d be fine ’cause any microbes would have been boiled off and killed, but if you had a cider that is also shelf-stable because the alcohol is a preservative, you can then, if you had an abundance of apples, you could juice ’em, ferment ’em, and now you have a source of calories and a source of some nutrients that can store for greater lengths of time. Back then, typically people didn’t have apple juice or what we call apple juice. Unless it was just juiced right then, because there was no way of preserving that in any real, really good way.

And besides, why not ferment it, right? [laughing] So now talking about Johnny Appleseed, back in 1792 in Ohio, there was this deal that was struck up between some developers and pioneers, and if anybody was willing to go further beyond where the settlements were in Ohio, they would be granted 100 acres of land to homestead, with a few catches. And one of them was that they needed to basically demonstrate that they were going to homestead. It wasn’t just a land grab, and they would come back at some later time or try selling it. They were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20, is it peach, I have to double check here, 20 peach trees, that was a symbol that they were planning to stay. When I moved to my house in Princeton, Wisconsin, I started planting apple trees with the idea like, “This is a symbol, I’m gonna be here for a while, “I wanna see these apples fruit,” so I kinda get that. So what Johnny Appleseed would do, and his actual name is Johnny, John Chapman, what Johnny Appleseed would do is he would anticipate where the next wave of settlement would happen. He would start propagating by seed, and he’d have these apple trees ready for when the pioneers came. And that was a business for him, that was his kind of business model. The other piece you know I still haven’t answered is well, why was he propagating by seed and not grafting, right? Well, he was a part of a religion called the Swedenborgian church, and they had a really strong connection with nature, that’s part of their belief system, and he felt that by grafting a tree you are actually causing damage to the tree and harming the tree, so he forbade the use of grafting, so that was the way his approach was with that. So that’s why he propagated by seed, primarily.

Putting on my horticulturalist hat again, there might be a few folks who do home apple orcharding, or perhaps a few folks that might think about doing home apple orcharding. There’s a great resource we have with UW-Madison Extension, if you just simply Google “UW extension growing apples in Wisconsin,” you’ll find a 20-ish or so page PDF, super helpful, really will get you started. If you come talk to me at the booth after I can tell you some tricks on low to no spray, which uses bags, and some tricks that I’ve figured out and actually I didn’t figure them out, somebody else figured them out, I tried them, it worked, so we can talk a little bit about that as well. All right, I think I have time for our last tree. So this one is the first evergreen. So you know how I mentioned alternate branching, right, and I also mentioned alternate, oh sorry, opposite, alternate, there’s also another one I haven’t talked about yet, and that’s whorled. So whereas the opposite branching has two branches coming from the same spot on that main stem, alternate is only one branch, whorled has more than two, so it might be something like that. [audience murmuring] You guys are good, you guys are good. I’m hearing pine, I’m hearing white pine, hemlock, I love hemlock, we can talk about that later, I did a little bit of research on hemlock a few years ago. The pine.

The pine is an important contributor to the Wisconsin economy currently. So whether it’s the five-needle pine, white pine, a nice easy way to remember white pine is five letters five W-H-I-T-E, the red pine, red, it’s only two needles. [chuckling] That was a bad joke, sorry. Red pine are only two needles, two-needle pines, and these pines are really important. They do well on sand flats, there is a history that I don’t think I can jump into right now with the conservation course throughout the state, where they were– during the Depression era, they were reforesting sandy plains to many parts of the state, many parts of the U. S. quite frankly, the pines tend to do really well on sandy soils where a lot of other things don’t really grow that well, whereas you can develop a really nice pine plantation. This is an image from up in northern part of Wisconsin. This is a 35-year-old plantation and it’s really quite beautiful just walking, if you ever had the opportunity just to walk into one of these middle-aged or older growth pine plantations. Once you get past like the straight rows, that part kind of feels a little weird, but if you just walk on a bit of an angle, those lines tend to kind of go away a little bit.

So I’m gonna ask you a little bit about how pines in forestry contribute to the Wisconsin economy. So the first question, I heard logging industry, you got it. The first question is okay, we have 72 counties in the state, how many do you think have forestry as their primary industry? Realizing we do actually have a lot of Ag land, we have a lot of urban areas in some parts, any guesses? [audience murmuring] Quarter, thirty, it’s actually a little less than that. 15, it’s actually 10 counties, yeah, but there’s a lot of trees in those 10 counties. [laughing] Another question, how does Wisconsin as a state rank in paper producing in the U. S. ? First, that was a shocker to me. I always thought it would be somewhere out in the West. So Wisconsin is the top paper producer of all the states, which yeah, that really surprised me. For every job forestry produces, how many additional jobs? So let’s say you have like, you’re this feller buncher operator, and so you have to buy parts, you have to buy fuel, how many spin-off jobs, so for every forestry job, how many spin-off jobs? And I’ll give you a 1. 5, 1. 7, or 1. 9? [audience murmuring] It’s 1. 7. [all laughing] It’s still quite a bit though. It makes an important impact on the economy. The last one, in dollars, how much does Wisconsin export in forest products internationally? I’ll give you a hint, it’s in the billions, it’s in the low billions. It’s a lot, isn’t it? It’s 2. 2 billion, and these are numbers from the DNR I grabbed. They’re a couple years old, so it might have changed a little bit, this is 2006 numbers, but it really is important, forestry’s contribution to our state as a whole.

We often talk about us being the dairy and cheese state, right? I think we should be called the dairy and trees state. [audience laughing] ‘Cause there really is a pretty significant contribution that trees provide to our state. I’m gonna fly through a few slides and unfortunately I can’t jump into too much, but I really wanna show these, and I think I got a little bit of time to do this. So a few years ago, I got a chance to visit the Harvard forest, and there was some folks from the [imitates British accent] British Forestry Association. That’s a terrible British accent. So I was there and I was kind of hanging around, and I knew they were going on a tour, and I said something really nice about the Queen and I told them that I was originally from Canada, and so they let me join their tour and it was great. So I got a chance to meet them, hear a little bit about forestry practices in England, but one of probably the gems of the Harvard forest is they have a little museum, it’s not very big, and they have these beautiful dioramas, so this is not a painting, this is a three-dimensional display. So this picture depicts– And the reason I’m talking about this is this also, these next few slides talks about how forest succession happens here in Wisconsin in the Midwest when you have pine and mixed woods and that sort of thing. So this is a virtually you know, not much touched forest, pre-settlement forest. And then the settlers start to come, and by 1740, there’s a lot of land clearing that happens, people start attempting, in some cases successfully, some cases not very successfully, to grow food and grow crops in New England.

The problem with New England is the soils aren’t great, and that rock wall kind of can– As to why that is, tons of rocks. There’s very rocky soil in many parts in New England, and it’s actually interesting ’cause even today, there’s parts you can go to New England and you’re walking through which feels like a forest that’s immemorial, like it’s been there for years, and you’ll come across a rock, a stone rock wall in the middle of this forest and it feels like, “Am I in Narnia, where’s the lamppost?” It feels really weird when that happens. So they continue on, by 1830 in many parts of New England, it’s peak Ag production, where they’re trying really hard. At this point also is when the West starts opening up, and there’s rumors and stories of better land out west. So then by 1850, you see New England farm abandonment. So these farmers now are now moving to places such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, they’re finding places to now settle and try to get better Ag land. At that same time as they abandon the fields, the soil is left bare with mineral soil, which creates an excellent seed bed for white pine. So by 1910, the white pine start to get to the point where they can now be harvested. And back then, one of the primary products that were, that white pine were made of, white pine of this size, these would be maybe 50, 60-year-old white pines, not huge yet, is they’d be used as box boards. So I like, and basically you know, this is before corrugated cardboard, they’d use these box boards.

And I’d like to think that maybe there was a farmer who was there, he moved out to the Midwest, they ordered something from out East, and the trees from their land made it out to them. I have no way of proving that, but I like that romantic notion that maybe some of the tree from that farmer’s land made it to their house when they were ordering stuff. And then what happens then after that white pine logging, now you have some hardwood trees that came in, they’ve come in from sucker growth, there’d be other species that would seed in and because you didn’t have that nice mineral bed that the white pine did well in, the deciduous trees really started to invade the area. And then by 1930, you have this primarily deciduous forest, and now you think of many parts of the Northeast as deciduous forests with pine as well. And that has part of, that is part of the story of the succession in the Northeast. And the real connection here that I’m talking about is these processes, those are the same, those ecological processes, how forest succession occurs. So when we do forest land and it’s like a clear cut area on a sandy soil, natural succession will often, if there is a seed source nearby, will often seed back with pine, sometimes you gotta do some planting as well. So I just believe this here, if you just Googled “Harvard forest dioramas,” you’re gonna get that, there’s the QR code, also they have a nice little book as well. It’s kinda like a coffee table book, which it’s a wonderful little book just to read the stories and see the actual photographs of the dioramas. So I’m gonna close ’cause I don’t wanna get those folks at PBS mad at me.

Oh, I have 10 more minutes? Oh, well my watch is running fast. Okay well, then you got me for another 10 minutes folks. [laughing] Seven more minutes, okay, all right, well, so we’ll just summarize here with a few things. So in summation, ash trees are historically important and are at risk throughout Wisconsin, and this is, it really is an important part of our history in the Midwest, ash trees; they are becoming less important for obvious reasons; I would say if you ever see an ash tree in a nursery [laughing] question that nursery person’s knowledge. Sugar maple’s claim to fame in Wisconsin is greater than just syrup, we have products wood products as well as maple syrup, or sorry, maple syrup as well as the fall color and tourism. White birch has an important role for nearly two centuries in many parts of North America and the Midwest relating to the birch bark canoe. Johnny Appleseed brought booze to the Midwest. [audience laughing] And if some Wisconsin folks think that’s a pretty cool idea, and I think it’s really cool too, ’cause there’s a lot of work being done on hard ciders now with new hard cider varieties, and colleagues throughout the Midwest are doing some real important work in that so. And then finally pine forests, over time, are dynamic and very interesting, and Wisconsin is an important player as it relates to forest products and certainly paper being number one. There’s a couple of slides.

So I’m part of the UW Extension, and we have offices in all 72 counties. So if you’re not from Dane county, maybe you’re in a different county, maybe you drove to get here, maybe you’re staying overnight for the weekend, I’d encourage you to check out the go. wisc. edu/ that code there, 551TDY, that’ll get you to our staff directory. From there, you can filter out by your county and you’ll get the staff directory of your county. Even if you don’t find somebody who has a question in that directory that, sorry, they have the expertise that can answer your question, call the office anyway because they’re often the conduit to get you to the folks you need. They may know of a colleague three counties over that can answer your tree question or answer your vegetable growing question or whatever it may be. So that’s first good place to stop. On the other site, we’ve built an events calendar, and it took a while, but it’s pretty good, so if you go to that go. wisc.
edu/fgibzs from there you will find all the extension events that are happening related to horticulture throughout the state. So they’re two good places, especially now we have a lot of master gardeners that work throughout the state and they have various programs, “Spring into Gardening” and all these kinds of things at the local levels, they should be appearing in that calendar, so you can check and see if there’s one of these day programs at the local level that you may wanna check out. Also, for folks that are here in the room today, there is a little feedback form. I’d love it if you gave me feedback, good and bad. I like to hear critical feedbacks; that makes me better; if you’re joining via video or on the broadcast, use the QR codes, I’d love to get a little bit of feedback through that way as well. Also, if you’re on social media, I am @jayplantsplants on Twitter, again on Instagram, it’s jayplantsplants again, and that is all for me. Thank you. [audience applauding]