Flowers & Plants Showcase ⇒ Autumn Ash trees

[uuglypher]

Every green ash tree one sees in SD - EVERY SINGLE DAMNED ONE - shows various combinations of the effects of effects of infestation with the emerald ash borer , combined with Anthracnose , verticillium wilt, and “Ash yellows”, a bacterial infection still of an uncertain means of transmission and spread.

When we bought our acreage two decades ago we had 28 mature ash trees; we have 16 still standing, but all are on definitely borrowed time.

An interesting effect of the presence of diseased ash trees has been an obvious increase in the populations of flickers, red-headed woodpeckers, and red- bellied woodpeckers ( and supposedly piliated woodpeckers, but our woodlot - a classic “ash tree old folks home” - has not yet been blessed with that species).
A specific role of woodpeckers in the pathogenesis of one or more of the green ash maladies has been suspected but not definitively proven.
Another sequella of the ash maladies is that the decision as to which trees to harvest from our woodlot for use in our wood-burning stove has been taken out of our hands.

I cannot help wondering to what degree the establishment of the settler’s harvestable woodlot using saplings selected as “most useful species” species transplanted from the only wooded sites (riverside “woods”) in the otherwise expansive tall-grass, mixed-grass, and short-grass savanna’s may have played in this problem.

Riparian meanders made such riverside “woods” of randomly mixed species only temporary features of the environment and likely interrupted the cycles of tree diseases from which trees transplanted to “wooodlots” at homestead sites protected them from the vicissitudes of meandering waterways.

And so, in recognition of the apparently insoluble and uninterruptible negatively progressing phenomenon, I find that the closing phrase:
“And so it goes”
finds unfortunate utility.

Dave

[uuglypher]

those look large, we lost a lot of ash trees to moths.

Yep! “Losing ash trees” is a standard complaint, of late, in South Dakota!
The rate of loss has noticeably increased over the past two decades!

Dave