September 12, 2019
The Portland Heritage Tree Quest: Group 3
We’re settled in at our basement apartment near the base of Mount Tabor - our launching pad for springing to Spain next week. It’s a lovely place, in another beautiful heritage neighborhood with a similar feel to Irvington. I especially like the fact that there’s a pretty paperbark maple directly outside our door. It’s a place we’d be fine with a longer stay at, if it weren’t a bit too far from the core than we’d prefer.
It’s not where we expected to be for this last week though. We thought we’d be over in the Alphabet District in NW Portland, but our reservation (which we made with AirBnb months ago) was cancelled without notice on the day before we were due to check in. We landed here near Mount Tabor as the best place we could find available on such short notice.
I won’t go into the details here about why we were cancelled or how AirBnb dealt with it - I think there was some confusion or mistake on the owner’s part because they let us know later that they were disappointed that WE had cancelled! - but I will say that we came out of it with uncharitable thoughts about AirBnb as an organization. Stay by stay, we’re gradually building a list of reasons we aren’t quite enamored with them.
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I wake up this morning feeling intensely conflicted. It’s a beautiful warm, sunny day - maybe the last one we’ll see before leaving Portland for the year - and it would be perfect for a long, physically challenging ride somewhere. On the other hand, there’s the Heritage Tree Quest nagging at my conscience. Shouldn’t I be taking advantage of these last few days to chip away at the tree inventory?
Forty miles with plenty of hills, versus ten miles stitching together some of the city’s finest. A tough choice, but in the end I’m swayed by the fact that Spain has an abundance of hills, but a complete lack of Portland Heritage Trees. The Quest it is!
The route I’ve mapped out includes ten trees, all within a few miles of home. There are so many heritage trees in the immediate vicinity here in East Portland, and if I wanted to put in a longer day I could easily find 25 new species without straying far from home. I pick just ten, mostly because I want to limit the size of the blog entry and allow time to give each tree the attention it deserves.
First up is this fine ginkgo, just a few blocks down the street. The ginkgo is a fascinating tree, with very old origins - fossil remains have been found from 270 million years ago. Some specimens live up to a thousand years. It’s one of my favorites, especially in autumn when it turns such a glorious yellow.
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Tree number two, a paradox walnut, is only a few blocks away; or would be, if it still existed. It looks to me like the tree was removed to make way for a new set of row houses. I’m sure I have the right location (the exact address is listed in the inventory), but even that street number appears to no longer exist. It might be a recent loss, because it looks like the huge tree is still shown on Google Earth.
A shame, because I wanted to see what the paradox was. This was the only instance of the tree in the inventory, so I’ll remove it from the target list.
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I'll take the reincarnation of the paradox walnut.
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I think the crape myrtle might be the prettiest tree of the quest so far. It is really beautiful - colorful, graceful - but it really puzzles me at first once I find it, on the property of Van Veen Nursery. It looks nothing like what I expected, because I had misread its name and thought it was a crape maple, not a myrtle. I don’t figure it out until I’m up close and read its name plate.
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The remainder of the day’s trees all still exist, and are relatively easy to find. I’m doing well with my methodology and everything goes as smoothly as can be expected - it especially helps that I took the time to make some location notes in advance, to help me quickly zoom in on the vicinity of each tree. Still though, it’s quite a slow process. Even though I know where I’m going and everything is close together, it takes time to finally locate each tree, and to take a respectful amount of time to admire each one. By the time I’m done I bike only 11 miles, but it takes me two and a half hours. I end up with nearly as much time stopped as moving.
A good outing though - fully successful, except for the vanished paradox walnut. With four more days left before departure, this might be the last outing for the year. We’ll see how trip preparations go, and what the weather brings.
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Keeping Score:
Round 1 (7 species): grand fir, willow oak, hedge maple, Douglas fir, incense cedar, tulip tree, sugar maple.
Round 2 (9 species): silver maple, Japanese cedar, oriental plane tree, European beech, American chestnut, copper beech, mockernut hickory, basswood, butternut.
Round 3 (9 species): ginkgo, crape maple, northern red oak, deodar cedar, bigleaf linden, giant sequoia, coast redwood, Japanese pagoda tree, Mount Fuji flowering cherry.
Dropped (1 species): paradox maple, which I couldn’t find and may no longer exist.
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5 years ago
Plant breeder Luther Burbank experimented with hybrid walnuts beginning in the 1890s, and cross pollinated the native Claro Walnut with English Walnut. The resulting hybrid was quite puzzling: the tree grew grew faster than either of the parent species, and also yielded harder and stronger lumber (though unfortunately it didn’t produce very many walnuts). Because of these anomalies, Burbank named the hybrid “Paradox.”
Sadly, I can’t find any reference explaining why lindens are called limes; or why they’re called basswood either, for that matter.
5 years ago