Plant Material Scounting and High Point Hike

I spent the weekend with my family at our vacation house in northeastern Pennsylvania this past weekend. Mostly, it was a chance to escape from work and technology and finish reading Diderot's D'Alembert's Dream, which I had only a few dozen pages left of. While there, however, I took time out to do some scouting for potential plant material for next spring to bring back home for conversion into bonsai. We had also planned on doing a little hiking at High Point in Sussex New Jersey on the way back home. It was a good opportunity to break out the tree guides and wander around as well. The foliage was just past peak, and most of the leaves had fallen due to the previous day's rain and windstorm. Some still lingered. 

 Because we had so much rain the previous night, the overflow from the lake was very high. The stream that runs through the woods behind the house (left) and separates our property from the other side of the lake was the highest I've ever seen it. Normally, it is a trickle. This weekend it was a torrent. Everything was essentially a giant wet sponge. The uneven and rocky areas of the forest, covered with grass mostly, were treacherous to walk through. It was easy to trip and loose your footing or step in between two rocks and sink down into a deep puddle without knowing it. A lot of trees had come down this summer as well, making it difficult to navigate.

There are several larger Eastern Hemlocks in the area. I managed to find a few potential saplings to collect in the spring. This single trunked tree (right) was the smallest. It's likely two years old at this point.

I managed to find this clumped grouping of two, maybe three - I didn't examine it too closely - Eastern  Hemlocks (left) not too far away from the first. This grouping looks older than the first and is probably four years old. It would make a nice grouped planting or multi-trunk bonsai. I haven't seen too many Hemlock bonsai but I could imagine these being nice specimens.

I'm not sure of the parent tree for these. There is a grouping of three or four trees (right) about five hundred feet away which are loaded with cones but I'm not sure how likely it is that the seeds spread from them, through the forest, all the way to the other side. There is another single tree in the other direction roughly two-hundred feet away which I could imagine being more plausible, but I did not see any cones on that tree. There were, however, three other small saplings in it's shadow that were no more than a few months old.

 What was easy to find were thousands of Eastern White Pine saplings. I was not even going to attempt to determine a possible parent tree for these... they were everywhere, of all youthful ages. In the spot where I saw these two, there were easily forty or fifty small saplings and throughout the area easily over one thousand. These two, however, stood out to me. I liked the trunk thickness and the second strong lower shoot of the larger tree (left). It's growth was more compact and had a lot of strong growing branches from the internodes on the trunk and branches.

The smaller tree had very long internodes on the trunk between the branches however the truck was covered in pine needles, leaving me to imagine that there is a good possibility the tree would backbud and throw off new branches readily if pruned back. This tree had a nice root spread already, with several lateral roots.

 I ran across this magnificent Shagbark Hickory (left) while on the trail next to the lake's overflow stream. We actually have a Shagbark Hickory in our backyard, however this one has some truly unruly and aggressive bark. Places where branches have broken off have curling and peeling bark encircling them, the large slabs of bark run two and three feet long and surround the tree on the floor is a pile of the old dispelled bark the tree has outgrown. I was unable to find any viable nuts from the tree for potential germination. I'm not sure whether the tree would make for a good bonsai tree or not. The compound leaves are large and would be potentially difficult to ramify and reduce. I'm also not sure if the bark would miniaturize, possibly creating a strange sense of scale with large batches of bark on a small sized tree. I did find some nuts in the backyard however I'm not sure whether they were from the Shagbark Hickory or from what is either a Bitternut or Pignut Hickory that is also in the yard.

Sunday driving home we stopped at High Point. Concerned about the light, we decided to hike the short trail to the monument instead of the longer trail that ran all around the ridge which was three miles long. High Point is the highest point in the state of New Jersey at 1803 feet above sea-level. The obelisk which sits atop the site is a war memorial built to honor veterans. When open, the monument can be climbed. The view from the base of the monument is breathtaking, offering a full panorama of northern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The Delaware river, Port Jervis, and the Appalachian mountains are easily visible.