Last Saturday morning was a glorious autumn morning—cool, crisp and sunny perfection. Twenty or so of us with a “subscription ticket to the morning time in this world,” (Thoreau’s words) showed up at the 100th Street Pool, Central Park West. We came for the Pool Walk conducted by volunteers of the Park West History Group.
On our walk, we looked at twenty of the more prevalent species of trees that thrive around the Pool and are found commonly throughout the park. We also looked at venerable trees, trees of more than 100 years in age that were planted during the original landscaping of the mid-1800s.
In a little more than an hour, we circled the Pool gaining information along the way about all manner of things:
-The Osage Orange tree stands sentinel at the 100th Street gate. The Osage orange is native to Oklahoma, home of the Osage Indians. At this time of year it bears fruit, the Osage orange, which is a grapefruit-sized, crinkled yellow fruit that resembles the human brain.
-The crab apples’ flowering from late April through early May is a welcome harbinger of fair weather. More than 400 of them graced the drives and pathways throughout the park in 1982 when the last tree inventory was conducted.
-The tallest tree in the eastern United States is the American sycamore—175 feet with a diameter of fourteen feet. (See first picture.)
-The tulip tree is the second-largest tree in the East, growing occasionally to 165 feet and nearly 10 feet in diameter. The first branch on mature tulip trees may not emerge until well over thirty feet above the ground. (See second picture.)
-The ginkgo tree’s lineage can be traced back 30 million years to the Mesozoic Era.
Most of the ginkgo population was destroyed by glaciers over 15,000 years ago. The ginkgo’s pollution tolerance is legendary and makes it a hardy street tree. “Because they are ancient,” writes Dennis Burton, “ginkgoes have no pests or diseases surviving to interfere with them.”
The leaders used Dennis Burton’s Nature Walks of Central Park, 1997, as source and distributed copies of the chapter on the Pool Walk. Burton concluded the chapter on the Pool Walk saying, “Central Park’s urban forest, some of it remnant of the Colonial forest, reflects the need for restoration and preservation of America’s hallowed and diminishing wildland.”
None of us “hugged a tree” Saturday morning, but we knew we were among friends—and on hallowed ground.
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