Write About Trees

In a conversation recently with my Oregon State University, Department of Forestry student son, I was complaining about the Oregonian newspaper (which can hardly be called a daily since it is only printed four times a week, but is online every day) using the term Douglas fir when they should be using the term Douglas-fir and he condescendingly sonsplained (even more condescending than mansplained) that the hyphen is a convention only in America and if you are writing for an international audience, it is fine to leave the hyphen out. Discounting a few expats that keep tabs on their birthplace through the Oregonian, I suspect the Oregonian’s readership is people in these United States, so the hyphen should be included. 

I haven’t yet written to the Oregonian to enlighten them to the error of their ways because I am lazy but also pretending to be waiting for a third thing to correct them about so as not to waste my time or theirs. So far I have two: the aforementioned Douglas-fir misspelling and their use of the adjective “pit bull” to describe misbehaving people, mostly men. When next they do this I am sending this picture of my pit bull: 

(Obviously, this is a screenshot from my other blog, but some days I am too lazy to find the original in the sea of lichen and tree pictures on my devices.) Honestly, do you think this is what they mean? Newspapers rant against prejudice but think nothing of disparaging perfectly balanced and oddly perched dogs when describing the misdeeds of men. 

Anyway back to my original rant, I think that if it is wrong here it is wrong everywhere and just because readers in New Zealand might not recognize our byzantine naming methods doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the correct usage when complaining about it as an invasive species as overly adaptable plants can become.

Well, now I feel better.

Of all the nonsensical nomenclature associated with trees and the wood from them, none makes less sense than the terms hardwood and softwood.

The term hardwood is used to describe any wood from a broadleaf tree, while softwood describes wood from a conifer. You may be thinking “Well, Miss Smartypants the wood from the mighty oak is mighty strong and hard,” and of course, you would be right which may be where the term originated, but the balsa tree is also a broadleaf and its wood is the lightest and softest of all wood and according to The Wood Database five of the ten softest woods are hardwoods. All ten of the hardest hardwoods, however, are from broadleaf trees. The hardest softwood I can find (see I admit this may not be correct) is from the yew tree.

Here is why you must critically consider what you get from Wikipedia. Can you spot the trouble in this quote from the “Softwood” page:

Certain species of softwood are more resistant to insect attack from woodworm, as certain insects prefer damp hardwood. Softwood reproduces using pine cones and occasionally nuts.   

Silly Wikipedia, Douglas-fir is one of the most important softwood timber trees and it will never reproduce using a pine cone, it has Douglas-fir cones. Additionally, conifer’s cones produce seeds not nuts even though the seeds from some cones are so large they are often called pine nuts.

I am the titular Ms. Know-it-all, a phrase my brother used last weekend and which sometimes fits me perfectly. Last Sunday the NYTimes ran an article about an amazing program where scientists are training citizen-scientists to capture DNA samples from bigleaf maples to protect them from illegal harvests. Sadly the Getty Images photo they chose to accompany their article was not of a bigleaf maple leaf. My guess is that the pictured leaf is from a Norway maple. 

I whipped on my Ms. Know-it-all britches, harnessed up Ms. Beezus and we went over past the cemetery where I know a bigleaf maple grows but was skunked because all the leave were too high. Undeterred we trudged on to another bigleaf maple and snagged a leaf hanging low. 

I photographed it using all the skills I have and my iPhone, so you know it was a great shot, and sent it to the NYTimes story editor. Okay, I sent it first to the wrong email, but then sent it to the correct one.

Apparently, while they are very interested in the accuracy of their articles, their dedication to the truth in their images is a bit slipshod.

Here is the picture that accompanied the article:

Here is an actual bigleaf maple:

They are very different and not surprisingly the bigleaf leaf is bigger than the Norway maple.

The britches are getting a bit tight, so I need to slip them off and get back to my Sunday tasks.

Oh crap! Turns out “cascara” means skin in Spanish and the cascara mentioned here refers to the skins of the coffee bean. I blame this on my inability to see the world for the trees. (I am issuing a correction unlike the NYTimes so far about the bigleaf maple.) See a true know-it-all always needs to be right about something

Here at writeabouttrees we (“we” being me and on a good day my dog) are concerned about how tree information is written about and we care about our readers, therefore we need to issue this warning to Starbuck customers about the marketing wisdom behind their new Cold Foam Cascara Cold Brew, and not just for the use of the “cold” twice in its name. (After years of posting I just figured out how to bold.)

The cascara tree, Rhamnus purshiana, is not a wildly popular landscape plant which some people think unfortunate because it has much to recommend it. It is grown primarily as an understory plant used in reforestation because it was harvested nearly to extinction for the medicinal effects of its bark. 

I am not much of a coffee drinker but saw Starbuck’s sign proudly announcing their new product on my way into Target and it caused me to laugh out loud.

Reading the description below (clipped from Wikipedia) one must wonder why Starbucks picked this name for their coffee.  

The dried bark of cascara has been used for centuries as a laxative, first by Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and then by European/U.S. colonizers. The chemicals primarily responsible for the laxative action are the hydroxyanthracene glycosides (particularly cascarosides A, B, C and D), and emodin. These act as stimulant laxatives, with the hydroanthracene glycosides stimulating peristalsis, and emodin exciting smooth muscle cells in the large intestine. 

For the love of god, think before you order this beverage.

Most trees begin as seeds and trees grow seeds in many different ways. Pecan trees grow their seeds in nuts, peaches in pits, maples in samaras. Conifers grow their seeds in cones and for some reason, possibly confusion or laziness, those cones are often called pine cones.    

We can all recognize a pine cone, but many times when that phrase is used, it is used incorrectly. I have heard a grown man say, “Look at all the pinecones on that Douglas-fir tree.” Trust me, there is not even one pinecone on a Douglas-fir unless some sort of wind event has occurred. Douglas-fir trees have Douglas-fir cones. Larch trees have larch cones. Hemlocks, you guessed it, have hemlock cones. Redwood trees have redwood cones, which incidentally are hilariously tiny. One way to make the shift in your mind is to think of the “pine” part of that word as describing the type of cone. Think ice cream, sno- and traffic, all cones that are never mistaken for a pine cone. 

As always there are exceptions to the conifer/cone rule. Junipers have berries which are described as specialized cones, an instance where apparently “specialized” means “not really a” or yew trees which have red berry-like arils which aren’t cones at all but are poisonous. Then there are alders which have cones but aren’t conifers. Many of their tiny cones are used as winter decorations because they grow in clusters and are cunning, a word my great aunt used to describe cute things like penguins and babies. 

When talking about or writing about cones be specific. If you don’t know the kind of tree, just call it a cone. Give the tree the respect it has earned. For heaven’s sake, it gives you oxygen.

Many people are taught that the two classifications of trees are evergreen and deciduous. While there is no question that trees are either evergreen or deciduous, it is just a way to describe a tree in much the same way that people can be sorted by whether they are shorter or taller than 5 feet. 

Evergreen trees keep their leaves all year. Deciduous trees don’t.

The words conifer and evergreen are used as if they are synonyms which they are not. While most conifers are evergreen, a few like the larch (which I am currently crushing on because they have adorable cones) are deciduous. I can list the conifers that are deciduous here:

larch | many varieties

pseudolarix - New Entry - not a larch, but like a larch and definitely a deciduous conifer

dawn redwood

bald-cypress

pond cypress

Chinese swamp cypress

‘Deciduous’ is the word many people have been taught to describe trees with leaves that are not needle- or scale-like. The real word for that kind of tree is broadleaf. AND, you guessed it, not all broadleaf trees are deciduous. I cannot list all the evergreen broadleaf tree here because nobody wants to read for that long, but think holly.

There is a third kind of leaf-holding pattern which is a subset of deciduous. Marcescence describes trees whose leaves die in the fall but hang on through the winter and it can be partial.

Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, there is a debate whether it should be broadleaf or broadleaved but it makes my brain hurt to ruminate on the difference between those two words. Honestly, what is with those words where ‘f’ turn into ‘v’? There are also those who think conifers should be called coniferous trees. These debates are raging. 

In the last post, I dealt with hyphenation, but not all tree names that are wrong are indicated with a hyphen. Sometimes two words are just run together to make a new word, to wit, the western redcedar. Why is redcedar one word? If you guessed that it is because it is not red, you would be right, although it’s bark is reddish. If you guessed it is not a cedar, you would also be correct.  True cedars (Cedrus) are not native to North America, they are from the Mediterranean and the Himalayans. Somewhere along the way, someone thought that the wood from the redcedar smelled like the wood from a true cedar, so called it a cedar. To let us know it is not a true cedar, the two words are conjoined forming an entirely new word. Strangely though of the three false cedars native to the pacific northwest, two are “clarified” by hyphens and one by conjoining. 

Here are some other examples:

Tanoak – not a true oak, although it has acorns and succumbs to sudden oak death. 

Redbay - not a bay tree, the source of bay leaves.

Hophornbeam - not a hornbeam and not even a hop.

Ha! This blog is about writing and the first thing I did was spell ‘beginning’ wrong.

I teach for a wonderful organization called Talk About Trees. My job is to visit classrooms and persuade kids to get excited about trees and perhaps even go outside and spend time around them.

This is my third year with them and I had a steep learning curve because while I  have a BS, it is in Political Science, so I read everything I could get my hands on to learn as much as I could about trees. What I discovered, in addition to developing a worship-like awe of trees is that almost nobody gets it right when they write about trees. This is not entirely the fault of writers as much as the fault of ridiculous tree-related traditions. 

It’s hard to know where to start because there are so many things to address, so here I go on hyphens. Most writers know how and why to use a hyphen, but they are used for an entirely different purpose when writing tree names. I live in Oregon and our state tree is the Douglas-fir. Please notice the hyphen. It is there to let you know that the Douglas-fir is not really a fir. I’m not sure why anyone would ever have thought that upon seeing the hyphen a reader would automatically think “Oh, that hyphen must mean that tree is not really a fir.” I am here to tell you nobody would think that.

I routinely see it written as Douglas fir, Douglas Fir and last and certainly least as if it were your little brother, Doug fir. Even Grammarly tried to correct it to Doug Fir, but I guess that it thought Fir was Doug’s last name. Here are a few more trees with hyphens and why the names are toting them around: 

·       Mountain-mahoganies | hyphen let you know it is not a true mahogany.

·       California-laurel aka Oregon-myrtle | hyphens lets you know it is not a true laurel or a true myrtle.

·       Yellow-poplar | hyphen lets you know it is not a poplar.

·       Incense-cedar | hyphen lets you know it is not a cedar.       

 ·       Port-Orford-cedar | So many hyphens. Not a cedar, but they are found in Port Orford. 

As an official policy of this blog, each post will be limited to one topic. Check back for more language silliness.