Anyone who climbed trees as a child can picture one particular tree they used to climb, said Jeff Wagner, founder of the La Plata County Tree Study Group.
He said trees are often taken for granted – people have deeper connections to trees than they often realize. He started the Tree Study Group to help people realize those connections and bring together people from all different backgrounds with a shared interest in woody plants.
At the outset, the group had about 30 members – master gardeners, industry professionals and members of the Durango Botanical Society. But numbers have “waxed and waned” over the years because of scheduling conflicts, he said.
The Tree Study Group has modified its schedule to meet at 4 p.m. on last Thursday of each month at the La Plata County Fairgrounds to make it more accommodating for people’s busy lives.
Wagner said the Tree Study Group is “active and enthusiastic.”
He modeled the group after one of his favorite horticulture courses for landscape architecture students in university. The course was designed to pack students’ minds with as much plant knowledge as possible over the semester.
The course was a seminar, he said. Students would meet weekly, studying the plant genus of the week before each lecture. The Tree Study Group has adopted a similar model.
“There are multiple valid ways to learn about trees that include botany, horticulture, forestry, arboriculture, fruit production, woodworking, sculpture, instrument making, carpentry, poetry, fiction, natural history, paint, drawing and more.”
Whether one is interested in tree health, carpentry or just wants to become familiar with the native trees of Durango and La Plata County, he or she is welcome at the Tree Study Group, Wagner said.
Classes often consist of field trips or expeditions in which members try to identify certain genera and genuses, or show-and-tell sessions in which members bring in twigs or photos of trees and discuss what they’ve learned about the subject of study that month.
Wagner said the Tree Study Group has examined firs, oaks, pines, lindens, poplars and junipers, among others, since it formed.
He’s also held three winter classes focused on identifying woody plants in dormancy, and classes sometimes focus on trees from around the country and the world.
In March, one member – whom Wagner said is “an excellent student and practitioner of Bonsai” – gave a seminar on Bonsai’s origins and development in the West.
Another class was all about the Aspen Pando in Utah, he said.
The largest organism in the world
The Aspen Pando, despite consisting of more than 40,000 individual trunks, is believed to be the world’s largest organism because every tree stems from the same root system, which is thought to have sprouted from a single seed at the end of the last ice age, according to the U.S. Forest Service. It weighs nearly 13 million pounds and is spread across 106 acres in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah.
Tree Study Group member Jim Gale said he enjoys the comradery of the group and the new friends he’s made since joining. The group doesn’t require any particular experience, except it invites inquisitive minds.
“It’s fascinating to me. We live such short lives,” he said. “Trees live hundreds, thousands of years. It’s just a different perspective to be able to learn about something that lives so much longer, communicates so much slower, but communicates and lives in ecosystems.”
He said everyone plays a role in the ecosystem, whether it’s in a national park, a wildlife sanctuary or one’s own backyard.
“Having a tree and nurturing that tree helps the whole community, not only for the birds and the pollinators, but just for cooling cities,” he said. “It’s easy to cave and to cut down trees, but we’re creating these heat islands. It’s really important that we have trees that help communities.”
Tree Study Group member Elli Morris said the group’s versatility in subjects is what makes it so intriguing – no matter what someone’s interests are, it has something to offer him or her.
Morris is a facilitator for the Southwest Colorado Conservation Recreation Roundtable. She attained her master’s degree in wilderness, public lands and science communication. She said she’s done well to fill her life with those subjects, but trees – although not too distant in a conceptual way – have always been somewhat missing.
“That's one of the reasons I’m doing more with tree study group this year, is because of my personal desire to just do more about trees,” she said.
Morris said she is looking forward to a field trip to Moki Dugway, Utah, where the group will observe trees in the valley and up on the mesa. The group is also scheduling a trip to the Durango Nature Center to discuss assisted tree migration, which is the process of moving trees from one region with its own climate to another slightly different region.
A common discussion in the group is climate, weather and their effects on trees in Southwest Colorado.
Wagner said residents will have noticed the hard frosts over the past several weeks have affected some of the trees within Durango. Healthy trees are able to bounce back by growing new leaves. But if they were flowering when struck by a cold snap and damaged, they won’t produce fruit and pollinators will have to figure out how to survive.
“Our seasons are expected to have wilder and larger extremes of temperature and precipitation and that will also affect what will be able to thrive here in the coming decades,” he said.
He said arboreta, botanic gardens and large producers are already scouting for new trees that match the predicted more extreme conditions.
Most firs and spruce won’t survive in lower elevations, he said, noting the “dramatic tent caterpillar predation” of native Aspens above Hermosa.
Aspens stand to face more predation events as the climate warms, he said. Other insect species such as ips beetle, pine bark beetle and spruce bud worm could threaten mass die-offs of conifers as seen around Wolf Creek Pass.
He said Colorado is lucky to have programs like Plant Select, which has spent years testing, growing and propagating plants best suited to Southwest Colorado’s soils and climate.
“Every human being on this planet has a close relationship to all plants, including trees,” he said, but Arbor Day isn’t what it used to be.
One million trees were planted in Nebraska for the first Arbor Day in 1872, and that’s what the holiday was about. In most places, he said, Arbor Day “now is a faint glimpse of what it was.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect date for the Tree Study Group’s monthly meetings. The group meets every fourth Thursday of the month – not necessarily the last Thursday of the month. Incorrect information was given to the Herald. The article also erroneously stated the location of Trail Canyon Trees, which is located in McElmo Canyon. And, group members were photographed examining Southwest White Pine needles — not Austrian pine needles as photo captions described.
