No wonder this book is sad--it's true. Glad to know about Wright Park. I've been there but didn't know the details about the trees. A nice physically distant outing for me sometime.
Reading Overstory has me pumped up for trees - for those of you relatively new to the area, Wright Park has lots of trees, many of which are over 100 years old. Included are Horse Chestnut, Giant Sequoia and Red Woods. A nice way to take a socially isolated stroll and see some interesting trees from as far away as Asia. Each tree is marked with name, normal range and year planted.
The Overstory section that made references to Douglas Fir was especially meaningful to me. I grew up in Southern Oregon in the heart of timber country. In the Summer the highways were dominated by logging trucks by the hundreds, and everyone I knew was touched in one way or the other by the timber industry. I had a job myself working in a sawmill the summer between my freshman and sophomore college years.
We were intimately aware of and cynical of the practice of leaving a couple hundred yards of trees standing along the highways while decimating the hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest that lay behind the screen. The virgin forests were populated with gigantic Douglas Fir. Now they are all gone, with just a few relics that escaped by virtue of their inaccessible location. All the others cheerfully and enthusiastically cut down, the land laid waste.
From my perspective, most of what passes today as “forests,” are really not forests. They are farms. Actual Douglas Fir forests are pretty much gone forever.
You can find lots of these kinds of pictures on the internet.
No wonder this book is sad--it's true. Glad to know about Wright Park. I've been there but didn't know the details about the trees. A nice physically distant outing for me sometime.
Reading Overstory has me pumped up for trees - for those of you relatively new to the area, Wright Park has lots of trees, many of which are over 100 years old. Included are Horse Chestnut, Giant Sequoia and Red Woods. A nice way to take a socially isolated stroll and see some interesting trees from as far away as Asia. Each tree is marked with name, normal range and year planted.
The Overstory section that made references to Douglas Fir was especially meaningful to me. I grew up in Southern Oregon in the heart of timber country. In the Summer the highways were dominated by logging trucks by the hundreds, and everyone I knew was touched in one way or the other by the timber industry. I had a job myself working in a sawmill the summer between my freshman and sophomore college years.
We were intimately aware of and cynical of the practice of leaving a couple hundred yards of trees standing along the highways while decimating the hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest that lay behind the screen. The virgin forests were populated with gigantic Douglas Fir. Now they are all gone, with just a few relics that escaped by virtue of their inaccessible location. All the others cheerfully and enthusiastically cut down, the land laid waste.
From my perspective, most of what passes today as “forests,” are really not forests. They are farms. Actual Douglas Fir forests are pretty much gone forever.
You can find lots of these kinds of pictures on the internet.