How to Identify a Tree By Leaf, Bark and Fruit | Wood and Lumber Identification for Woodworking

hey check it out I found poison ivy [Music] hey y'all hi I'm James right and welcome to my woods today I want to take you out on a special adventure and we're going to go out and walk through the woods and identify some trees and show you some ways that you can use to identify trees and I'm out here with my son Arthur say hi Arthur and the two of us are gonna have a little fun here so let's go off into the woods and see what we can see so first of all this is the absolute best time of the year to come out and identify trees it is not winter yet the leaves are still fairly green but starting to change some of them starting to fall there's fruit on the trees fruit on the ground and we can walk around and quickly and easily identify them now one I see right here is red oak you can see how these have very pointy leaves so here I have two trees right next to each other this one right here and this one right here and they both are oak trees and they've become very very obvious and easy to identify once you see them the bark on these two is a little bit different this one is older so it's a little more shaggy kind of harder to identify whereas this one you have a little bit more of that standard oak look let me take you over here and show you basically one of the reasons why this is a great time of year to come out and identify trees is you get to identify their fruit and their leaves that are down on the ground so here I have this is from the first one over on my right and this is from the one on the left you can see how all these have rounded ends on them and then all of these have these pointy ends the pointy are from the red oak anything that's rounded are white oak also you can look at the acorn and the acorn for the red oak is usually a very smooth cap not much identification to it whereas the white oak usually has either a very bumpy cap or it's a very hairy cap and a lot of times the hair will actually hang down over especially with the Baroque and swamp oak so let's go take a look at some others here's one that I like this bark it looks fairly similar to oak in many respects but you'll see these leaves come off and it'll be the group of five leaves five or seven sometimes like on this one you can see how they bunch out more but here's the ash leave and they come in these whole series you might think that those are seven leaves but this is actually one leaf that joins back at the stem ash isn't a very easy one to identify by the leaf so here's one that is a bit confusing they may look like ash leaves that we just looked at they're clustered together in seven they're from a single bunch on the stem but they're not ash this is actually a type of maple it is a boxelder and after a little while you're gonna get very used to identifying boxelder by the branches and tree you'll often see this very distinctive bark and all of these little sprigs coming off everywhere that's a very common representation of boxelder very knotty very twisty it's not a hard maple but it is a really nice maple with a lot of color in it sometimes you get a red flame through it a very beautiful wood to work with and would make a great workbench in my mind but yeah boxelder is the type of maple often called ash leaf maple because the leaves well they kind of have a look of ash to them another thing I'm doing is I'm walking along and I'm looking for acorns I'm looking for nuts I'm looking for leaves and I'm starting to identify the leaves like this one is a type of maple that's a type of oak and usually from the ground you can start to see where the leaves are and then you can look up into the trees and find out where are they is that that leaf look like the one I'm sitting on the ground or does that leaf over there look like the one the ground and then from there you can identify the bark on the tree and say oh I know what that is now so we've been looking at hardwoods but here you have a couple soft woods this is a fir and then you come back over here and this is a bark that you'll know quite a bit this is a a pine tree and I don't know as much about them because I don't use the wood as much and they don't interest me as much but one of the things it's actually kind of fun for me are the needles particularly from the white pine because there are very long needles like that then you'll find that they each have five sprigs which is white WI te 5 letters 5 sprigs a fairly easy one to identify and one of my favorite pines ok here's one that I really like you'll find these heart-shaped leaves and they fall in great clumps they don't change color that much and they just they clutter the ground and you're also going to find these sticks that have a lot of nubs and novels on them and these sticks are very telltale of Cottonwood so let's look around here we found these all over the ground and we're gonna look around for usually a very large tree and voila there it is this has a lot of bark twisting on it they usually end up having a very very straight long trunk all the way up and you can see in the they have a very large canopy most of the time it's cottonwood in early spring their seed will come floating down through the air in little Tufts of cotton but they are very very easy to identify in the fall or anytime by these leaves them not too many trees have leaves like these heart-shaped cottonwood leaves like that right there so here's one of my favorites you'll be walking along the path and you'll come across these nuts that are kind of split four ways the husk falls off very easily and then you'll have these white nuts underneath these are hickory nuts and Hickory is one of my favorite woods beautiful beautiful wood extremely hard great for ax handles and anything you don't want to break just a great great wood all around but one of the cool things about it is the bark is very easy to identify the bark here is actually this kind of shaggy thing that well just like these pieces will flake off and this is a hickory tree now if you go all the way up did you get this almost these things are huge and I'm trying to find one here on the ground but they're about 12 inches long so each one of those are about a foot long they're huge huge leaves and you can see that each one has a cluster of three and then the stem coming off that's one leaf is that cluster of three and the stem and this one over here has five and one long stem so there are a very beautiful tree great wood to work with and a lot of fun when you identify them plus hickory nuts tastes good and you can take those home and have fun of them so yeah I'm always finding these are not running in the woods you will stumble across there and it's a very obvious point that there's a hickory tree here so here's another one you're gonna find these oval Leafs quite often I'll be looking around and there's one here and one here and there's another one over here and here and here and there they're fairly oval some of them have a very fine sawtooth like this one have I very pronounced sawtooth but then you'll also see these trees that if you didn't know any better you'd swear they were a pine tree they kind of have that shaggy bark that you see very commonly in pine trees that is actually a cherry tree and a cherry is a fantastic hardwood for hand tools just a beautiful beautiful wood with a dark red color and one of my favorites but yeah you'll be looking along the floor and you'll come across all these little yellow tiny little leaves like that one there and that one there there cherry leaves now here's another one I want to identify this isn't a tree but if you're wandering around the woods it's a good one to know and you'll see these three leaves here and often they look like a mitten and the one in the one in the middle will have a thumb on both sides whereas the one on the outside will just have a thumb on the outside that is poison ivy and yeah don't go rubbing in that yeah you'll you'll find this all over the place so poison ivy poison ivy poison ivy poison ivy yep when you're wandering the woods that's a good one to know okay here's a fun one so you're walking around the woods and you find this Hickory Nut and then a while later you find this one you think ah is that a black walnut no it's a Hickory knife if you look closely it's got this X cross section at the top it's just one that hasn't turned black yet and gotten soft so you can pop off the husk a walnut though a black walnut looks like this a little smaller than a baseball when they come down they're green and they slowly turn black and then eventually the black all falls off and you'll see this traditional or like a walnut inside the leaves look kind of like an ash leavin that they're all one big piece and they have these sprigs that come off but they're very hairy they're fuzzy and they had this like characteristic to them the center of the stick is very pithy and then the bark is very easy to identify it comes like this you see this this criss cross XJ on the bark and that is very characteristic of a walnut tree and so you know this right behind the bark there's a bit of a white wood the SAP wood and then inside of it you're gonna have that very very dark walnut wood and then the very core you're gonna be almost this almost empty core running all the way up the middle in the heart of the tree so yeah when you're running through the woods you're gonna come across these nuts and they become a problem for stepping on because you step on them you roll but this is black walnut and once you start to identify it you'll be very very happy you did because everybody likes black walnut now here's one that I should know it has a sawtooth leaf and all the spines come back to the central point as opposed to all coming to the base they all come back to the main spine and I'm seeing this tree quite often I've seen these leaves a lot they are all over the place you can get a closer look at what the canopy looks like well kind of but these leaves are just covering the trees and they're all over the ground so when I get back to my house I'll show you how I look it up and identify the tree so now let me take you to a few sites and apps that I use to help me find what is this plant what is this tree and my first and foremost is the Arbor Day Foundation Arbor Day org and I'll leave a link to all of these apps and websites down below so you can go and look at that and this one is very good particularly if you live in the US or Canada at finding native trees and so it's you know asking you are you in the West Coast or in the East Coast and and picking from there if you're not in North America then your this is going to be a little bit more difficult for you but it's still still fairly doable because it does have trees that aren't just in North America although it is designed for the native trees to North America so this will basically then go through you know is it a nice turn is it needles that have cones is it a regular leaf is it a standard leaf or is it a compound leaf you know it's a standard leaf are the leaves directly across the stem or are they alternating across the stem and you can go on down through this and it will give you more and more ideas about what it is until eventually you come to it this particular one is a little bit deeper down so rather than dragging you through that I'll just take you to the answer it's an elm tree particularly a rock elm and this is a this is a fairly common one around here this is actually what my table is going to be made out of my dining room table I'll be making here soon very easily notified by the the paper seeds you'll find the seed in the middle of the paper and it's a fairly common tree around here then the other place that I often go to and I want to find out more information about it is wiki a ton of information on there for you know more information about what the tree is from history of the name history about the tree that might be using different things far more specifics about where is it located where is it commonly found other uses for it and things like that this is a wiki is a great place on Google search in general if you're looking for information or you kind of know what it is and you're looking for you know it's an elm tree but what type of Elm is it you know I'll look up elm tree types leaves and it'll give me pictures of all those and I can kind of match them up and get a better idea from that another one that I use all the time is British trees this is an app you can put on your phone it is focused on trees in Britain but I'll I even find native trees from America listed there except for they'll be listed as ornamental trees or trees that have been transplanted to the garden as opposed to native trees and this one is great because it's far easier to get around then the the arbor day because there's pictures for everything so if you're trying to find something this is this is an app that I use all the time this is the one I probably use on the fly the most then probably the easiest of all of them is plant net with an @ symbol in plant and this one is is so simple because you just take a picture of the tree itself you take a picture of the leaf or the bud or the fruit and it goes through the algorithm and tries to figure out just from the picture itself so it's kind of reading the picture it's very quick very easy and it gives you a general idea at least it gives you to a point where you can jump off and you can go and you can google or you have more information we need to go to Arbor Day to to look it up so these are the ones that I use the most I really don't use that much more and if I can't find it from these then post a picture on social media and say hey does anyone out there know what this is and usually someone's gonna be telling me by the end of the day so there you have it next time you're wandering around in the woods you know exactly how to look up and find out what is that tree what is that nut I find I definitely say go out and explore the only way you're gonna get good at learning what trees are out there to go out into experiment to find out the tree and to learn and even if you run into a problems and you can't find it online you can't find it on the apps and you have no idea what this is post the pictures leaf on Instagram or social media and ask people hey anyone have an idea what this is that's a great way to learn as well so I hope you like this I do want to say thank you to the patrons on patreon you guys are really the reason why I can keep putting out videos like this if you'd like to see more like this you can help out with patreon or find out more about right down here also if you'd like to subscribe or see some behind the scenes footage you can do that as well that's about it for today and until next time have a wonderful day

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 504,903

Rating: 4.8966703 out of 5

Keywords: How to Identify a Tree, tree id, Hickory, elm, Walnut, black cherry, ash, maple, box elder, plant identification, Wood By Wright, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, how to, identify, trees, id, bark, nature, wood, winter tree id, identify trees by bark, cottonwood, plant id, Identification Of Trees Of The United States, midwest, Lumber identification, hand tools, hand plane, hand tool

Id: nO67Jd_6KEw

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2017