Tree Identification - Northeastern Softwoods

early March here in western New York yeah that's a good time to talk about conifer trees otherwise known as soft woods that's because while the leaves aren't done they won't conceal the ones we're talking about a soft wood or conifer tree is anything with needles as opposed to leaves an evergreen tree basically now that has no bearing on whether it's wood is actually hard or soft it's common for the lower limbs of conifer trees to be dead because as the tree grows and gains height and adds limbs up top it no longer needs these bottom once they die and break off eventually white pine are capable of growing till they get real big majestic looking white pine is susceptible to attacks from a weevil that attacks the leading chute of a young growing white pine tree and when that happens when the tree is a sapling the result in a form like you see here it'll be multiple stemmed and it'll be very crooked and for some reason the weevil leaves the tree alone once it gets fairly tall so when you grow a tree above about 25 feet tall its home free so in places where the pine grows fast like a gravel or sin the the tree the trees will often have better form than ones that grow on clay or more poorly drained ground I'm just gonna let the camera linger over the bark of the white pine so you can study it a little bit so any pine there needles will grow in clusters and if you pull out one of the clusters the best way to remember a white pine is that the needles will come in groups of five whit3 inches long you can see white pine are capable of putting out a real impressive cone they're not all gonna be that big but kind of close to my heart that's the maine state flower is a pine cone and tassel all the white streaks you see that's sap running out of these woodpecker holes white pine whenever it's injured or damaged by woodpeckers or has a limb broken from a windstorm it'll lose sap like this an attempt to close off the wound and well because of its soft wood white pine is something at woodpeckers rather like to attack wolves considered red pine a really handsome tree it tends to grow ramrod straight I'm really tall and the top will be just this little clump way up at the tip of a long pole red pine bark is quickly easily filled flakes off by hand and that under bark will be quite reddish especially when the sun shining on that's one of the giveaways red pine needles are longer than any other pine that I find in my travels in New York the you know five to seven inches long and they're in groups of two and red pine sap and lumber has like white pine it has a turpentine smell to it for good reason turpentine is made from pine sap red pine cones are tight like this when they first drop and then they open up to look almost round but they're kind of small and roly-poly like that in their native Europe I understand that Scotch pine are an important commercial crop here in New York Scotch pine are considered a weed tree they have a great tendency to grow crooked and you're full of big dead knots though it should make the the lumber very weak so we don't care for them too much in the logging world in New York State but the biggest giveaway of identifying a Scotch pine the orange upper part of the trunk will just be this bright orange like you can see Scotch pine needles will not be as thin and long as white pine needles they're they're stubbier and they come in clusters of - and there's the cone of the Scotch pine it's kind of tapered at the tip like you see and it's got these pointy things on the outside Hemlock are capable of getting really big and really old I'm told they can live to be out seven hundred years old and this one here is about two and a half foot through and hemlock will grow in swamps it can tolerate growing the mushy astound there is but it can also grow on hillsides to stands of pure or mixed hemlock often have this characteristic where nothing can grow in the understory but the hemlock shade the ground so efficiently that no other trees can germinate in their shadow it leaves it very open like this here's the bark of the hemlock and it's a little difficult to describe but show you up and down the trunk a little bit one thing about hemlock is that it does not lose pitch of any kind there will be no SAP losing from from a hemlock trunk hemlock needles are short and flat there's nothing Jabby about them they won't they won't poke you like a spruce needle would they're gonna be lighter on the underside than they are on the top I don't see how close I can get with this and again if you crush the needles or break the twig you won't really smell anything most of these soft woods have some kind of aroma to them not so for the hemlock hemlock lumber is not strong because of its tendency to split however it's really resistant to rot which made it ideal for sheathing my barn with Norway spruce tend to grow with a classic spire shaped like you see here there's another pair of them over there Norway spruce has one dead giveaway you'll have a leading limb and all of the twigs will droop from that leading limb no other spruce looks like that any spruce tree will have needles that are sharp and pokey it's almost painful when you when you touch it because they're hard and sharp and they are aromatic as any of you who have live Christmas trees no if you look at the top you can see clusters of cones hanging from the limbs up there norway spruces cones are pretty long you know about five inches long and scaly like this this one's opened up so the seeds have been dropped there aren't a ton of cedar trees in New York's in western New York and where you find them they don't grow all that great but we do have a few now you get on the other side of Lake Ontario and they have tons of cedar up there in Ontario now you see a rather sharp line where the where the needles begin on this tree and that's from deer browse deer love to browse on cedar needles and you go up pretty tall cos last winter there was a snowbank here and the deer would climb right up on the snowbank and browses high into the trees they could cedar have kind of a fractal pattern to their needles they're flat and scaly and that's the underside of right there the deer love to browse these cedar bark is long vertical strips like this you can reach out and peel strips off these cedar lumber is very durable it can withstand weather for a long time but rarely do we grow them in western New York to where you could saw them into anything the cones are a cedar of these tiny little things and they open up to drop their seed these are opened they're small and there's not much to them certainly not compared to a pine or a spruce

Channel: Peter Collin

Views: 20,763

Rating: 4.9292035 out of 5

Keywords: woods, letchworth, softwoods, pine, spruce, hemlock, tree identification

Id: ugQuAahHsz8

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2016