A Cornerstone For Our Biome

Contributed by Carol Herwig

Chair, Tree Working (TWiG) Committee

Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home has become a standard text for American gardeners, especially along the Atlantic Coast. One of the takeaways from it is the importance of the oak tree. Tallamy cites a 2003 study in Illinois that found that “a single white oak can provide food and shelter for as many as 22 species of tiny leaf-tying and leaf-folding caterpillars,” not to mention the butterflies, moths, birds, bugs and beetles that depend on it. The oak is a cornerstone for our biome.

But as arborist and author William Bryant Logan demonstrates in Oak: The Frame of Civilization, the oak does a lot more than feed and shade us. Logan reminds us of the importance of the oak tree in fishing and shipping and construction, providing the raw material that opened up new worlds and new ways of travel and shelter.

If you want some first-hand knowledge of how evolution happens, follow Logan as he takes us into a woods. A forester “may see clearly here a pin oak, there a red oak” but then some confusion, because “oaks make frequent small genetic changes.” So now you’ll see, for example, a pin oak with the northern red’s broader leaf, or vis versa. Change in a microcosm.

Oaks represent strength and grandeur and patience. They are slow to grow but endure for centuries. To writers like Logan, and arborists everywhere, losing an ancient oak is like losing a link to history. Oak: The Frame of Civilization gives us context.

Logan is also the author of Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, which is as wonderful as the title suggests. Amazon calls it a “cult classic.”

Both books are available online through various used book outlets.