An insect species never before recorded on Martha's Vineyard
has attacked spruce trees Islandwide, damaging many and even killing a
few, say area scientists and tree experts.
The pest was identified this month as a Spruce aphid (elatobium
abietinum) by a cooperative effort of scientists at the University of
Massachusetts.
O, Christmas Tree! Park Landlord Says It Must Come Down
By MANDY LOCKE
A graceful Christmas tree is caught in a tug-of-war between
Edgartown leaders and the Benjamin Hall family.
The full-bodied spruce stands 20 feet tall in the center of a
treasured park on Main street. The Halls - who have leased the
so-called mini-park to the town for decades - are demanding the
tree come down.
After thirty years serving the Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich on Cape Cod, horticulturist Jeanne Gillis said she still loves to work with people and plants.
Speaking before the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club at its October meeting, Ms. Gillis presented more than thirty colorful slides in a talk titled Flowering Plants for the Landscape.
Many of the plants featured in her talk are strong and able to survive high winds.
The latest round in a dispute pitting a landowner’s right of access against conservation values played out like a game of cat and mouse in town hall, the courts and the woods of Edgartown last week.
It began a little before 10 a.m. on Friday morning, when Paul Elliott, the president of the Edgartown Meadows Road Association, found workmen cutting down trees along Middle Line Road.
One of the great public views on the Vineyard at the Tashmoo Overlook is disappearing behind a wall of willows, but instead of calling in tree surgeons to open the vista up, the trees’ owners have called in their lawyers.
The Tisbury selectmen complained on Tuesday night that despite more than a year of attempts to negotiate a solution, the owners of the trees, the Thomas and Ginny Payette family of Tashmoo Farm, remained intransigent and have now refused to talk further, except through their legal representative.
The attorney representing the owners of a stand of willow trees which is gradually obscuring one of the Island’s best scenic views at the Tashmoo Overlook has extended an olive branch to the town of Tisbury over the dispute.
In a letter sent to Tisbury town administrator John Bugbee on August 15, Michael Goldsmith, an attorney with Reynolds, Rappaport and Kaplan in Edgartown, offered a formula for further talks about the problem.
David Foster is no ordinary forester. To begin with, there’s his professional moniker: paleoecologist. It means that he is an environmental historian; he studies ecology in the context of history. Long-range history. Very long-range history. He can tell you (for example) what was happening in the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest about 15,000 years ago — and also 60 years ago.
The red pine plantations of the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest have been described as recently as 1998 by this paper as a “pine cathedral,” with evenly spaced rows of the northern evergreen towering above a forest floor nearly barren except for a carpet of needles. Now that cathedral has been all but sacked by fungal barbarians known as diplodia pinea which infect the trees from the shoots and rot them to the core.
Inside the Polly Hill Arboretum office on Monday afternoon sits Collections and Grounds Manager Tom Clarke with a number of black oak twigs and branches on his desk, one just brought in by arborist John McCarter an hour earlier. With acorns dangling and new foliage sprouting, the twigs are seemingly healthy.
Look closer and each twig has hundreds of miniscule holes; the once smooth, skinny branches are now bumpy and swollen.
Once emerging from these tiny holes were the cynipid gall wasps currently attacking black oak trees up and down the Island.
