Large trees are a great asset in a home landscape, providing shade, beauty, and added property value. Well cared for yard trees are normally healthy and will provide these benefits for decades, perhaps a century. But trees with health issues can be potentially dangerous. These are classified as Hazard Trees that pose a threat of dropping large limbs or falling over on people or property. Poor tree health can be caused by landowner neglect, insect or disease attacks, old age, and wind or ice storms.

After a long hot summer my favorite time of year is finally here, with its balmy days, cool nights, and eventual forest color display that everyone looks forward to. If you ever wonder why leaves change color, here’s the latest scoop.

I’ve seen two postings with photos of Fairy Rings on Facebook this week, so there is an apparent outbreak of them, likely caused by all the rain we’ve gotten lately. Fairy rings are those peculiar sprouting up of mushrooms in a well-defined arc or circular pattern. This has caused a lot of myths about their origin to sprout up over the centuries, but there is an explanation as to what’s going on with the rings.

Ironweed (Veronia altissima) is the purple flowers you see growing on a tall, slender stalk in pasture and hay fields while driving down the road. It seems particularly plentiful this year.

I’ve bragged about our areas plant diversity in the past. The mountainous terrain dissected by rivers and streams creates an incredible variety of habitats that supports more plant species than anywhere but rain forests. One example of this species richness is a tree that is not only growing far out of its normal range but has a most peculiar growth habit that helps it survive.

I really enjoyed my career as a forester, partly because of the variety. It was rare that I did the same thing two days in a row. I could be walking in the woods collecting field data in the morning and be on a wildfire that afternoon. If you like routine, forestry is not for you. One unique task I did on occasion was identifying animal poop, especially when people would find droppings in their house and badly wanted to know what uninvited visitor left it.

I was mowing the grass the other day and, not particularly enjoying it, mused over what a dull thing to be doing. I was not taking things into perspective.

While I thought I was puttering along on my mower at a blazing two or three miles per hour, I was in fact mowing grass on a surface of the Earth that was spinning at a rotation speed of 1037 miles per hour. While spinning at this breakneck speed, the Earth and I were whizzing around the sun at a speed of 1110 miles per hour. That’s like driving to Myrtle Beach in 23 minutes.

My job as a forester was a blessing to allow me to get out and enjoy the beauty of our woods and fields and get paid for it. But there were plants out there that would suck some of the joy of being outside. I’m talking about plants that can make you bleed because of their thorns; things like blackberry, escaped rose bushes, and my worst nemesis: sawbriars. I’ve come off wildfires with literally every square inch of my legs scratched from these painful vines.

I hope each of you have had the opportunity to be in a really dark place on a clear night and caught a glimpse of a shimmering, sort of thin fog like band of light across the sky. This time of year it runs high overhead. It helps to let your eyes adjust to the dark before trying to see it, and any street lights or the moon ruin your chances.

There have been many theories and guesses about conditions on the moon, such as: It’s a dead, dry world; that it has Earth-like mineral soil; that weathering doesn’t occur because the Moon is surrounded by a vacuum, and the like. Information retrieved from the Lunar Prospector probe launched to the Moon several years ago, along with long term study of lunar rocks retrieved from the Apollo missions, have turned up some interesting facts.