On September 29, 2021

Not “just a bunch of trees”

By Gary Salmon

Just as fall is appearing, two trees pop into the landscape whose color will be okay but whose form is what catches the eye. They both live in Rutland, one on Court Street across from Grace Church and the other, a quiet life at the Godnick Center out on the Deer Street side. Even the species are not remarkable — one is a Norway and the other, a sugar maple.

Submitted
Deer Street maple

So what gives?

A tree growing in an open space will develop a set of horizontal branches to take advantage of sunlight on leaves. The result is an ever expanding rounded crown which gets larger as the tree gets taller, and most hardwood trees develop in this manner. It is what your eye likes to see in a tree and certainly sets the palette for displaying fall colors. These will have color but it is the form that makes them stand out from all those others around them. They are columnar varieties which grow as tall as their more common maple cousins but with very narrow vertical crowns. “Bunch” is not a word used very often in describing trees and when used it encapsules usually a group of trees of the same size and species in a similar looking space.

Submitted
Court Street maple

Beautiful planning, I’m told, is created by designing the hardscape and then finding a place for the trees to “fit.” Planning beautifully involves integrating the landscape so that both buildings where we work and play can exist with the trees that will fit there. That is the origin of these two variants — tree genetics — which developed a tree that would grow where a tree was needed and whose form would not interfere with its environment (near sets of wires, between tall buildings, or on narrow greenspaces, for example).

Of all the places around for these trees to fit, there weren’t many except for more urban environments where much of the planning above built a demand to create these variants. So they never were very popular trees for planting but appear occasionally in Vermont. A quick trip to Horsford’s Nursery in Charlotte confirmed that they were in demand a few years ago but that they carried none of these two variants now. They did say, however, that if they had a few of the columnar sugar maples they could probably sell them.

Trees and fall foliage are in season so enjoy them. But don’t exclude form when your eye examines trees, and you will be surprised at what is growing in front of you. So stop by on Court or Deer Streets and take a peek. You can’t miss them as one has a gingko tree growing right across the street and the other has a planted American chestnut, complete with fruit, adjacent to it. So get out explore, the fall landscape, and remember that what you are seeing is not “just a bunch of trees.”

Do you want to submit feedback to the editor?

Send Us An Email!

Related Posts

Pies, parades, and porch chats

July 2, 2025
“America is a tune. It must be sung together.”—Gerald Stanley lee The month of July is the height of summer, bringing a spirit of celebration to all of us. Our town of Killington may be small, but we know how to celebrate the 4th of July. We start early with the annual book sale at…

Inventing a better ski day: the innovations that drew crowds to Killington

July 2, 2025
By Karen D. Lorentz Editors’ Note: This is part of a series on the factors that enabled Killington to become the Beast of the East. Quotations are from author interviews in the 1980s for the book Killington, A Story of Mountains and Men. “We’ve got a million dollars that says you’ll learn to ski at…

‘Almost Heaven’

July 2, 2025
The stage was simple, designed to resemble a wooden board that resembled the siding of any barn, anywhere across America. It could have been the barn behind my house, or the one that my cousins have down in Georgia. It could have been a barn in Colorado or even West Virginia.  Nothing remarkable at all,…

Getting away from it all

July 2, 2025
My family and I went to the beach this past week. The temperatures were hot, and the weather was sunny, making for a classic seaside vacation. The house we rented was in the harbor of the town where we were visiting, so while we didn’t stare out at the ocean, we were able to sit…