Les Jones

Science > Signs of Spring

I celebrated the spring equinox in advance. Last night after work I came home and grabbed my rod and reel and went fishing at Ish Creek on Fort Loudon Lake. I had less than an hour to fish before the sun went down, but I had fun. In a couple of weeks we'll change to daylight savings time and there'll be lots of fishing time after work. When I got home I left my gear in the trunk. For the next six months it's fishing season.

The picture is a Magnolia soulangiana (saucer magnolia or Chinese magnolia) at work. They're one of the earliest bloomers in Knoxville. There used to be one in front of the law school. I snapped this picture yesterday morning with my cell phone camera and jazzed it up with Photoshop. Click on it to see the original, unadulterated (and boring) photograph. Saucer magnolia is on my short list of non-fruitbearing, ornamental trees to plant.

Our property at casa de Jones has most of my favorite native trees, including red bud, dogwood (two other early bloomers), hackberry,* and an awe-inspiring hemlock that impresses even the jaded landscapers who have been out to the house lately. The other native tree I have a soft spot for is sourwood. We have a peach tree and a couple of mature black walnut trees. I'd like to add a pear tree and some dwarf fruit trees when we start the big landscaping project in a couple of weeks. LATER: Come to think of it, there's two more fruit trees I'd like to have: a pawpaw and a fig. Eating a fig picked fresh from the tree is unforgettable - the flesh of the fruit is pinkish-red and doesn't taste anything like the dried fruit.

If you're planting fruit trees in East Tennessee, avoid cherry and plum. There's a blight that does them in. I've had a couple of wild cherry trees in my yard succumb to it. A few years ago I had to make like George Washington and chop down a plum tree I had planted for my mom as a mother's day present in high school. I've also lost a couple of pine trees to what I assume was southern pine bark beetles. You could actually stand outside and hear the beetles chewing into the cambium layer.

* Hackberry is a really non-descript tree, but I like it. Why? Because it's an honest tree, so to speak. No one plants hackberry. If you see a hackberry tree, it's there just because it happened to grow there au natural. It also has a distinctive bark. I can ID hackberry trees even in winter when the leaves are off. For the same reason, I wouldn't mind having a beech tree. Beech has a smooth, gray, tight bark that makes the tree look like an elephant's leg.