Friday, October 04, 2013

Loggers v Sassafras. Sassafras Wins


Forestry revenge.  Or clearing the way for fruitfulness?

At our sassafras walk, some 3 1/2-4 miles around a ridge-top reservoir, woods and dikes and bogs,  the loggers came through. They had permission of the forestry-district commission authorities, but there was devastation nonetheless. Does clear-cutting serve the long term health of a woods walk? Perhaps. Watchful waiting needed. Cautious optimism.

Meanwhile, experience with me the sadness at groves of sassafras apparently mindlessly mowed down and uprooted out. Do public utilities (our MDC at the reservoir) and loggers have any sense of differentiation between plants? Will the trillium survive?

As to the trillium, doubtful. Perhaps the sassafras can survive, with its millennia of experience under stress.  Underground runners, rev your engines.

 Sadness. Watchfully wait.

 
 
Some sprigs survived.  

 
 
Can one or two survivor sassafras root another thriving grove.


Update.  The prospects for our few clumps of sassafras look okay, several months after the forestry management.  Some sassafras that had been in groves, are peeking up yet again. 

Sassafras regeneration. For the species that survived Hiroshima, this is not surviving.  Forestry is not atomic bombs.  Underground runners:  whether the tactic relates to plants, or to heretics, or other dissenters, does nature say this:  if under stress, go underground if needed, wait, nurture yourself as you can, poke up a cautious head later, and see if you can survive despite them.

So far, for the MDC in CT, signs show that sassafras will rise again. 

Will exploration of its healing qualities, its attribute of enhancing insect repellence (read, bedbugs) and then congeniality, fellowship, someday outweigh the element of ecstasy that some can use to their own uses.  Perhaps.  What to control, and how, and why make sassafras a demon under the false flag of "carcinogenic" when the testing for that was intrinsically flawed.