Sunday Afternoon Post: Poutine

I decided to make this first of bad-for-you destination food posts on our perennial heart-stopper, monsieur poutine, short and sweet.  I have written about him before:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/07/poutine-mes-amis-poutine.html

Alas, then I did not have a picture to share.  I warned the timid readers out there before that it might look disgusting, and to quite a few people it does.  Voila!

Come closer.  It won't bite. 

Yep, that's the real deal, from Riverview Snack Shack in Mattawa, Ontario.  Coincidentally, they have the best hamburgers in the world there as well, but I can save that for a more detailed post.  Today, just enjoy the thick gravy, melted curds, and amazing fries sitting together in French Canada's answer to the query "and what shall your street food be?"  In our next post, the gravy train goes to visit Philadelphia, home of the cheese steak sandwich. 

Real Maple Syrup: Part Four

Though no tree can really compare with the noble Sugar Maple for excellence of syrup, there are three minor contenders at least passing mentions, all of which are largely bottomland species, preferring the lush damp world of the shoreline and riverbank to the upland home of the Sugar Maple.  We start with a species we have already been introduced to, a tree of incredible habitat diversity and stunning beauty:

Red Maple (Acer Rubrum)

A map for this species was already given in the first post of this maple series.  Click that link to find it!

The Red Maple produces what is probably the next best maple sap for getting syrup after the noble Sugar Maple.  It has a similar sugar content, but a distinct problem in that Reds break dormancy before most other trees, and they do it fast; the window for sap collecting is very short when compared to even the lesser maples.  This should not be surprising coming from a tree that is equally ready to face brutal northern winters as well as some brief passing of a seasonal dip in Southern Florida (and theoretically even the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico, but don't hold me to that until I find the trees and get famous and stuff).  Sure, the trees are probably not reverse hardy by any stretch, but what's important is that Mr. and Mrs. Red Maple hail from a powerful evolutionary tree line; while you are most likely to find one down near the drink, you would not be shocked to find one up in the hills or in an abandoned field.  I could make a small fortune in the nursery trade off of some that appeared in various gardens I have tended, more so than any other "weed".  Like any good "weed", they grow pretty quickly, at least until they are 10 or so.  Other trees which can then get established in their pioneering wake or are slow to wake up then usually overtake them, and they seldom tend to dominate forests.  Perhaps this is for our viewing pleasure, as they sure do look nice making passers by ignore the rest of the forest.

They look simply amazing, the equivalent in red that the Sugar Maple is in orange.  Except for the sumacs, no tree, even in flower, produces such a vibrant red.

This picture, and no picture really, does this tree justice.  This was taken somewhere in SE Michigan.  I have very few pictures of them on hand, even though they never fail to capture my attention and camera.  The yellow tree to the right is actually a female.  They turn yellow!  In the background are Sugars. 

They are often also provided with a reflecting pool, being rather fond of life at the water's edge. 

Cedar Lake, Algonquin Provincial Park.  This was a hazy day, in August of 2012.  As you can see, the tree has already turned, as many trees on the edge of waters which have been cooled by cold nights will.  This makes our showman stand out even more.  Those other shrubby things are Speckled Alders (Alnus Incana) and some Myrica.

What's more, they have one more trick up their sleeves: the females turn yellow!  This can be seen in the neighboring tree in the first photo, in case you missed the caption.  They sometimes grab a little orange in the mix as the color game comes to an end, as can also be seen.  Anyway, it is no wonder that the tree would warrant more scrutiny and eventually be selected for harvesting by our first syrup and sugar makers.  Beauty and accessibility combined make for an attractive package.  Why wander through a forest when the trees are usually right at the edge?  That said, the Reds are just a bit more intense in flavor than the Sugars.  This actually makes for better straight sap consumption (yes, this can be done, as boiling into syrup essentially does not cook the product so much as concentrate the sugars) than the Sugars, at least to my taste buds.  Again, however, the window is small on getting the sap while it is running.  These trees flower insanely early in the waking season, and waste no time in arising after the winter slumber.  While repeated freezes can make sap run again, anything even over a week makes them taste... well, gross.  In terms of terroir, I have tasted sap from upland northern species and find that the rare loam-growing upland Red has reliable taste, while those growing in clay further south are actually even better, but the variability of the waking season further south makes for a difficult tapping.  I have never sampled any riparian tree sap, probably because it is easier to tap a tree on land than from a canoe.

Silver Maple (Acer Saccharinum)-Yes, the Latin name looks suspiciously familiar!

This is an entirely different animal, not being found much on uplands at all, being dominates instead of the river bottoms (they can't take shade in the uplands but can handle it with the extra nutrients of the waterside).  They can be flooded, like the reds, and make for a beautiful scene with the more southerly Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), which likes to play even closer to the deep end of the pool.  They break dormancy and bloom even faster than the Reds.  They are beautiful (no I don't have pictures, which is odd because they are everywhere, including in my brother's backyard of his previous home) and despite their natural wet home, often get planted as ornamentals; trees in parks in central Toronto have been there for some time and reached incredible girths.  In terms of syrup, I am told (but have never had personally experienced) that they taste like the Sugar Maple, but apparently the sugar concentration is so low that the process is not worth it. 

Thanks, USGS!  If you were wondering where to find them that far south, its usually in the microclimate of the waterside. 

Since they have roughly the same range as the Sugars, with the exception that they grow two hundred or so miles further south in both directions of the compass, one is probably best off using a Sugar instead. They are amazing trees, however, and are planted as noted because they shimmer in a breeze, their leaves being silvery underneath and pale green above.  In the fall, they turn a less than brilliant yellow. 

Boxelder (Acer Negundo)

This one is a bit... weirder.  It grows amazingly well from Guatemala to the far northern plains in Alberta, as well as in the east. 

Many thanks as usual to USGS and the original map maker, Mr. Elbert Little.

It does not have normal leaves as we imagine most maples to have, as they consist of multiple little maple leaves in a giant compound leaf, arranged in a palmate pattern.  I have never taken a picture of a Boxelder, even though I have seen them in the most incredible places, including in little depressions and valleys in the high plains.  They are never far from water, and are often a good sign that it is near, be it high in the mountains or across the otherwise treeless plains.  Like our other two featured maples in this post, they break dormancy early and quickly, and are mentioned here not because they make powerful syrup, which they can, albeit worse than the others, but because they can be found in the north well west of the other maples.  I have had this maple treat me once, as the raw sap, tapped by an Ojibway woman in northern lower Michigan.  She told me that her people, and other First Born from farther west, including the Lakota and Black Foot, only have this maple to draw from, and they usually don't even boil it to a syrup, but drink the sap straight, mostly mixed with the sap of the Sugar Maple which out west they had acquired in trade from further east.  The stuff I tried was such a blend, and it was probably the tradition and respect talking instead of the actual taste buds, but it was pretty decent.  Sometimes the best taste just really comes from the trees where are found home... even in Vermont.

There are other trees capable of producing syrup from sap.  These, however, are the four genuine articles for honest-to-goodness maple syrup and sugar, with the orange majesty of the Sugar being the true real deal.  Next: the finale.  Then we can move on!

Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.

Real Maple Syrup: Part Two

Moving along in our discovery of one of the most amazing native things ever produced from the continent, maple syrup, we must question why some syrups are naturally superior than others, and the answer lies in something similar to what makes wines different from one another: Terroir.

Terroir is a mystical, magical concept.  Like many French words, it has no powerful English equivalent with which to express its full meaning, but basically it comes down to all the things that make a plant do what a plant does best: react to its environment.  This includes weather and climate, soil, etc.  In the case of Vitis Vinifera, a.k.a. the wine grape, things are obviously extremely complex due to human intervention in cultivating numerous forms down through centuries of loving manipulation.  Various species of maple (and by extension, other possible syrup friendly trees), in contrast, at least our North American trees, have not nearly been selectively bred to the same extent that wine grapes have.  That said, we do have a small assortment of species to choose from in the syrup game, and also said, we find that nature is remarkable in that has long produced variations within species without our help.  In part, this is because terroir has affected our leafy friends in such a way that trees are likely to have some small variations in form and resulting taste even when sampled from neighboring areas.  A Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) from central Tennessee would find itself facing a rather brutal winter if it were to find itself suddenly in Quebec, to say nothing of what the same shock would be like for a Red Maple (Acer Rubrum), a far more generally adaptable species, suddenly finding itself no longer in the swamps of Southern Florida but among the shorelines of the Ottawa River.

This sort of stuff gets commercial tree growers in trouble quite a bit, especially where more tender temperate ornamental trees like the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis) are concerned.  One of the most obvious differences in terroir felt by a nursery grown tree from the South and imported into Le Nord would be the new and strange frigid winter that the tree would find itself trying to be hardy to.  Likewise, the tree would find that Le Nord is not nearly as hot in the summer as it was back South, to say nothing of how much less humid and rainy!  Finally, it would also find that the soil was so very, very different from what it grew up in.  I could go on and on about terroir, or Phytogeography, which is pretty much what the core of this blog is about, but...

The maples!

Most maples are creatures of the forest, and thus are very fond of mixed-light conditions and moisture, moisture, and more moisture.  With the exception of the aloof, adaptable, and mysterious Box Elder (Acer Negundo), none of our temperate eastern maples are courageous enough to venture far into the drier prairie lands, and the Red Maple will not even make it very far into the eastern prairies of Illinois or Indiana, being completely afraid to face the possibility of drought combined with fire, which is another reason why I probably found even the thought of central Illinois syrup to be funny (to be fair, Sugar Maples and Black Maples are apparently made of tougher stuff and can indeed be found in forested patches there).  Sure, the maples can be planted further afield from their comfortable natural ranges, but they might not produce enough starch in their roots to make syrup production viable.  Syrup production in most places was not the best in the March of 2013, owing to the colossal hot, drought-heavy summer that was 2012.  The brunt of that disaster was felt in the True Midwest, but trees were sufficiently stressed in all but northern New England.  Rocky, sandy, well-drained northern Ontario and neighboring western Quebec and northern Michigan baked and dried to a crisp.  Massive forest fires made life even more difficult.

That year, Vermont won the award.

Thankfully, most of the time the inland north does better.  Why?  A little thing called maritime, or oceanic influence.

The most powerful maritime climates in the world are usually envisioned as being temperate western Europe, the Pacific Northwest, etc., but a typical cold January day even in chilly Nova Scotia is decidedly more moderate of a chill than one would find farther inland, even New Brunswick and Maine. Champlain and friends discovered this first hand when their colony of Saint Croix was established in a very chilly position, and soon made way to the other side of the Bay of Fundy where they established the roots of future Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia.  Saint Croix was on the "inland" side of the bay, gaining no benefit from the prevailing westerlies which would skim the mostly unfrozen waters, pick up moisture, and moderate the winter chill.  Still, even Saint Croix is much more mild than places further inland, such as the St. Lawrence valley.  The ocean, westerlies or not, is like a giant road block for intense continental chill.  New England, as a result, is a tropical paradise compared to neighboring Quebec and upstate New York.

That said, the same can be noted for upstate New York in comparison to Michigan and southern Ontario, and then Michigan in comparison to Wisconsin.  The Great Lakes, you see, have a small amount of maritime influence of their own.

Public domain, see the original at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041130.html.

The above picture features a north western wind, but the overall effect remains the same: downwind of the lakes one gets moderated temperatures and a ton of moisture.  In the summer, this sometimes has a reverse effect of creating something like a coastal California marine layer, wherein the water and shoreline areas are under heavy cloud while inland the place is delightfully sunny.  In any event, even smaller bodies of water can influence climate, with an unfrozen Lake St. Clair providing small scale changes to the local climate.  The larger lakes, though, are truly things of raw climactic power.  Superior creates its own weather systems!  Well, she does until she manages to largely freeze over.  The lake effect runs to a screeching halt once the bodies get a coat of ice.  A total coat is rare for all but Erie, but enough of the surface area gets frozen in places like Georgian Bay, western Superior, and the Straits of Mackinac, that winter does come and the true maritime influence disappears.  The result for the local terroir in places like northern Michigan, the Adirondacks, and the Opeongo Hills section (Algonquin highlands) of the Laurentian Mountains is the best of both worlds; New England meets Boreal.

Like in the deserts of the western United States and Canada and northern Mexico, elevation rise is the second factor in enhancing this climate soup.  As air rises on the Porcupine, Adirondack, or Laurentian mountains or onto the Mio Plateau, all of which are significant rises above the surrounding lowlands (a change of at least a thousand feet in many places), it cools if even ever so slightly, and dumps out moisture.  In each of these locations, a slight rain-shadow is even created.  The most noticeable of these is in the central Ottawa valley of Ontario, where Jack-Pine savannas and cacti can be found.  Like in the desert sky-islands out west, the Opeongo portion of the Laurentian mountains contrast this scenery with moist spruce-hardwood forests, replete with maritime expectations like Red Spruce (Picea Rubens) and Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis), well west of their happy Appalachian strongholds.  Then of course there are the maples, benefiting both from the same moisture, and the final ingredient of terroir: recycled life and powerful organic soil (and on the Mio plateau and in the Laurentians, glacially deposited sand an loam to assist in drainage).  Powerful for trees, anyway.  Farming never took off in any of these mountain lands, confined instead to nearby clay belts in the surrounding lowlands.  The end result is a logging paradise, and more so, a maple syrup dream, the moisture of the Appalachians with the winters of the interior (sorry Vermont, you are just close enough to oceanic protection to make the slight difference for the pickiest syrup-enthusiast), perfect for feeding a tree and then keeping the food locked away from pesky winter thaws.  When that sap starts to run, it really runs.

In review, the best sort of syrup (and remember, that local soil can make you even pickier) comes from here:

And yes, x does indeed mark the spot of syrup in its Platonic form, but that is just my opinion regarding the finest terroir.  What can I say?  Those Canadian Shield minerals are just amazing.  Next post, we will start looking at individual trees, and we will cap off with individual products.  And before I get any letter-bombs sent to me from the Green Mountain state, Vermont syrup is fine.  Honest. 

Winter 2014, A Final Farewell

Spring looks to be finally upon the continent, even towards more northerly reaches.  While the alpine heights of the mountains and the more distant north will not experience the hints of a growing season until June, more temperate lands have started to feel release from what has truly been a difficult winter.  Were it not for the snow many of us (except, sadly, on good portions of the Great Plains) had, the landscape would look like a disaster area.  Here in Southeastern Michigan we experienced the grip of the sort of cold best reserved for Northern Ontario, and our friends on the other side of Lake Michigan were even worse off.  In contrast, much of the far west experienced relative warmth... except for one place.

Thanks to a special friend for taking this shot for me. 

This would be in Washington, Utah, a place otherwise noted for being at the edge of the Mojave Desert and thus prone to mild winter days in the lower fifties and chilly nights hovering around half of that value.  Now and then snow can fall in this land, as it did in record amounts back in 2008, but in general the thaw comes around quickly and winter rains, rather than fluff, prepares the red land for a floral display of utmost brilliance when spring sunshine warms the scenery.  Things are warm again there now, but back in December they almost got as cold as they did back here in Michigan; some days did not go above freezing.  Nearby Zion National Park recorded sub-zero temperatures.  Most of the native flora handled this somewhat well, but some had a rough time, including the palms seen above.

Those are crossed California Fan Palms (Washingtonia Filifera), a palm otherwise noted for its incredible cold tolerance.  While they do not grow native in this particular part of the Mojave, they can be found less than a hundred miles away in an isolated grove in northern Clark county, Nevada, and in general they can handle the climate anywhere lower than 3,500 feet around there pretty well.  They can handle periodic freezes and snow just fine, with the storms of 2008 barely phasing them.  Unfortunately, that little corner of Utah got just a little too cold for comfort, for too long.  Many palms and tender plants bit the dust in what was well below any sort of normal occurrence.  In the meantime, nearby coastal California never got even close to that cold, nor did it see any sort of rejuvenating precipitation, snow or otherwise.  This winter has simply been out of control for everybody, which is not a good sign when taken in conjunction with temperature and precipitation swings wild in the other direction even just last year (and especially 2012).  I'm not going to go on a tirade about Climate Change, but I am saying to keep an open-mind; this is not proof that things are going screwy up there in the sky, and it is not "how winters used to be when I was a kid" either.  My parents at least claimed there were thaws in January and March was actually March and not what January should average out at.  Out there in extreme Southwestern Utah, they have also been growing palms for quite a while too, meaning that this was extreme and not so much a return to "how things used to be".  I encourage them to try again with the palms, or at least start planting Joshua Trees (Yucca Brevifolia) a bit more; both can take the heat, both can tolerate the cold, both can definitely shrug off the dry.

Oh, and for a little more information on the picture, we have two western classics out there, one more Plains and Inter-mountain, Sinclair Oil (I know, ironic in a post about winter not being normal), and one more Pacific western, In-N-Out Burger, which in all bust the most impossible climates puts a signature pair of crossed Fan Palms (usually California variety) outside of their restaurants.  Hopefully they try again, or wait to see if the things survived; our North American palms are exceptionally hardy.  

Treasures Of The North And Winter: American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana)

Most conversations I have had with people about my northern (i.e. pine tree and really cold winter country) heritage usually include discussions on what exactly grows up in the land of frigid winters and gentle summers.  Many people assume that the farther north one travels, the more one runs into coniferous needle-leaved trees, and that the horizon is nothing but spruce after spruce.  Just as residents of the lower north (southern Great Lakes, Midwest, Northeast) assume that Florida is one giant palm plantation, or that the desert west is nothing but sand dunes devoid of life, residents from said lower north down to the the rest of the continent picture the Boreal north as a land of excellent Christmas trees and the odd moose or bear bursting through the needles.  In truth, spruce are the most northerly occurring trees, right on into the tundra in fact (albeit as a very small form that takes centuries to hit an inch tall).  They are very quickly joined by willows, birch, aspen, and best of all, by something that looks like it should not grow in this land of the anti-leaf, the American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana).

Clingmans Dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  North Carolina, with some Tennessee in the background.

 On the upper slopes of Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina.

 As you can see, our friend the grand Mountain Ash looks, like the northern growing sumacs, to be a palm tree that got lost along the way.  Despite growing in an otherwise rugged setting, the tree (others insist it is a tree-like shrub) has delicate looking foliage and a branching structure that looks like it would get absolutely broken apart in heavy snow and ice.  Believe what you want, however, because this fine specimen of a plant really only grows where things get somewhat brutal:

Thanks, USDA!

Most of my pictures of them come from North Carolina, despite the fact that this is indeed a tree I have grown up with for a long time.  The good olf Sorbus is indeed a tree of eastern Boreal Canada, growing right on up to James Bay.  Not until I was specifically plant hunting and noticed it stood out among the Spruce-Fir forests of the higher Appalachians did I really think it was anything unique!  Yes, it has the same good characteristics in both Ontario and North Carolina, and it stands out from the forests in the Laurentians:

Somewhere in the forest north of Brent, Ontario and south of Deux-Rivieres, Ontario.

As well as it does in the Blue Ridge and Smokies:

Off of the summit of Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina.  They really do look weird with the conifers.

Along the main road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, eastbound side, not exactly sure, but high enough to see the transition between coniferous and deciduous forests.  On the top right there is also a heath bald full of rhododendrons and kalmia!

Yet I always seemed to think of it as part of the scenery, taken for granted.  This is probably because it is not a "northern" looking thing; just as the kid who got excited over pine trees did, so do people who get excited over spruces and rhododendrons which happen to grow best where the Sorbuses do: 

They really do offer a nice foliage effect together.  I am sure by now that any gardeners reading the blog are getting some ideas!  This was taken on the road leading up to the summit of Mt. Mitchell.

Let's face it, you all looked at the flowering Catawba Rhododendron (Rhododendron Catawbiense), and why not?  The Sorbus looks like any old sumac (or worse, a Tree of Heaven [Ailanthus Altissima]) growing in an abandoned city lot might. This holds true until the winter comes, however, and the true glory of Sorbus Americana enters the landscape, it's berries:

Another fine tree from the Ontario Laurentians, probably about 6 or 7 miles from the other one pictured in this post.  Both were set in some fairly dark and lovely spruce-fir forests.

Somewhere in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, most likely on the path to Munising Falls near Munising, Michigan.

The berries, of course, are preceded by flowers, which truly makes this an all season interest tree:

Flower buds!  This was at Mt. Mitchell and taken mid June.

Clingmans Dome.  I arrived too early at the high elevations, and too late at the lower elevations, to get a full bloom.

I don't have any photos of the plant in full bloom or naked in the dead of winter with those bright red berries really standing out against the landscape, but it does not take too much imagination to realize that this is a tree which proves that noticeable seasonal changes are not a bad thing.  Indeed, this tree might have even given a bit of a boost to early colonists who had to deal with an actual winter or were heading into the dark and mysterious mountain or northern interior.  It was a welcome splash of color in the winter landscape, and would have reminded them of their own Sorbus back across the sea, the Rowan Tree (Sorbus Aucuparia), which people had considered to be good for everything from making jelly to fighting off witches.  That said, it seems that Aucuparia still gets more notice and stock in the nursery trade; in keeping with the current few posts and their theme on the blog, it is important to note that this is probably because the European version can be grown in warmer spots than the North American version.  Again, however, this is not say that our version is weak and tender, as it can grow out of some really difficult soil:

Somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway near north of Mt. Mitchell.

Somewhere on Mt. Mitchell.  As you can see, the soil is pretty shallow before bedrock is reached.  This particular Sorbus is joined by a nice blanket of blue alpine flowers, Mountain Bluets (Hedyotis Michauxii).

And of course, our version can also handle the colder end of the spectrum better than even some of the hardiest northern broadleaved trees.  This tree just happens to be hardy in the other direction, the one that no one claims to like!

By the way, if any Illinois people are reading this, I would love to hear/see anything on the wild population in your state, which is far more prairie than Boreal. 

Remembering Winter

This past winter has really done a number on the people of eastern North America, and perhaps the most insane among us on this first day of not-so-Spring are otherwise known as gardeners.  While most long for warmer weather and the end of things such as road salt and scraping off the windshield every morning, the gardener is a different sort of folk who simply longs for a return to leaves, flowers, and matters vegetable in general.  This time of year, both people thus long for the coming of that which is not winter (even when they might otherwise miss Spring in the process) and fail to notice that even back in late December, any amount of snowfall and cold was welcome and sought after.  Indeed, in a few more months we will most likely all be complaining about the heat instead, and then long for heavier meals, holiday things, and even a nice bracing chill to the morning air.  In California and much of the desert southwest, people definitely wish they had our snowpack and colder air so as to moderate the powerful effects of prolonged drought.  People in the American southeast definitely mock northern types with tantalizing pictures of blooming spring flowers, but trust me, I saw many of them get very excited up high in the spruce forests of the southern Appalachians wishing that they could grow such things as spruce and fir in their yards.

Historically, people actually liked winter in the frigid north.  The mild winters of the European homelands of the Second Born often contrasted sharply with what they had back home.  The French in Quebec often complained about it, but they also found that it toughened them up and made them into a culture of adventurers and explorers.  The various folks of the eastern American seaboard delighted in having common festivals of snow and ice play that were far and few between back in rainy England and Holland.  Everyone in general loved being able to make maple syrup and sugar, especially in Vermont, Quebec, and Ontario, where sub-cultures actually developed around the noble maple species and it's economic boons.  The annual rite of tapping the maple tree was a harbinger of Spring, but this was not possible without the frigid winter to precede it.  Very well, you say, winter then is a sacrifice to be had to enjoy the more colorful periods of the year.  Perhaps, but winter is far from lacking color.  Bare earth, evergreens both needled and leaved (rhododendrons and certain ground covers keep their leaves even in the north, and some oaks retain their fall color until the following Spring!), snow, seed heads, bare branches, and berries conspire to create some of the most amazing scenery of the entire year.  Since winter seems to keep dragging on in some places, I offer that we take a look at some of those Northern wonders which make the winter scenery up here something even the magnolia and palm clad Southern folk can drool in envy over. 

And don't worry, these winter blues are going to make us feel even more fantastic when things do warm up nicely!  Let's face it, if the seasonal cycles were truly that terrible, no one would still be living here.

What Toronto Looks Like Now (Winter 2014)

Toronto is what most people who know anything of it would expect it to be, a rather large city that sprawls horizontally beyond the typical vertical business district downtown.  There are large buildings, a public transportation system covering most of the high traffic areas, and a general environment of connection with the rest of the world.  In comparison to New York, Toronto is much more spread out and less dense, but in comparison with Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, or Montreal, the scale of the city does not necessarily shrink in relation to distance from the economic core.  There are skyscrapers of considerable height all over the place, often dwarfing the neighborhoods around them or consumed by them.

Example provided farther below in image with lots of taller trees.

Despite being a relatively young city (200 years plus to foundation), at least in terms of it's current level of importance (50 years or so), Toronto has not developed into a clean grid.  This is in part due to topography, and in part due to another grand feature of what makes her somewhat special in North American standards of cities: foundation era historical buildings being located in developmental harmony with modern structures.  These are everywhere in the city and surroundings, probably due to the Canadian virtue of a respectful, if somewhat nearly religious attitude toward the past.  As I can probably break many such images into further posts, I will just present a few of the most striking examples, with captions, here.

This is Campbell House, one of, if not the, oldest surviving houses in Toronto.  Despite being so deep into the retail core of tightly-packed Queen Street west, the Georgian survivor still bears a large lawn space and stands out even while it is near other historic buildings of larger scale.  Campbell House is a fine example of how the cityscape has not demolished a sense of historical memory, which will be useful in building a better Toronto.

This is the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, one of the best surviving examples of Canadian Railroad grandeur, typical of the Edwardian and Late Victorian architecture still in vogue in Canada in the 1920's, long after England and the United States had moved on to other styles.  She was the tallest building in the British Empire when built, and today is dwarfed by the commercial district towers.  Still, she stands out even better this way, another part of a Toronto that cherishes history even while seemingly isolating itself from consciousness of any time period. 

 That said, Toronto is hardly just a museum of Georgian and Victorian glories sharing space with International style homages to Manhattan architecture.  There is indeed that towering business district, complete with canyon like streets that turn a gentle breeze into a violent, chilling wind.

This is also the sort of big city downtown that paves everything over with concrete and maybe throws occupants some rather artificial looking reminders of the nearby presence of nature.

King Street just west of Bay.

Toronto, of course, is full of trees.  Any look beyond the concrete jungle of the money district will demonstrate that.  The residential neighborhoods are well-treed, with an urban canopy that does a fairly good job at hiding most of what lies below.  Toronto does this better than most other cities I have seen, with the only other dense urban canopy of comparison being in Detroit (honorable mentions given to smaller southern cities like Richmond, Memphis, and Charleston).

Notice the twenty story apartments at the end of this relatively well-treed residential street, a typical example of the merging of densities common in the cityscape.

Then there is the abundance of park space and natural land which we covered in our last post.  Spurred on by Hurricane Hazel and given continuing promotion by environmental groups, the city has enough green space to compete well on the world stage in this regard.  Sadly, especially if there have been no recent rains, Toronto does not have a pristine blue sky to prove this point to the average visitor.  The sky is bleak and brown, not quite to the level of Los Angeles or Mexico City, but definitely far worse than what can be found in New York or even industrial Gary, Detroit, or Pittsburgh.  This is in part because Toronto has a very typical North American addiction, the automobile.  Highway 401, the main artery of traffic in the Montreal-Chicago corridor has the responsibility of moving not just a heavy percentage of trade between the United States and Canada (and thus also land based trade between Canada and Mexico), but also commuter traffic between the city and its eastern and western suburbs.  Southern Californians may mock the concept, but Toronto often has worse traffic than the usual nightmares one can find on Los Angeles parking lo... er freeways.  The horizon suffers for it dearly, and while I did notice that breathing was not the chore it seemed to be in London or Mexico City, the place is far from having a nice effect in the sinuses. 

She also has an ugly side here and there.  While on the whole Toronto is a fairly clean place (as bad as the locals claim it can be, the subway here is miles ahead of the smelly mess down in Manhattan and about the same as London's Tube), some of the infrastructure does show age and deterioration.  The Gardiner Expressway, in addition to being an eye sore which has long since divided downtown from the waterfront on Lake Ontario, looks rusty, broken, and far more Detroit or Chicago than Toronto.

In some places the electric lines, streetlights, and streetcar cables add to the dated image of the city, which, to be fair, is not entirely a bad thing.  Toronto definitely looks like it just stepped out of the late 19th century on some streets:

Queen Street east in an area called "the Beach" or "the Beaches", depending on who you ask.

That said, a quick turn of the head usually shows off the ever present construction going on.  This is a very strange, amazing city that refuses to forget itself, even while it also thinks too much or too little of itself.

Those are the buildings of the Ontario Legislative Assembly, a.k.a. Ontario Provincial Parliament.  They are surrounded by an ever expanding provincial capital. 

 Expect more up close looks at various little bits of Toronto, and of North American cities in general.  Remember, there is always something right around the corner that is worth taking another, if not a first look, at.

The Natural Setting Of Toronto

One of the memories of Toronto that had fashioned an overly-romantic vision of my great Canadian city was that of the physical setting in which she has grown.  Unlike the pancake landscapes of Detroit or Chicago, Toronto was born on some more realistic, diverse ground.  Unlike Manhattan, she has since not paved it over in order to create the illusion of flatness.  In general, Toronto is like the other Great Lakes cities in that she is dominated by her most prominent feature, the water.

Yes, that is open water even in frigid February 2014.  Lake Ontario is the most protected of the Great Lakes, at least from the cold north-western winter winds.  It also gets sloshed around quite a bit by the inflow from the mighty Niagara.  This obviously has a heavy effect on the surrounding climate, both good and ill.

Lake Ontario is the reason why Toronto is here, really.  The city was founded on one of the great portage places between portions of the Great Lakes, specifically Huron and Ontario, a route that had to wait for the dropping of Iroquois hostility to become viable (hence Toronto had never been a French city, even though a fort had been established here in 1750).  Near the lake, the land is level and the shoreline is relatively protected by the offshore islands, making the site attractive to settlement once English Canada became a going concern.  The climate was also a nice, inviting feature.  Further east, the winter gets a bit snowier from lake effect squalls, and the growing season grows just a little bit shorter. 

Toronto, in fact, is noted for being one of the northernmost places in Eastern North America where the eastern deciduous forest (known in Ontario as the Carolinian Forest) exists in the same recognizable form before giving way to the north woods.  As part of this package deal, Toronto gets Atlantic coastal flora, some boreal elements, and even the easternmost extension of the great Prairie Peninsula which is an extension of the central grasslands well into Ontario and even parts of western New York and interior Virginia.  In Toronto, the best place to see surviving grasslands is in High Park, where some oak savanna remnants can be found.

Indeed, in comparison to the mysterious transitional forests and rolling terrain further inland and to the east, the oak openings and level shoreline must have seemed very inviting to settlement.  Early English speaking Canadians were very eager to find land comparable to what they might have had further west along the Lakes or in the Midwest and Ohio Valley, and it helped that Toronto had just this available to them, all at a comfortable (but not ultimately safe) distance from the American border.  That said, again, the place is hardly a level grassland in it's entirety.  Things get very steep, very fast.

Much of Toronto is within a few minute's travel (by any means) of deep ravines and even minor cliffs.  This affords for a very dramatic cityscape, at least as far as eastern urban North America goes.  The other Great Lakes cities, with the exception of Hamilton, really do not offer much in the way of relief, and the end result is that Toronto features some pretty natural park spaces right beside high rise buildings, and not merely because someone thought a park would look nice there.  Back in 1954, in fact, there were actually buildings going up in the ravines.  Then came Hurricane Hazel, the first time in modern history when the Great Lakes got to remind us that they are really little freshwater oceans; the ravines flooded in rages that put an end to both people and urban planning alike.  After the floods had reminded Torontonians just how fragile their up and down rolling city landscape could be, the city started building around, rather than on top of or through, it's topography. 

Most other major cities in eastern North America simply can't say the same.  No defensible ridge of land remains where Detroit was once founded atop the rise where Woodward avenue now runs atop.  Manhattan is relatively flattened in comparison to what it once was and even now is surrounded by.  Our ancestral city of ancient urban concept, London across the sea, has long since fooled people into thinking it was always solid ground devoid of water in all but the Thames.  Boston certainly has done a good job of containing the aquatic geography of its foundations!  Miami looks nothing like the combination of barrier islands, mangrove swamps, and limestone pine ridges that it once was.  Toronto, on the other hand, is a nice lake plain, set of islands, one river valley after another, and even has, well, sea cliffs.  These are better known as the Scarborough Bluffs, one of the coolest and most under-appreciated features of the city.  Sadly, I took no pictures to truly do them justice, but the ones below can decently illustrate how interesting they are. 

So what sort of city has since been built around and on top of these features?  That's in our next post.

Toronto And The Power Of Memory

To a Detroiter, Toronto is a thing of distant majesty, be it seen in either the eyes of envy or romance.  In comparison to a decaying industrial behemoth which once had the possibility of rivaling Chicago or Los Angeles in terms of culture and influence, Toronto looks to be the promise of a Great Lakes capital fulfilled.  Here we have a stable city of incredible economic strength and fortune with all the diversity one would expect of a city the size and importance of New York.  Here we have gleaming skyscrapers, a remarkable landscape of ravines and naturalistic city parks, all within easy travel of anything from oceanic expanses of water to cliffs, mountains, and north woods.  Here we have a city, which while being well-developed, is still so full of promise and young enough to proudly declare that she is far from being finished and ready for so much more.  I always thought so.  Part of me still does.

This, of course, is the viewpoint of an expatriate looking back ever so passionately over that long, so-called undefended border and dreaming of what life without exile in this United States would have been like had I stayed.  Like so many Torontonians, I can only envision my gleaming city as the accepting, open, safe alternative to a post-911 New York.  I would love to envision her as being as equal among names like the city at the mouth of the Hudson, London, Paris, or Hong Kong.  While instead I realistically consider her to be of the same caliber as a San Francisco, Milan, or Sydney, part of me still imagines Toronto to one day, along with Canada, claim her position in the supreme pantheon of global divinities.  She is, after all, extremely well connected and perhaps one of the most tolerant places on the entire planet.  Therein, of course, lies the problem.  Toronto is too Canadian.

Before I have my countrymen come down on me like a bad case of NAFTA, I would very much like to qualify that statement.  I realize how self-hating I sound in writing this, akin to the James Joyce who loved Ireland but for the Irish and their culture (something I could never seem to forgive him for), but the truth of the matter is that so much of the Canadian cultural and political identity is based off of a defensive self-image: namely, we are not American.  Even my presentation here of Toronto proposed that part of her greatness lies in being an alternative to an American city!  Canadian culture, at least what I have known of it from Ontario, the most defensive province of all, has little maple leaves everywhere poised to force Canadians to remember that while we share material culture with the Yankee beast to the south, those little leaves acting as an apostrophe in a fast food sign tell us that we could not be more different.  To a great extent, we are, but again we have the problem in having to point that out to ourselves or the the American tourists who pass through southern Ontario and see strip mall after strip mall standing in silent reminder of just how much control branding has over the world these days... but of course we think instead just about how surely they point and laugh and call us the fifty first state.  Some do, to be fair.

But we also don't look at government, guns, or history the same way.  The border remains largely because a difference of mentality marks far more of a difference between, say, Michigan, New York, or Ohio and Ontario than there is noticeable between Ohio and Kentucky.  Sure, as neighbors we live on the same street, have half the time fought on the same side in battles, to say nothing of fighting in the same battles, and we both eat far too many Big Macs.  The truth remains, however, that we are still neighbors and not part of the same family in the same house.  This truth, time and again, keeps getting neglected by those in the Canada house, at least in the Ontario department.  Those people instead prefer to see their house simply as being either better or worse than the house next door!  Any concept of what is Canadian thus evaporates beneath the heat of the comparison lamp.  Meanwhile, that city of Toronto keeps getting larger, keeps adding in more people from every part of the known world, and turns into some settling basin where the diverse elements never really add something to the mix but tend to keep to themselves.  Unlike New York, where the magic of the city has always been the transformation of cultures into something American and then ultimately into something New York in it's own right, Toronto does not have a Canadian or even Torontonian glue sticking it all into some amazing sculpture.  There is neither assimilation nor destruction here, but, in true Toronto fashion, people lowering their heads to the ground or a phone and ignoring one another.  Here tolerance is taken to the ugly extreme of opted compartmentalization. 

That, of course, is a cultural sin.  No, it is not the apparent evil that is the mutually agreed upon racial and socioeconomic segregation popular in Detroit and Buffalo, the two closest border cities, but it is perhaps just as dangerous considering as how this sort of self-absorption is preventing Toronto from becoming truly world-class at the highest levels.  This sort of selfishness is deadly insomuch as it is passive-aggressive to the point of not even being acknowledged, even by people who look out for that sort of thing, like your author here.  You see, until I was able to see the people avoiding eye contact and concerned about the possibility of random conversation, I did not believe that my Toronto had become so cold and indifferent.  I figured that such an image of the city was the result of a worldly friend who wanted more than the mundane every day of next door.  Torontonians, after all, have a legacy of self-loathing to uphold, at least in the realm of civic pride.  Yet the Toronto that I remembered was through the eyes of a child, who did indeed remember more hopeful people back in the early to mid nineties, who saw those gleaming skyscrapers, and more importantly, who saw that incredible parliamentary mace, gloriously surrendered back to us by the neighbors who finally had to admit that we made it as a country.  When I looked at that mace, when I looked at those old buildings next to those new buildings, I knew what Canada was.  I knew what Toronto was.  I knew that I was the citizen of a country that proclaimed liberty with a dressing of tolerance, a desire to move cautiously forward with a healthy respect for the past, and a passion for freedom both from without and within.

I also remember a small cluster of the most beautiful tree in existence planted out front.  There, in plain sight, I remember three Eastern White Pines not much taller than our teacher, planted surrounding a smaller Colorado Blue Spruce, which then I figured to be nice but unimpressive.  The trees, like the mace, were still part of a Toronto that I simply had refuse to acknowledge had changed, or rather refused to change.

A quarter of a century later, these native pines have grown from the fresh landscaping Christmas tree size into their more natural, flowing, majestic sway.  The American-born Colorado Blue Spruce has grown with them, and in a rather amusing and illuminating way has not managed to overtake its companions, yet probably still draws more attention than the common place pines.  The truth here, though, is that the image has changed somewhat.  Like the city around them, they have remained the same but taken on a much grander form... but those who pass them every day probably don't even look up, as they surely don't look around at what an amazing thing has grown around them in the past thirty years, let alone the past ten.  Instead, Torontonians are busy with the illusion that they are at the top of bottom of the world, depending on perspective; the city has indeed become something global, and yet...  They cannot see the miracle of transformation and continued growth with the fascinating world of formal identity specifics that exist both in the now and then.  Toronto is a city that denies itself a taste of what it can be, what it has been, and even what it has become, amazing in being a living example of philosophical potential being, that "which is possibly everything but actually nothing". 

I do promise to show, as I do in this blog in general, what Toronto is.  Better yet, I invite you to see it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.