The tree Radka Wildova and Jonathan Rosenthal wanted to show me was only a few hundred feet from the trail at Tivoli Bays, a state wildlife management area in Rhinebeck, New York. But getting to it required bushwhacking through a thicket of non-native honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and poison ivy.
The tree Radka Wildova and Jonathan Rosenthal wanted to show me was only a few hundred feet from the trail at Tivoli Bays, a state wildlife management area in Rhinebeck, New York. But getting to it required bushwhacking through a thicket of non-native honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and poison ivy. “It’s like a museum of invasives here,” Rosenthal, an ecologist based in nearby New Paltz, observed as we stumbled through the underbrush.
The tree, once reached, was maybe a hundred feet high and ten inches in diameter. It was sporting a metal tag that identified it as number 047. “This is a green ash,” Wildova, a botanist who’s also based in New Paltz (and is Rosenthal’s wife) announced. Ash trees are dioecious, meaning they produce either all male or all female flowers.
“I think it’s a she,“ Wildova said. “But they don’t flower every year, so it can be hard to tell.”
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
