Holding Back the Forest

Several years after I moved into this house, some friends came to visit. Their three-year-old son stood in the driveway, looked around at the dense woods, and asked, “Why do you have a forest at your house?” I was puzzled by the question until another friend provided a plausible interpretation. She reminded me that my friends live in an urban neighborhood in one of Maine’s larger cities and that a big event in their son’s young life had involved going to a nursery, picking out a tree, and planting it in their yard. “He thinks that you planted all these trees,” she explained, “and he thinks you kind of overdid it.”

In truth, one thing I am unlikely to do in my gardening adventure here is to plant a tree, because gardening here involves a constant effort to hold back the forest. Maine is the most heavily forested state in the United States, with 90% of its land area covered by forest. Especially in winter, when the deciduous trees are bare and the white pines (Pinus strobus) and eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) dominate the scenery, I look out my windows and am reminded of the opening line of Longfellow’s Evangeline: “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.”

But there is nothing primeval about this forest. According to the Maine Tree Foundation, the first European settlers in Maine also found the land about 90% forested, but they soon set about clearing it, both for farms and for timber extraction. (Those majestic white pines, for example, grow fast, tall, and straight and were much in demand for ships’ masts during colonial times.) By the 1860s, the forest cover had been cut back dramatically. As the country industrialized after the American Civil War, however, agriculture declined and abandoned farms were quickly reclaimed by the forest. That process of reclamation has continued for 150 years.

Today, although Maine is again heavily forested, very little of that forest is old growth. Most trees are younger than 100 years, and that is certainly true of the woodlands around my house. This property was once part of a farm and was probably a pasture. For decades now, the forest has been reclaiming that pasture; and I must be vigilant to keep it from creeping forward into the cleared areas around the house.

Here is the current crop of pine seedlings trying to reclaim the front yard.

These seedlings of maple, oak and birch are moving in on the edges of the driveway.

I have planted tawny daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva) and Coreopsis verticillata along the side of the driveway in hopes that they will naturalize there; but if they’re going to have a chance, I need to cut back these tree seedlings that are crowding them.

Because it backs up to the edge of the woods, the Blue and Yellow border is particularly vulnerable to forest creep. New tree seedlings appear each year at the back of this border and need to be pulled up. Some escape my notice until they turn into saplings or young trees that need to be cut down. The squirrels participate in forest reclamation by making this a favorite place to bury acorns. When I weed this bed each spring, I must pay special attention to digging out all those sprouted acorns and oak seedlings.

The woods may well reclaim this land someday. But as long as I’m gardening here, I will do what Mainers have been doing for generations, working to hold back the forest.