Trip Report by Nina Shoroplova

Five intrepid tree enthusiasts joined Nina Shoroplova on a Nature Vancouver tree-identification walk in Grand Boulevard, North Vancouver, on December 1, 2023, despite the temperature (3 degrees C) and precipitation (enough for umbrellas to be up the whole time).

Grand Boulevard is one of Canada’s Historic Places, with the oldest of the planted trees—both native and imported—being no older than 117 years of age. And some are a whole lot younger. Check out the history here: www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/image-image.aspx?id=2425#i3.

On our morning walk, we learned to identify whether a tree has opposite leaves (or buds, as most leaves have already fallen from deciduous trees) or alternative leaves. We discussed how oak trees display marcescence—the habit of keeping their leaves after they have died; young beech trees and low-growing branches on older beech trees do this too; both oaks and beeches are in Fagaceae, the beech family, so it’s a family thing.

We saw a couple of falsecypresses and examined the seed cones to see how round (globose) they are compared to the more oval seed cones of western redcedars. The scalar sprays of these evergreens are similar at first glance.

We looked at 

• a true cedar 
• several coppiced willows
• the skeletons of English hawthorn and European mountain-ash
• the papery lantern fruit on a golden raintree
• the overwintering buds on a pussy willow

We compared the needles of baldcypress with those of dawn redwoods and realized the needles of baldcypress (named so for the conifer’s deciduous nature) are alternate whereas those of dawn redwoods are opposite. Both are deciduous conifers—most unusual—so it is good to have a way to identify which is which. And whereas baldcypress is native to southern US, dawn redwood is a living fossil going back to the dawn of time, to the Mesozoic Era of 150 million years ago. The small enclave of dawn redwoods found in a remote area of China was recognized in 1948, seed was collected, and the species was reintroduced around the world.

The highlight of the walk was the spreading mound of plumose Japanese cedar, Cryptomeria japonica ‘Elegans’, probably because of the trickster like colour of its needle foliage. Is it green or is it purple? Or is it grey just with rain? Was it several shrubs that merged and mounded into one?  Or was it one treelike shrub that lowered its branches to the ground to root again and create a copse of itself? We may never know.