Trees by Julia Ellen Rogers

It’s fun to find trees I talk about on school field trips in botanical print books. I’m highlighting Julia Ellen Rogers book about trees published in 1926 today. The book includes 48 color illustrations and I’ve picked four favorites. The digital version of the book is available from Internet Archive here.

The black walnuts that are easy to find at the Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant Farm and Belmont locations. The summer campers find the immature nuts that look like green tennis balls; in the fall field trips the nuts live up to their name – the outer husk becomes a gooey black mess; in the spring we find the nuts the squirrels have eating – like oval works of abstract art.

The horse chestnut is something I point out when it’s in bloom – during spring time. It is easy to spot at the end of the tree lined road up to the Manor House at Belmont – it is the last tree.  The leaf pattern is interesting as well.

The sycamores at Belmont are along the drive and into the forest that surrounds Belmont. They are very large trees – hard to miss in the winter because their branches look so white. They also have seed balls that are fuzzy.

We often ask the children to look at the seed balls for sycamores and sweet gum trees…to describe how they are the same/different. Sweet gum balls are something the students recognized because the trees were planted in many Columbia developments as yard trees (the seeds are spikey but the tree itself is beautiful – nice shade and turns red in the fall).