RESOURCES

Identifying Trees: An AllSeason Guide to Eastern North America by Michael D. Williams [stackpole Books, 416 pp., $29.95, March 2007]

An easy-to-use-guide that’ll help you know what you’re hugging, even in winter.

A Field Guide to Eastern Trees (Peterson Field Guides) by George A. Petrides [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 448 pp., $20, July 1998]

More detailed, but also more technical and less accessible.

Leafsnap: An Electronic Field Guide, free for iPhone and iPad A mobile app that uses visual recognition software to identify leaves. Also has games that sharpen your tree-identification skills.

upcoming events JanUARY 21

FebRUARY 9

FebRUARY 9

Secret Garden Volunteer Day

Lecture: African American Heritage Plants

Beekeeping for Families

Help clear and clean Awbury’s Secret Garden for the 18th Annual Greater Philadelphia Martin Luther King Day of Service. 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Free To register, email volunteer@awbury.org , or call 215-849-2855 x25

Chris Bolden-Newsom, community organizer, food justice and food system educator, will talk about traditional African and African American plants that have impacted the national and global food system. 1-3 p.m. $5 For more information and to register, visit awbury.org or call 215-849-2855

Learn how your family can become backyard beekeepers! Select a hive style, choose your breed of bees, and discover other tips to raising a successful colony. Additional dates: Feb. 16, 23 and Mar. 2, 9, 10 a.m-12 p.m. $90 adults/$75 children 10+ For more information or to register, visit awbury.org or call 215849-2855

*All events are held at Awbury Arboretum, 1 Awbury Rd.

patterns—are the leaves (or where they’re attached) set opposite each other, or do they alternate? Bark can also reveal a lot, as can the buds that will unfurl into next year’s leaves, even in autumn. However, those buds can be painfully tiny. At about a quarter inch we needed a magnifying loupe to tell the black cherries (pointed bud scales) from choke cherries (rounded bud scales). For differentiating black and red oaks, the leaves are similar, but bark is different—ridges on the red oak’s bark [figure 2] sort of run together. Birches make it a little easier. Here’s a river birch [figure 3] with its beige bark peeling in

obvious, ruffling curls. During winter months, tree identification can focus on the micro scale, but visitors to Awbury can also take in the macro in these months. The arboretum boasts grand old lindens and beeches, the second largest river birch in Pennsylvania, and landscapes ranging from wetlands and meadows to forests and English parkland. bernard brown is an amateur field herper, bureaucrat and founder of the PB&J Campaign (pbjcampaign.org ), a movement focused on the benefits of eating lower on the food chain. For more on Awbury Aboretum, visit awbury.org

Figure 3 PHOTOs by Jen B r it to n

FEB Ruary 20 13

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