Aspen Trees

Oh, the fluttering of aspen leaves in the sun. It is enough to make you content for the entire afternoon, even after driving I-70 in the midst of ski traffic.

For many people, Colorado is synonymous with this famous white-barked tree. A famous ski village is named for it. John Denver sang about them. To put it mildly, this tree is a big deal in Colorado.

My yard, I am excited to report, is host to four aspen trees. Or it seemed like four when I moved in. Upon closer examination of my yard, I discovered that I had more than four big aspen trees. I had about thirty. One problem was that most of these trees of the short, barely noticeable variety. This was not a problem as much as where these aspen juniors seemed to be sprouting. Most of them were closer to the structure of the house than their taller, well-established and obviously wiser brethren. The short distance between these young trees and the house made me imagine a not-too-distant future where an out-of-control root system tears out my underground sprinklers and infiltrates the plumbing. With my deepest apologies to the National Arbor Foundation, I decided to remove some of these extra trees.

It turns out that you can’t just dig up an aspen tree, yank the roots out of the dirt and be done with it. I tried. Some of the baby aspen trees were as thin as a pencil and no more than six inches tall. Yet when I tried to pull them up, they resisted as if they were much, much larger. I was flabbergasted. Were these trees ganging up on me? They clearly outnumbered me. Perhaps they sensed my fear about the plumbing. I decided to do a little research. It is important to know what you are up against.

Aspen trees, which are either male or female, can reproduce in two different ways. One way is reproduction through seeds, which most people envision when they think of the average plant. In the dry regions of the western United States, the aspen tree sometimes uses a method of reproduction called ‘cloning’. Aspen trees can share a root system – they can actually be attached to each other deep under the ground. This was my yard problem. Those baby trees that refused to be uprooted were part of a much larger life form.

The root system of an aspen tree can send out nearly one million shoots per acre if there is sun and a cleared area. Now this is not to say that I had a million baby aspens in my yard, but as I dug sharp tool after sharp tool deep into the ground to remove some of these junior trees, it felt like the number was somewhere in that area.

From what I can gather from about an hour of online research, there are two types of aspen trees. The bigtooth aspen tree has a leaf edged with jagged…well, teeth. The quivering aspen lacks these teeth. It is winter at the time of this writing, therefore I cannot determine from the nekkid branches which type of aspen lives in my yard. I find this to be an interesting fact. I acknowledge that this bit of trivia does not help me in controlling their presence in the yard.

After reading about them for a while, I concluded that aspens are very interesting trees. Keep in mind that I say that as a person with average knowledge about trees.

This spring, when the grass starts turning green and the buds start to show on the branches, I will be watching for the sneaky aspens so I can get them early. Let’s see… four aspen trees in a sunny clearing, times one third of an acre…that equals…

On second thought, I should probably just let them take over. I was thinking of decorating the basement with a natural look anyway.

Thanks to the following websites, who assisted me in my quest to know why aspen trees were taking over my lawn:

1. http://bss.sfsu.edu/
2. http://www2.fpl.fs.fed.us