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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Scott Wade winces when he hears the term "tree-hugger," but the guy loves trees more than anyone I know. He travels all over the state, mostly in the Southeastern part, measuring big trees for the Pennsylvania Forestry Association. Yesterday I met up with him at Springton Manor Farm up in Glenmoore, Chester County, yet another of those little-known treasures we're blessed with in the Philadelphia area. This 300-acre property, now a demonstration farm and county park, was an original land grant from William Penn and has been in some form of agricultural use since the early 1700's. Check out the view that greeted me as I drove in to meet Scott! How sylvan is that? He wanted to measure the "king and queen trees" - two massive white oaks - down by the barn that have been described in older tree literature as "two original forest monarchs." And regal they certainly were. Scott took one look at the pair and exclaimed, "Wow! This is so cool." They're what's known as open-grown trees - out in a field, not in a forest competing with other trees. And they usually don't grow more than 100 feet tall because, as Scott says, "They're too busy growing out" - 'cause they can. The "queen" had huge lower limbs stretching out horizontally, touching the ground, very tempting to sit on. A sign warns against doing that, so Scott ran his hands along the branch, which was hilly and lumpy, suitably "wrinkled" for a tree that's more than 200 years old. I'll be writing about Scott and his big trees next week. First, though, I have to find the right words to describe them - not just the trees. Scott, too. He's his own kind of "original."

 

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About Ginny Smith
Ginny Smith, a Philadelphia native, worked as a reporter at newspapers in New York, Connecticut and Ohio – with six short months at the end of the Bulletin tossed in – before coming back to Philadelphia in 1985 to work at the Inquirer. She was in the paper’s Montgomery County bureau briefly before moving to the City Desk, where she wrote about Center City and urban issues like homelessness. Ginny spent eight years after that as an editor, most recently as the paper’s City Editor and Pennsylvania Editor, before returning to reporting in 2004. She’s been gardening forever – and happily writing about it since 2006. In that short time, she’s won two silver medals of achievement from the national Garden Writers Association, most recently for a 2008 story on invasive plants.