Some signs of spring around Seoul

The warm weather is paying off, the trees are just budding out here and by the end of week we very well should have some nice color.

They have been pruning the sycamores all over the city for the past few weeks. Being from the Great State of Illinois, I have a particular affection for sycamores. The largest recorded tree east of the Mississippi River was a sycamore in Illinois. (Here is a fascinating study of the huge old growth forest there, and the remants in Illinois and Indiana)

Here they prune these magnificent trees in a particularly extreme way, really trimming down the trees to their core and trimming all smaller branches. The effect is to have trunks and main branches, and then I guess all new growth for the crown. They were doing the same kind of trimming to the sycamores in Japan I noticed when we were there, so I figured it must be a basic aspect of urban forestry.

In Norfolk, it is common to prune back the ubiquitous crepe myrtles like this in the spring, but these are actually shrubs rather than true trees (and is actually a native to Asia though very widely planted in the South).

It is quite striking to see a huge tree like a sycamore cut back this way.



I poked around and I gather that this style of pruning is actually called "pollarding," and it is done to sycamores because they have a unique ability to regenerate. From the Friends of the Urban Forest we learn

Pollarding is a specific form of pruning that originated with French peasantry centuries ago. Before the advent of central heating, peasants were allowed to cut firewood from the trees on the lord’s land. Through trial and error, the freezing serfs discovered that they could scalp a sycamore tree within an inch of its life and it would come back in the spring. Other trees died from such treatment. If you’re interested in the special effect of pollarding, consult an arborist first.

And from another site:

As with coppicing, pollarding was a traditional form of management where timber and foliage could be harvested on a regular cycle. New shoots growing from a coppice stool or pollard would produce fairly straight branches, they would grow relatively quickly and be used for specific purposes. The new branches would be cut on a cycle of 10-40 years depending upon the size of branches required. By growing the new stems at the top of a 2-3m trunk instead of close to the ground as coppice, the new shoots could be kept out of reach of browsing livestock.

Pollarded trees have a distinctive appearance, they look a little unnatural and were for this reason often used as boundary markers along field edges and especially within ancient woodlands where they would act as a living, permanent sign post for an owners area of woodland. Traditional pollarded trees have been pruned and managed as pollards throughout their lives, and may even have been planted for that very purpose.

You learn something new everyday.

In other signs of spring I saw these guys working high on the windows on the new building over in the Severance Hopsital complex, sitting only on little boards suspended by ropes. OSHA would love this job site.



Finally, when I came home this evening I saw a sure sign that the weather is warming up: the packs of wild cats are back feeding at the garbage piles in front of each house.