"These 5 tree species are dying. Scientists are racing to save them.”

"These 5 tree species are dying. Scientists are racing to save them.”

An Article Exploring the Growing Threats to our Tree Species, Featuring Marc Wolf

Outdoors, TIMES UNION, May 19, 2025
By Roger Hannigan Gilson, Staff Writer, Times Union, May 17, 2025

Invasives have largely wiped out the American chestnut and elm, caused “hell” with the beech, and are now wreaking havoc on the eastern hemlock and white ash. Signs of beech bark disease on the bark of an American beech tree. It is one of five species in the region that have been severely affected by invasives in recent decades.

TANNERSVILLE — Marc Wolf steps off a trail at the Mountaintop Arboretum to examine a beech tree with mottled, bumpy bark.

These invisible ‘wild neighbors’ need our help

These invisible ‘wild neighbors’ need our help

Opinion, The Washington Post, May 18th, 2025
By Wildlife Photographer and Mountain Top Arboretum Collaborator, Carla Rhodes

Carla Rhodes is a photographer based in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

A hickory nut, opened with such precision it could belong in the Museum of Modern Art, lay at the base of a towering, dead eastern hemlock. That nut, its delicate grooves unmistakably carved by a flying squirrel, was a clue and an invitation to look through a doorway into a secret world.

Let it Rain by landscape architect Jamie Purinton and Executive Director Marc Wolf

In this informative article—Let it Rain—landscape architect Jamie Purinton and Arboretum Executive Director Marc Wolf describe the process of designing and planting the system of rain gardens around the Education Center. Plant lists are included. We appreciate the Ecological Landscape Alliance giving us the opportunity to share this story!

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Emerald Bog: The Oldest Peat in the Catskills

In 1994, I had an idea. Workers in other regions were using macrofossils (needles, leaves, cones, twigs, wood, bark, roots, seeds, fruits, etc.) preserved in bog peat and/or lake sediments to reconstruct the vegetational history of their regions… Could I possibly do that in the Catskills?

Since 1995, I have studied 111 bogs. Previously, the oldest peat samples were from the bottoms of two Catskill bogs tied for first place at about 14150 years. That record held until 2016.

Update on Emerald Ash Borer

Healthy White Ash Trees at Mountain Top Arboretum

On June 14, 2016 our final group of white ash, Fraxinus americana, in the Woodland Walk was treated for emerald ash borer (EAB).

A team led by Cornell University Forest Entomologist Mark Whitmore, Vern Rist (Healthy Trees) and Phil Lewis (USDA, APHIS, Arborjet) injected fifty more ash trees with insecticide.  The insecticide travels through the phloem just beneath the outer layer of bark, killing EAB as it feeds. Ash is a wind pollinated tree and lacks nectaries so this injected treatment will not harm pollinators nor other insects besides EAB.

The Gilboa Forest

isitors to the Mountaintop Arboretum get to wander through our modern temperate forest and it is a wonderful experience. But we should all appreciate that there have been forests right here continuously for almost 400 million years.  Throughout all that time forest ecology has been evolving into what we see today. But, if we can imagine ourselves returning back all those millions of years we would find ourselves in one of the world’s oldest forests: known to geologists as the Gilboa Forest. The fossils of this ancient ecology are preserved in many Catskill rock sequences.    The trees of Gilboa were, not surprisingly, very primitive. They go by names such as lycopsids and psueudosporochnaleans. They lacked proper leaves, had no fruit or seeds and were poorly rooted as well; we might hardly recognize them as even being trees.

Anthropoliths

Harry Matthews started balancing stones following years of extended ramblings amongst stone circles and Neolithic sites in Wales, Devon, and Cornwall. “The more I create what I call my “Anthropoliths,” the more my understanding of balance, or gravity, grows.”  All the stones have been balanced first, then taken down and “fixed” with the steel roads and raised again.

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