Branch Management

For Scott Wade, hunting big trees is an evergreen pursuit.

by Rachel Frankford

Until last Wednesday, the most interesting fact about a semi-shaded clearing in the Andorra Natural Area on the northern end of the Wissahickon Valley was its use in the not-quite-classic 2005 flick Shadowboxer. Cuba Gooding Jr. digs a grave — while postcoital and naked. But now the clearing has another claim to fame: The knotted, sprawling European beech tree at its center is a new "champion tree": the largest known of its species in the state.

The beech's measurements — 257-inch circumference and 102.5-feet tall with a 105-foot spread (i.e. from leaf tip to leaf tip) — are now part of the register of the Pennsylvania Forestry Association's Big Trees Program, which looks for the biggest tree (determined by a point formula based on those three measurements) of each species. Scott Wade, the program's coordinator and self-described "fanatic," took the day off work with his friend, former co-worker and frequent tree-hunting partner Megan Varnes to tramp around the park.

TRUNK SCALE: Tree hunter Scott Wade measures the new champion European beech. : Michael T. Regan

Wade makes his living as grounds manager for the Sisters of St. Francis Convent in Aston, but searching for big trees, and putting out the 60-year-old program's first published register since 1993 (there is also a list online at www.pabigtrees.com) is his passion. He's the program's only employee, but strictly speaking, he's a volunteer ("there is no budget"), although he can ask Pennsylvania state foresters to check out the dozens of tree measurements sent in by laypeople on the other side of the state. He doesn't know exactly how many hours he spends in search of trees, "It's kind of all the time."

Because champion trees aren't always in the wilderness, he keeps an eye on the scenery while driving, too. "Just last year," says Wade, "I found the new champion red oak in Broomall, of all places, in the middle of a 1950s development."

Southeastern Pennsylvania, as it turns out, is a very good place to be a tree enthusiast. The abundance of arboretums, estates like Longwood Gardens and former nurseries (the Andorra Natural Area is one) makes for a whole lot of trees that were planted as early as the Quaker heyday and then protected and cared for. Before I met up with Wade and Varnes, they'd already measured the beech, a cucumber magnolia, a Norway spruce and a tulip poplar (which came just 3.9 feet short of matching the tallest deciduous tree in the Northeastern United States). Varnes, a skinny young woman in jeans who works as the curator of horticulture at the Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton, N.J., and Wade, enthusiastic and athletic in his hiking clothes, seem equally obsessed, even though Varnes admits laughingly that she is "really a small-plants person."

Their memories seem to work in terms of what trees they measured where and when. They discuss this black oak in Chestnut Hill and that linden in Wade's hometown of Media, reminisce about a pecan that was spread wider than it was tall, and recall the time they snuck into someone's yard in Bucks County and "we were expecting people with shotguns to come out." Their pride and joy was a bitternut hickory they discovered on the St. Francis grounds, which recently toppled. "It was one of the first I ever documented. ... We ring-counted it to 262 years," Wade recalls. There's hope for its life, if not its champion status: "It's not quite dead yet."

Things in the horticulture world can get heated. Some people, for instance, don't think the points formula is fair, that it's the tallest trees that deserve awards.

"[If] you want to see arguments flying, go to the Eastern Native Tree Society Web site [www.nativetreesociety.org]," Wade laughs. Indeed, members write articulate, detailed posts not only on how trees should be measured, but why. An entire category is entitled "ENTS Philosophy" in which someone wondered — maybe tongue-in-cheek, maybe not — "Are there more elegant and insightful explanations to our individual and collective behaviors in our pursuits of tree awareness? Is it all intellectual window dressing to cover primitive instincts? Is it Freudian?"

Primitive instincts and Freud aside, why big trees? They don't get any legal protection, so it's not about conservation. (Wade thinks it's unworkable — what do you do each time a tree falls and another ascends in the register?) And, as he cheerfully admits, "There are no cash prizes."

But there is love of the game. "Even if you don't find a tree, you're outside, you get to meet people," says Wade. "It's relaxing. You get away from everything in the woods."

It's far too late for him to join the intrepid botanists who, he explains, brought species east over the Appalachians in the 19th century. But by measuring Pennsylvania's trees, many of which, such as cucumber magnolias and lindens, are genuses they found and propagated, he is in some way their heir. Of the Andorra area, he says, "I think I'll just work my way south until I get to the Schuylkill River. See what I can find." Because there are always more trees.

(r_frankford@citypaper.net)