Trees on the Yale Nature Walk

This Black Locust Tree is found across Prospect Street from Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, and just up the hill from Ingalls Ice Rink. If you were a squirrel that lived in this tree, you would be able to see students walking to their laboratory classes in the morning and fans coming to cheer for the Yale hockey team in the evening. At lunchtime, you might even be able to smell the delicious scents of Thai and Mexican food from the food trucks by the intersection of Sachem and Prospect. At almost 70 feet tall, this particular Black Locust tree would give you an excellent bird's-eye view of campus. Despite its size, the Black Locust is actually a member of the pea family, Fabaceae. Black Locust trees produce fragrant flowers and pea pod-shaped fruits. While they are flexible with regards to soil type, and can grow in a variety of locations, Black Locust trees do require plentiful sunlight and open ground. Black Locust trees can be found throughout all of the United States except Alaska and Hawaii, as well as parts of Canada, Asia, Europe, and southern Africa. However, their normal range is limited to the southeastern United States. Black Locusts are valued for the honey produced from their flowers as well as its durable wood. However, this tree can become invasive due to its ability to produce large quantities of seeds and reproduce via root suckers.

The Norway Spruce is a highly versatile and resilient tree. The Norway Spruce is a conifer gymnosperm and an evergreen tree that bears pine cones. This classification signifies that the tree relies on wind pollination and bears “naked seeds” on its large cones. It is monoecious, with both male and female cones on the same tree. This tree has a pyramidal form, and its leaves are opposite. The leaves are needle-like and are attached to the tree branch through a woody structure called the sterigma or the pulvinus. The bark of the Norway spruce is thick and flaky, with gray-brown scales.

Known colloquially as the only type of wood that could kill all vampires in The Vampire Diaries, the white oak is indeed as magical and powerful as it sounds! Not only does bark from the tree form stakes to kill vampires, but it is also used for barrels (called staves, so sometimes the tree is called a stave oak), Japanese martial arts (bokken = wooden swords), and even the US Constitution! White oaks are eudicots and quite old! Some can live past 450 years old. This is not without reason, as white oak trees are the most resistant to disease and insects, and the wood from these trees very rarely splinters when broken. Keep reading to learn more about this amazing tree!

True Northeast icon, this Sugar Maple is even more gorgeous alone on Halloween, although in reality, its gorgeous cascade of blazing reds, golds, and oranges makes it one of the continent's most hallowed trees. Autumn is their season, here an absolute spectacle, reducing landscape to living paintings and drawing locals off-branching tourists by the droves for one look at New England's seasonal magic. This specific tree, however, is more than just eye candy. Early spring, when warm weather arrives but nights still snap with cool, this Sugar Maple works behind the scenes: dripping sap that, boiled, is converted to that rich, gold syrup that sweetens breakfasts across America. Some 40 gallons of sap yield one gallon of maple syrup, a testament to nature's slow, generous rhythms. Its sweet offering aside, Sugar Maple is an admirable member of local landscape citizenship. Its wide leaves offer dappled summer shade, creating cool microclimates for ferns and in-dwellers below. Its limbs offer nesting to birds, seed rewards to squirrels, and nutrient-rich components to soil when it falls. Its hardwood is also prized for strength and beauty, and is used from floor wood to fine violins. Deeply rooted in North American culture and ecology, Sugar Maple is more than all its components in total, it's not simply a tree, but an icon for strength, bounty, and cycles as well. Whether traveling to see it for leaf-peeping, syrup, or simply sitting in its shadow, there's an aspect that this tree offers in every season of the year.