More measuring today Barry Caselli
  February 1, 2009

Today I went out alone. The first thing I wanted to do was to go back to Batsto to photograph one of the trees we measured yesterday. When I was taking all the pictures yesterday, I somehow missed that tree. It's the 11' 10" Tuliptree.

Then I wanted to go to Weymouth and measure the CBH of the Hemlock that's there. Weymouth is another bog iron furnace village site. It's mostly a ghost town. No buldings remain from the iron or paper days. But in the vicinity of where the mansion, or mansions, were, (all woods now) there are European Larches, a Bald Cypress and a Hemlock. As I hiked back there I saw an enormous White Oak which I had completely forgotten about. I wanted to measure it of course, but I found that to be impossible. One side of the tree is next to the trail, but the ground drops off steeply on the other side, going down to the Great Egg Harbor River. This oak is the largest oak I've ever seen, other than ones that have been written up in books, such as the Salem Oak. It might have a CBH of 12 feet or more. That tree can be added to the list of trees to be measured officially, along with the Hemlock.
Anyway, when I got back to the Hemlock, I looked at it carefully and took many pictures. I found that the needles at the top seem very sparse, while those at the midsection are lush and dense. The tree has many offspring around it, all under  6 inches in diameter. None of those trees are infected with HWA. I'm worried, yet I wonder why, if the tree does indeed have HWA, why don't its offspring have it. Maybe the tree is okay even though the top doesn't look good. I don't know. But the tree is on the list to be measured later anyway.
I found the CBH to be 9' 6".
I  then measured the Bald Cypress and found that it is 5' 11 1/2",
and a nice Sweetgum nearby is 7' 9 1/2".
In the parking area next to the old furnace site there is a Sweetgum that's quite big, but I didn't measure it.
 
I then drove up to Atsion, yet another bog iron village site. This one has a few buildings, such as the ironmaster's mansion. That has about 7 or 8 Buttonwoods around it, plus one other tree that I couldn't quite ID. Most of the trees were inside a chain-link fence. But further away from the mansion, near where a house once stood, there are 4 huge White Pines, two of them much larger than the other two. I measured the two largest, and found that both are 11' 2", give or take a half inch. I had completely forgotten about those two trees. So I'm glad I went there. They are by far the largest White Pines I've ever seen, except for the giant on Word of Life Island in the Adirondacks (that tree is gone). There was one other tree that I had forgotten about, a big Pitch Pine, down the embankment from the old railroad, in the woods. It is partially hollow and has a cleft from top to bottom, but it's a big tree. I found that the CBH is the biggest of any Pitch
 Pine I've ever seen. It's 7' 2", 4 inches bigger around than the second biggest that I've found, which is in Estell Manor. That one is 6' 10".
So there you have it, some more measurements.
Barry

Here's the big Pitch Pine at Atsion, discussed in the post below:
http://s696.photobucket.com/albums/vv327/dbarryc63/?action=view&curre...
http://s696.photobucket.com/albums/vv327/dbarryc63/?action=view&curre...
and a view from the good side of the trunk:
http://s696.photobucket.com/albums/vv327/dbarryc63/?action=view&curre...

Continued at:
http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees/browse_thread/thread/3a71f445c7f59cad?hl=en