Aspens: Crapping tree or crappy trees?

Folks on the Eastern seaboard are lamenting about the cicadas returning after seventeen years and making a mess out of their lives, while here, in the Rockies, we need to survive the yearly routine of catkins coming out of our forty or so aspen trees that populate our backyard.

These tree produce thousands of catkins that eventually are turning to downy fluff looking like more snow flurries in June and by doing so are spreading their seeds – process that to me seems totally useless since this type of trees essentially reproduces itself through the root system, sending up new trunks as the older trunks die off and that can last for thousands of years with the same tree and therefore the same DNA.

 

This is all nice and good, but we eventually need to clean up after these dirty trees, around the house, over the roof and deep into the gutter. Oh, yes, I forgot there's also the business of oily secretion from the leaves of that tree that dirties everything under their canopy, but we aren't there quite yet, so I'll leave that one for some future blog...