Lancaster Bonsai Society

Sand So Clean That It Squeaks

Submitted by Jeff Howe

I grew up in the lake country of lower Michigan, where the receding glaciers left a chaotic jumble of rambling hills pockmarked with a thousand lakes. My parents however, grew up along the coast of Lake Michigan in the Sleeping Bear sand dune country of the northwestern Lower Peninsula .  Here the wind, the water and sand so clean that it squeaks, fight constantly over the beach, spilling their disagreements far inland and taking it out on the trees.  As a boy, I spent a lot of good time growing up there and so it was to northern Michigan that I traveled recently for a few days, to trace old footsteps and to see why that land has always made such an impression upon me. 

One thing that has struck me since I was a kid, without my actually realizing it, is that the trees and the bushes of this area are in miniature.  Not dwarfed necessarily, not even small enough that you can really point them out. But once you start looking around carefully, the flora becomes comfortable, friendly, almost personal-sized.  It’s a large part of what gives the area its characteristic charm.

From a horticultural, scientific point of view, it likely has something to do with the sandy soil in which the trees grow.  The ground is little more than sand dunes stabilized by fragile soils over the last 10,000 years; well-drained soils composed of rounded grains of quartz sands with very little clay and only the most rudimentary of organic material.  Possibly the stunting instead has to do with the unforgiving winds that howl in off the big lake in every season of the year.  Or maybe it’s just the lake-effect snows that dump relentlessly on the defenseless coast in the winter, turning it into a tundra from November to April.  Most surely, it’s a combination of all of the above. 

The stunting on Massachusetts ’s Cape Cod is even more pronounced, due to stingy soils, harsh relentless winds and bitter winters.  The result is a kid-friendly forest of miniature trees.  The Door Peninsula of Ontario forces trees to cling to sheer cliffs as the wind howls in off Lake Huron .  In California ’s Mendocino County , the Pygmy Forest survives despite hardpan soils, vicious ocean winds and an upland exposure.  Yet just a thousand feet below - in dark, organic, fog-filled canyons protected from the ocean’s winds - giant redwoods grow to immense proportions.  In the Rocky Mountains and the High Sierra, ancient, gnarled pines and cedars have clung to crags in the rocks for thousands of years, yet grow barely tall enough to peak at the horizon.  In all cases, proud trees grow in harsh conditions. 

There is much to be learned from nature – lessons that we can use as we raise and shape our little trees.  Nature is responsive, reactive rejuvenative, relentless.  We may ask our trees to do what they don’t WANT to do, but we can’t ask them to do what they CAN’T do.  Despite all our efforts to change them, they in fact don’t change at all.  They simply respond to their environment and continue to grow.  For all of our efforts and all of the apparent modification that we see, we’ve been little more than a nuisance, just another bothersome bit of the environment that intrudes occasionally into the best intentions of the tree. 

As the saying goes: "What doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger."  Vow next year to aggressively challenge your trees.

This page was last updated on 07/20/2008