Blooming! Spring Blossoms by Carole Gerber

Sometimes it seems as if spring is a long time coming--and then suddenly it's here, taking the landscape by storm, in a tsunami of blooming trees in a spectrum of shapes and colors.

SPRING IS BURSTING OUT ALL OVER. THE SUN IS WARM! LET'S GO!

TREES, SO BARE AND PLAIN ALL WINTER, ARE DRESSED UP FOR THEIR YEARLY SHOW.

Some buds are tiny and pale and some are boisterous in color and size.

Dogwood spread their low branches wide to show off their white crowned blooms, and crabapple trees are covered with small flowers, white and fragrant, both dressed for Eastertide. Other flowers show their colors! Cherry trees bare bouffant pink ruffles on stubby stems that bounce and flounce in the breeze.

THE OAK BEARS TWO KINDS OF BLOOMS.

MALE FLOWERS DROOP. THEY'RE GREENISH GOLD.

THE FEMALE BLOOMS ARE SMALL AND RED.

BOTH OPEN AS NEW LEAVES UNFOLD.

The red maple, true to its name, bears its spring red clothes, but the redbud blooms are rose pink. And conifers like pine and balsam firs hide their quietly colored flowers so well that most of us don't see them, just their potent pollens borne on the breeze. And a windy, warm spring rain can bring the trees' bright petals down in a colorful shower of flowers!

People wax poetic over flowering trees, but for the trees, it's just their job to flower and pollinate and provide their fruits and nuts to secure that more trees will grow and bloom for many springs to come, in Carole Gerber's poetic Spring Blossoms (Charlesbridge), offering sybillant verses and a bit of botany, while artist Leslie Evans follows two girls out under the flowering trees to celebrate the spring beauty, illustrating the botany session as they go. Appended are charming illustrations of each bloom for easy identification in a lovely spring lesson.

Tracing the Tree Assassin: Beetle Busters: A Rogue Insect and the People Who Track It by Loree Griffin Burns

The Asian longhorned beetle (ALB for short) is a stunner. Its 1.5-inch body is a deep black speckled with white, and its head bears a set of shockingly long striped antennae. These antennae and the beetle's six feet are tinted blue, and its mouthparts, if you get close enough to see them, resemble a miniature lobster claw.

If an Asian longhorned beetle landed next to you right now, you would probably never forget it.

And it's a good thing that the ALB is such a memorable bug. In 1996 a man in Brooklyn noticed some small round holes in some maple trees. He blamed teen vandals and mounted a one-man surveillance program on his own. What he spotted was a large, black beetle with long, striped antennae and blue legs, caught in the act of emerging, well fed and ready to mate, from the trunk of one of his favorite trees.

It didn't take long for local officers to ID the perp. The ALB had a long rap sheet with the tree police. It had been discovered chomping up newly planted American poplar trees in China in the early 1980s. The Chinese discovered the pests and leveled the infected trees, but instead of chipping or burning the wood, they thriftily used it to build thousands of shipping pallets, which were loaded with manufactured goods and shipped to the East Coast of the U.S. The alien stowaways hatched and matured and emerged at the ports of New York and Boston, and got busy doing what tree beetles do. They found a lavish beetle buffet on the American ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, willow, elm. hackberry, mimosa, ash, and maple entrees in their new home.

When the Brooklyn tree watcher collared the suspect, the tree scientists of New York went into action. An urban forest has fewer trees, usually not in close quarters, so tree surgeons figured that they would locate all the diseased trees, cut them down, chip them up finely to kill the larvae inside, and that would be that. But before long, infestations showed up in Boston, and the tree men went on red alert, playing whack-a-mole as each infestation was found and eliminated. The ALBs are inept fliers, so they attack trees that are close by, so the hope was that each area could be cleared easily enough once it was located.

But then the pest was discovered in the leafy suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts. Suburban forests are denser, spread over many independently owned plots of land, and even worse, located near real woodlands, part of the great North American forest that stretches from eastern Canada to the Great Lakes area and southward through the Appalachians into the deep South. If the beetles infected that great expanse of trees, millions and millions of our most beautiful trees might be lost, with serious consequences for human and wild animal habitat across almost half of the country.

Teams of tree scientists descended on Worcester, trudging through briers and undergrowth, suffering though ice and snow in winter and ticks and mosquitoes in summer, and climbing into the canopies to identify affected trees for removal. Homeowners and park visitors grieved over the loss of majestic maples and elms. Entomologists studied the beetles' two-year life cycles, and botanists and foresters studied cross-section "cookies" of tree trunks to determine how infestation affected growth. Zoologists observed how the loss of these trees affected all the creatures who depend on forest trees. Chemists created ALB pheromones to attract mating adults to traps, and sniffer dogs were trained to detect the characteristic smell of chemicals released by the beetles to speed up surveying.

Many pesky suspects were arrested, but the Asian longhorned beetle's crime wave has not been stopped, They are now being fought all over the world, in Austria, France, Italy, England, Japan, and Switzerland. Resolute scientists never give up, but so far, the fight depends more on amateur observations of new infestations than on miracle pesticides, exotic new predators, or evolving resistance among the affected trees.

Loree Griffin Burns' Beetle Busters (Scientists in the Field Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) details the struggle with one of the pests that threaten our forests in an easy middle-reader text stacked with information. These are truly "scientists in the field" (actual fields) revealing how teams of experts with varying specialties cooperate in the their assignment. Many color photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz document the work of these insect CSI experts. In fact, any reader of this book is well prepared to identify this insect pest if it is encountered. In the tradition of Houghton Mifflin's estimable Scientists in the Field series, a glossary with terms such as dendrochronology and vascular cambium, a bibliography, and an index is appended

The fight against the ALB is not a skirmish, but a real war. America loves its leafy towns and cities, its glorious shady glades, and its forested state and national parks. What do we have to lose? The shade of towering elms, the autumn glory of red maples, and the inimitable taste of sugar maple syrup, the songs of birds, and the beauty of our woodlands.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: We Planted A Tree by Diane Muldrow

WE PLANTED A TREE,

AND THE TREE GREW UP.

A simple event--the planting of a tree, with a view to its future--is celebrated here. It is a common, albeit totally human event, but, as we know, so much depends upon the simple presence of trees.

Two young families, one in Brooklyn, another in Kenya, choose a spot and plant a tree, and those two trees, one in the tiny backyard of a brick rowhouse in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, one near a small, low house on a vast, arid plain, take strong roots in their home soil as they grow up with the two families.

The trees bud and blossom and leaf out through the seasons, growing tall, and broad, holding the soil, providing shade for family picnics, a quick, cooling rest in the heat of the day, a branch for the children's swing, and a home for varied animals and insects. Season after season passes, and then one day the children of both families, now grown and with their own children around them, celebrate with their parents under the sheltering tree that has given so much to their lives.

Diane Muldrow's simple little paean to the wonder of trees, We Planted a Tree (Random House/Golden Books, 2010) nevertheless speaks eloquently to a world which needs all the trees it can get. Her gentle, easy-to-understand text describes how trees can make all the difference.

THE TREE KEPT THE SOIL FROM BLOWING AWAY--NOW RAIN WATER COULD STAY IN THE EARTH.

THE TREE'S LEAVES HELP CLEAN THE AIR. AND WE BREATHE BETTER.

WE PLANTED A TREE, AND THAT ONE TREE HELPED HEAL THE EARTH.

Pair this brand-new book with Donna Jo Napoli's excellent Mama Miti: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya, Gail Gibbon's notable The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree or Lauren Thompson's lyric The Apple Pie That Papa Baked, and Shel Silverstein's classic The Giving Tree 40th Anniversary Edition Book with CD a salute to tree, nature's queen of going green.

Oh, and if you can, plant a tree with a child.

Come, Little Leaves: Two for Fall by Lois Ehlert

The first waves of the coming tsunami of fallen leaves are beginning to break, reminding us that the season is changing. It's time to turn to the science of leaves, which, thanks to the uproarious display offered by North American trees, is always a pleasant occupation.

There's no better source for the picture book set than the artful books of Lois Ehlert, whose earlier Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf takes the reader along on a close look at the life cycle of a maple tree through the eyes of a child who plants and tends it. Ehlert's collage technique utilizes unique materials as well as stunning paintings to make us look, really look, at the wonder that is the leaf and the tree.

In her 2006 book Leaf Man, Ehlert has found a new medium for her collage. Despairing of the possibility of incorporating the fragile texture and colors of real leaves in her collages, she hit upon the idea of photocopying autumn leaves as she found them and using the copies to create the layouts which fill her pages. Set against gorgeous backgrounds using varied texture and color, her charmingly witty leaf art collages fill her die-cut pages, which ripple like river banks, curve like hillsides, and zigzag like the tops of fir trees.

The unifying story is slight but evocative. "Leaf Man," an anthropomorphic fellow made up of maple, beech, and gingko leaves, with a sweet gum ball for a mouth and acorns for eyes, is blown away by the autumn winds, leaving "no travel plans." "A Leaf Man's got to go where the wind blows," is the recurring refrain as Leaf Man sails past leaf chickens, leaf geese, leaf pumpkins and squash, leaf turkeys and cows, and leaf turtles and fish. Where does he land? Ehlert doesn't tell, but she does advise "...listen for a rustle in the leaves. Maybe you'll find a Leaf Man waiting to go home with you."

Again, Ehlert's art summons forth our ability to see the detail in a pile of windblown leaves, to see the individual colors, spots and all, and the shapes of the fall leaves all around us. Backing up the sensual experience of her text, the endpapers are filled with colorful leaves identified by their source tree, while the dust jacket flaps display "mystery leaves" and the various places they were found, from Santa Fe to Wisconsin to Orlando.

Just right for early childhood education, these books combine a playful and aesthetic experience coupled with botanical information, but their lasting value is that of inspiring a walk among the trees to look for, and really see, those "signs of fall."