July 20, 2025
In this issue: Please contribute if you can, finding renewal in visits to the Northeast Kingdom, a butternut experiment, fond butternut memories from childhood, and racing into the heat and humidity.
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Finding Renewal...
...in visits to the Northeast Kingdom.
Editor’s Note: We received this lovely essay from Sara Gagné, author of Nature at Your Door. You can also watch Sara’s new TEDx talk, Rekindle Your Relationship with Nature One Salamander at a Time, on YouTube.
I start most visits to my parents’ place in the Northeast Kingdom with a walk in the woods. First, I scramble over the tumbling stone wall that separates forest from pasture where the white ash marks the edge of the property. The tree, easily three feet in diameter, leans up against the wall on the forested side, pieces of lichen encrusted bark littered at its base and the remnants of a hunting platform wedged into a crotch of the trunk.
Deeper into the woods I find what I seek: a group of sugar maples and yellow birch that stand out in the comparatively young forest. The first tree I meet is nearly dead — a lone branch reaching up into the canopy is anchored by a colossal trunk, hollow and shaggy with the unmistakable shavings of birch bark. A little further along is the tree I’ve come to pay my respects to: a magnificent sugar maple. It dwarfs its companions that also stood here when the rest of the forest was nothing but seeds in the soil. This tree is vibrantly alive, its branches spreading across the sky.
I deeply cherish my visits to Vermont’s northern forest. My home is now in Charlotte, North Carolina, a rapidly growing city where you often see just as many construction cranes reaching into the sky as trees. When I’m in the northern woods, surrounded by the forest I know so well, I’m reminded of the immensity of the natural world and also, of its persistence. In the forest, I walk among an immeasurable wealth of lives, mossy and furry and everything in between. I’m struck by the energy that I feel, like a current flowing in the filamentous fungi below my feet, up through the trunks, and into the leaves slowly moving to find the best light. The life force of the forest seems so long-lived. The forest was here, in some incarnation, before humans were, and it will be here long after we are gone. In the woods, my spatial and temporal horizons expand far beyond the narrow confines I experience in the city.
Just as easily as I can look through the trees to the valley and hills in the distance can I see into the past as I walk in the woods. The magnificent sugar maple and its neighbors are relics of a long-gone forest that was cleared for homesteading in the 19th century. Low stone walls that used to delineate fields edge our property and run through the woods in the guise of suspiciously straight earthen berms. As a kid, I discovered a curious semi-circular stone wall, about five feet high at the midpoint and over one hundred feet across, that buttresses the hillside and hugs a large open area. The wall was impeccably built — nearly perfect in form when I found it — but its purpose remains unknown. Nearby, at the top of the ravine, lies an old dump where bedsprings and stove tops poke out of the soil — a treacherous place for a walk, but the perfect denning location for the local fox and her kits. Closer to the road among the trees is a sunken stone foundation barely six feet on a side. It fills with water and tadpoles each spring.
A hand-drawn map of the area in the 1880s depicts my parents’ house at the top of the hill and below, the ‘starch factory’ where the nearby brook cascades downstream. I often visit the remains of the factory, still an imposing stone structure on the brook’s wooded banks. Upstream were two lumber mills, a schoolhouse, and homes that now dot the lines on the map; some of the lines are still roads today and some only snowmobile trails in the deep woods. I picture cultivated soil between those lines and intersecting stone walls neat and high. Forest is absent — just a few scattered trees cluster around homesteads or shelter livestock further afield. Log homes with stone foundations sit side by side under the sun, children wandering from one to another and then to the school in the cove. Millworkers busy themselves with wood and grain and the wheel of the starch factory knows no rest. It’s a looking glass reflection of the wooded area I know today.
Ironically, the landscape I imagine, now hidden beneath leaf litter and fallen stones, gives me hope. A landscape once so consumed by humanity yet now so utterly subsumed by nature is a beacon of possibility. The forest has returned, perhaps a little different than it was before, but still rich with hermit thrush singing in the evening, star moss sparkling with dew, and bobcat tracks to follow.
The hope I feel follows me home to my office in Charlotte, where I am an associate professor of urban ecology. I now look upon the parking lots and eroded stream beds of my Piedmont landscape, a miniature version of the Green Mountains of Vermont, with new eyes. I see the impermanence of human transformation of landscapes and in that, the potential for renewal. Maybe in a hundred years, Charlotte’s sidewalks will be covered by thick leaf litter. City residents taking a walk will wonder at the straight lines of old ‘street trees’ running through the forest and marvel at the number of buildings and roads clustered on old maps. I certainly hope so.
— Sara A. Gagné
A Butternut Experiment
Here’s an unusual log that’s splitting itself into firewood. If you look closely, you’ll see it’s also sprouting. It’s a butternut, and since butternuts are rare these days, I figured I’d see if I could get some of the sprouts to grow. The parent tree was killed in a logging accident – a big tree came down a little off line and took the butternut with it. If I can get the sprouts to take, the tree will live on in a different form.
One sprout was growing from one of the pieces of firewood, so with that I simply cut the wood and buried it in a compost pile. I don’t have high hopes it’ll survive, but we’ll see.
I cut two other sprouts that were about 4 inches long, dipped them in rooting hormone, put them in some potting soil, and put them under a clear plastic tote in indirect sunlight in the dining room. I’ll mist them every day and see what happens. If they take, I’ll give a full report in Volume VI. We’re not the only ones who appreciate butternuts; read on for a story from Vol. III where the author fondly recalls butternut memories from his childhood.
— Dave Mance III
A Look Back
Picking up butternuts
From Vermont Almanac, Vol. III
Juglans cinerea is the scientific name for what we call butternuts. They are also called white walnuts in some places. Butternut seems to me to be a better name for them, since the meat has a rich, creamy taste, with none of black walnut’s bitterness.
Growing up in Pittsford, we spent a great deal of time each fall harvesting the nuts and getting the delicious nut meat out of the butternut shells and into such treats as my mother’s wonderful chocolate butternut fudge, a Christmas tradition. Or my father’s favorite: butternut cake with maple-butternut frosting.
The butternuts first had to be picked up off the ground after they had fallen from the tree. Then, we’d spread them out in a dry area of the barn to dry down the green resinous hulls for a period of time.
I particularly remember one year, when I was about ten or eleven years old, my father saying that the butternuts had fallen and that we had to go up to the pasture to pick them up. There were several butternut trees on the farm, but in the night pasture, there were two trees with nuts that were twice as large as any of the others. My whole family went up to get those butternuts. We brought with us bushel-size baskets and burlap bags.
My father and mother and probably my sisters wore gloves as we started to pick up the butternuts. I couldn’t bother and I worked barehanded. I was soon plastered from head to toe with black, sticky resin. My mother would later give me something that she called “Lestoil” to scrub myself clean. It smelled like bathing in a pine tree.
I remember finding a cache of butternuts in a crotch at the base of a tree. I was going to put them in my basket, but my father said to leave them, as a squirrel had put them there and would need them for the coming winter.
We gathered seven bushels of nuts that year and brought them down with the horses and wagon and then spread them out in the upper barn.
It was the next weekend when my father told my cousin, Donald Champine, that a friend of Donald’s could come and pick up butternuts if she wanted to. This friend came the next day. Her name was Carmine Genola. She was from Proctor, and she brought her mother with her to help. The ladies came dressed in their church clothes – directly after church.
Carmine was a young, shapely woman with dark eyes, a friendly smile, and a soft voice. I told her I would show them where the butternuts were. I helped them pick up the butternuts, getting myself plastered with the black, sticky resin again. Carmine, in her soft, friendly voice, talked with me and asked many questions. Carmine and her mother talked to each other in Italian, which I did not understand. When they were finished, they both looked at me, said something in Italian to each other, and giggled. I hoped it was about how cute I was, but it more likely was about how funny I looked with the black resin plastered all over my hands and face. When we got back down to the house, the ladies left with their butternuts, and my mother handed me the Lestoil.
A butternut is a hard nut to crack, to say the least. My father would take a bushel of butternuts into the cellar. The green hulls had dried by this time and were wrinkled and brown. He would sit on a chunk of rock maple by the huge wood-burning furnace and crack the entire bushel. He held each butternut between his fingers and brought a hammer down on the pointed end of the nut. Several sharp hits would cleave the butternut exactly in half, revealing the nut’s meat inside.
The tedious job of picking the meat out of the cracked shells fell to my mother. My sisters would usually help her. As for myself, I was not very good at the job – maybe somewhat by design.
We no longer graze cattle on our Whipple Hollow Farm. This has allowed new butternut trees a chance to take root, though they’ll come of age in a time when butternut canker, a deadly disease, has become endemic in Vermont. It’s still possible to find nuts, though they’re nowhere near as numerous as they once were. And I have not found any trees bearing the extra-large nuts that the old butternut trees that grew in the night pasture did.
Some of that old butternut tree still stands in my house. When it fell down, my best friend and neighbor, who has a sawmill, salvaged parts of it and sawed it into lumber. His name is Sonny Poremski. Sonny is also a master woodworker. He built a beautiful room-divider in my house out of that lumber; its natural finish reveals the rich brown color and character of the grain. To me, the wood symbolizes strength, resiliency, bounty, and friendship. A great gift from God and from an extraordinary man.
– Allen A. Mills, Jr.
Braving the Heat
