Aspen Photography

[Drew Wiley]

Poplars aren't aspens, and the poplar election is over anyway. One of my favorite areas is the Aquarius Plateau in Utah, between the Escalante River and Capitol Reef.
The eastern Sierra is closer for me, however, and always has a good show. But there's some backcountry groves on the western slope of the Sierra that have by far the largest and proabably oldest aspen trees anywhere I'm aware of - up the 3ft diameter. (Never mind that aspen groves regenerate from a common root system
that can last thousands of years, prompting some scientists to classify them as the
world's oldest trees - I'll stick with the layman's definition of a tree! But this is the
reason why different groves adjacent to one another will turn different colors at the
same time of the season.)

[Struan Gray]

Aspen plantation (yes, I know that's a birch out front :-)

Poplars might not be aspens, but aspens are always poplars :-)

Our Eurasian Aspens don't have the white bark, but they do tremble, supposedly in shame because the True Cross was made of aspen wood. Like the North American variety they spread clonally, and because their leaves taste unpleasant even to unfussy animals like deer, they are good at taking over abandoned pastures and unmanaged wetlands. The wood is fairly useless, except for making matchsticks because it burns so slowly. The bark is alkaline, and people made potash from it in the days before mineral and industrial sources of alkali were developed. Here in S. Sweden there are quite a few aspen plantations, but few seem to have been planted recently. In many ways it's a forgotten tree.

The attachment (taken from the Swedish Virtual Flora website) shows the range for most of the common species in the Northern Hemisphere. Executive summary: they're everywhere.

[ljb0904]

Shh, don't let people know that lest we end up looking like Maroon Bells...

:-)

Or perhaps, "AspensExclusively.com"?

We get little stands of aspens here in southern Arizona, where the mountains go above 9000' msl. A 30-minute drive puts one back down among the saguaro cactus.

[Vaughn]

Make that Asprins! Nate Potter, Boston MA.

Take two and develop them in the morning...

Distribution map...

http://plantwatch.sunsite.ualberta.c...sp_pop_dis.gif

[Kirk Keyes]

Executive summary: they're everywhere.

I've read quaking aspen has the widest native distribution of any tree on the planet.

[Struan Gray]

I've read quaking aspen has the widest native distribution of any tree on the planet.

I've seen that said, and it seems to be much-quoted online, but I wonder how they measure it and suspect it's an artificial measure (even before you get into the complexities of fractal boundaries :-).

Of the trees I know I'd have put my money on a birch - silver birch, or one of the small but ubiquitous arctic/mountain dwarf species - but the birches are so salami-sliced into sub-species they probably don't get a look in when records are being compiled.

Coco-de-mer would be my smart-arse guess :-)

[roteague]

We live in beautiful Colorado, and just got done with quite a grand year for shooting Aspens . . . we were just curious, what other areas of the country/world have aspen trees, or are they limited to Colorado? I have quite the collection of aspen art and photographs, but I just wondered if this goes beyond this region?

Thanks

None here in Hawaii ..... but we do have lots of palm trees.