Identify Trees in Winter

Winter is a great time to identify trees. The forest is open, there are no insects, and instead of a blur of vegetation, many trees stand out strongly and have a characteristic winter look. Some are evergreen, some have old pods, old leaves, leftover fruit, spines or giant buds - and a tree's silhouette is far more visible without the cloak of leaves.

Note: Most of the examples in this article are specific to the U.S., but the guidelines apply anywhere. Feel free to add examples from your own region by editing this article.

Steps

  1. Get Write a Field Guide When You Are a Young Naturalist to your local trees. It's good to have both a general regional guide, as well as a more specific guide for your area. You can never have enough field guides - the more images you have the easier it will be to identify a particular tree. Field guides can be obtained for free at your local library. Used bookstores can be another good source, where guides can be bought at about half the price. Another great resource is a plant identification terminology book. This will help you understand the language in the guide. If you're just starting out, focus on using mostly photos of leaves and bark and flowers and fruit to identify trees. Then move on to using keys and drawings, which are more technical and precise. Various guides can also provide fascinating anecdotal information about different trees.
  2. Avoid ornamentals, if you're a novice. Anything planted in a garden, lawn, roadside, park, is often an ornamental. Ornamentals are garden varieties of native species that are dissimilar enough to throw you off, and make pinpointing an exact species very difficult. If you want to learn your area ornamentals, there are many guides for the horticulturist about planting and growing trees that will have enough images that you might just find your tree. There are not that many different native trees in a specific area, and they are easy to learn. But if you include the city ornamentals, you're talking up to a thousand trees planted from all over the world.
  3. Go for a walk, and take some guides with you. If you have the time to sit at the base of a tree you want to learn, and pore over field guides - great. Identification takes a lot of patience and concentration. It may take at least 30 minutes of studying various guides before you've found it. If you cannot sit with the tree, take some photos and samples home with you.
  4. Focus on trees that stand out, rather than going methodically from tree to tree. Pick a tree that has at least one, if not two easily identifiable characteristics - such as a leaf or flower or fruit. Bark is not so easy to go by, nor buds, or scars, or growth habit. Leaves are the easiest to use. Start with an evergreen. There are very few native evergreen broad-leaved trees in the U.S. This magnolia [magnolia grandiflora] with its large glossy evergreen leaves in the South is a dead giveaway:
  5. Look for leftover growth up in the branches. The tulip tree with its huge vertical trunk and papery upright flowers, that remain all through the winter, is very common and easy to identify (the 'flowers' are the remains of the fruit axis, not actually blooms). It gives the tree a candelabra effect.
  6. Look for short spiny spur branches, the sure mark of a plum, pear or apple - a fruiting tree in the rose family:
  7. Learn your families, rather than isolating trees by species. A peach, a cherry, a plum, a hawthorn, a juneberry, a pear, are all in the same family, with edible fruit - the rose. Trees with pods are in the Use Green Manure Crops, (or bean) family, such as silk tree, mesquite and locust. There are not that many different tree families in any temperate region of the world - if you can group your trees in their respective families you'll be better able to understand them, and know their characteristics. Beech and oak and chestnut are all in the same family (the beech), and produce edible nuts. Cottonwood is really a gigantic member of the willow family, growing beside water and having deeply fissured bark, just like other willows.
    • And the tulip tree is in the magnolia family - it has large showy flowers, just like magnolia, and look at a comparison of the fruit:
  8. Look for very peculiar bark, such as the warty trunk of this hackberry, common along river bottoms (though different varieties can also be found on mountaintops). Hackberries are in the elm family, and both the seed and flesh of the prolific berries is edible - they're much like candy, and can persist on the tree deep into winter in some varieties and locales:
    • Or the flaky peeling bark of this river birch:
  9. Look for anything flowering, even in the dead of winter (especially in the American South), such as this silverberry, with its silver-speckled foliage, flowers, and immature fruit:
    • Red maple (acer rubrum) is usually the first tree to flower in the spring - in the American South that's in February. The scarlet flowers stand out beautifully against the smooth gray bark. Red maple's twigs are also red. Its red keys typically don't last that far into winter:
  10. Look for leftover fruit, as it can sometimes remain far into the winter, like on this ornamental crabapple:
    • Or the cherries on this laurelcherry, a southern native, still not yet ripe:
  11. Search for trees with giant buds, such as the upright rack of huge velvety buds on this Princess-tree, a common weed tree . . . there are also old woody capsules from the previous year's fruit:
  12. Look for trees still holding on to their dead leaves throughout the winter, a common habit of beech:
  13. Don't forget the conifers, almost always evergreen, with easily identifiable needles . . . and often holding on to their cones, such as the tiny 1/2" cones on this hemlock:
  14. Use the internet, where possible, to finish the identification process. There's an incredible amount of information about various tree species online, as well as lots of images - you should arrive at a dead certainty about the identification of your tree at this point. You will also find a wealth of anecdotal information, as well as what possible uses the tree has and any toxic or edible parts. Always cross-reference and verify from multiple sources the edibility of a certain tree - don't go by one opinion alone. That having been said, there are very few trees in the U.S. that are actually poisonous, such as buckeye and yew.
  15. Take photos, and save them in a file with both the label of the tree and time of year the picture was taken. Ultimately you'll create your own database of area trees, and become an expert. It will become an excellent reference source for you year after year, and you will come to know your trees from all angles, in all habitats, in all seasons.
  16. Collect samples, and put them in a scrapbook. This is a great project for kids, and it spurs their interest in trees.

Tips

  • To really get your trees down, begin using them for food. All oaks have edible acorns (the white, or round-lobed, are best, and don't need processing); walnuts, butternuts, hickories, pecans, pine, beech - all have edible nuts. Many trees have edible leaves, such as beech (when young - first 2-4 weeks); and sourwood, sassafras, linden, and boxelder have leaves edible all season. Conifer needles are also edible when very young. Many trees have edible flowers, such as black locust and redbud. As far as fruiting trees, there are wild apples everywhere, persimmons, pawpaw, plums, many species of wild cherry, juneberry, hackberry, mulberry, alligator juniper, farkleberry, autumn olive and more. Start depending on trees, and being nourished by them, and you'll come to know them intimately.




  • Trees get easier to identify the more you know. The first is the toughest. When you get comfortable with the identification process, you'll pick up quickly what to look for, and in what family each tree would probably belong. And once you identify a tree, you'll start seeing it everywhere - it's now part of your awareness. Eventually after enough time flipping through field guides, instead of seeing a tree and later looking it up - you'll notice a tree, and remember having seen it somewhere before, in one of your guides . . . sometimes the name will occur to you spontaneously.
  • Even trees completely bare of leaves in winter, with hardly any obvious identifiable characteristics, will often have piles of old leaves at their base.

Warnings

  • Research any plants you plan to eat to be sure they are considered edible before consuming. Some trees and plants are toxic, or could cause allergic reactions.

Things You'll Need

  • Field Guides
  • Magnifying Glass (great for close-up examination of buds, scars, leaves and flowers)

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

Retrieved from "https://kipkis.com/index.php?title=Identify_Trees_in_Winter&oldid=281041"