Under the guidance of Ho-Jin Jung, Russ was invited to try a number undone lines, many of which he established first free ascents of, and in the process he created a life long friend with Jung.įast forward to 2019: South Korean climbing is well established on an international scale and claims some of the top climbers in the world. Russ arrived full of his usual New York candor and fresh out of Yosemite’s bustling free climbing scene. Many routes were still being aided and had yet to be free climbed. He explained how during his trip back in 1985 the rules of Korean trad climbing where still being laid. Instead I smiled politely as Russ continued to boast about his past trip, love for the island and the plentiful rock there. “If you see Ho-jin Jung tell him I said hi!” I hated to break it to Russ that the chances of me running into a climber he had rendezvoused with on the granite cliffs outside of Seoul over 20 years ago was highly unlikely. Hike through a patch of witch-hazel at the moment the seeds are fully ripe, and bullets may come a-flying! This article by Edward Kanze originally appeared in the news magazine The Adirondack Explorer before publication in the Fall 2016 issue of our quarterly print newsletter, The Land Steward. The capsules are hard and knobby, angular but vaguely spherical, and measure about a half-inch across. Witch-hazel is singular in that its flowers and ripe seedpods (the fruit, literally, of the previous year’s flowers) appear at the same time. If the flowers are out, you’ll see that they’re yellow and adorned with four long, skinny, arthritic-looking petals. Observe the leaves’ distinctive wavy edges. In November and December, the broad, glossy leaves will be down, but rummage on the ground or in the snow and you may find a few. When looking for witch-hazel, keep your eyes peeled for many-trunked bushes, some as tall as you are, or taller, with brown or gray-brown bark. Either way, witch-hazel’s striking name likely has no connection to women who don black pointed hats and traverse the night sky on broomsticks. “Wych” also derives from the same linguistic root as “wicker” and may refer to the plant’s bending stems. “Wych” is an old word for “water.” It probably refers to the English tree’s tendency to grow in wet places. More credible theories center on the word wych, an old English sound-alike of “witch.” The witch-hazel found by early English settlers in northeastern North America likely reminded them of the wych-elm (Ulmus glabra), a widespread English tree, and of English hazels (genus Corylus), which are close relatives and look-alikes of our native American hazelnuts. Dowsers, also known as water-witchers, sometimes choose forked sections of witch-hazel as divining rods. The most colorful (and perhaps least reliable) is that the plant, flowering around or after Halloween and with its crooked growth habit, gangly yellow blossoms, and explosive seedpods, was historically associated with witches. There are several stories explaining how witch-hazel got its name. Regarding genuine health benefits, the jury remains out. Old-time pharmacists made witch-hazel lotion by pulverizing young twigs and roots and steeping them in alcohol. Oddly, there’s little or no whiff of the final, astringent product in the plant itself. Witch-hazel essence, which also turns up in toothpaste and facial cleansers, is distilled from the twigs. The liniment, still sold in drugstores, wafts a distinctive medicinal smell that inspires faith (possibly misguided) in its curative powers. When I was a child, my mother treated major body aches in the household with witch-hazel rubdowns. Sweetgum trees, ranging from Dixie northward to the coast of Connecticut, also hail from the same off-beat family. Most of its kin live in Asia, although a second, smaller kind of witch-hazel occurs in the American South. Then they begin developing in earnest.īotanically, witch-hazel is a lone wolf, at least in New York state. So the embryos are archived until spring. The plant is virtually shut down physiologically and in no position to manufacture fully developed offspring. An odd thing about witch-hazel embryos is that after they’re created, they’re put on hold. Studies have shown that for witch-hazel, Cupid’s errands are carried out by a variety of cold-weather fliers, among them fungus gnats, parasitic wasps, and hoverflies.Īs in all so-called higher plants, pollen delivers the sperm that fertilize eggs cradled in ovaries. Certainly with nothing else in bloom, witch-hazel has little trouble attracting the attention of whatever insects are active. Why blossom in autumn or winter when pollinators are scarce? It’s an open question.
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