Surrounding Forest
The forest immediately surrounding the lake was last burned over in the mid 1800s, and so is now well over 100 years old and approaching climax. White spruce and balsam fir are now the dominant tree species on the shores of the lake. The lakeshore population of paper birch and trembling aspen is in decline, and deciduous trees are now fairly inconspicuous except in isolated pockets. This is a fairly recent development, as the deciduous trees that sprouted after the fires only started dying off in numbers in the 1980s. Before this time, the lake shore forest was dominated by deciduous trees. Therefore, for much of the 20th century, Spruce Island (which had escaped the fires) had a conspicuous evergreen forest in contrast to the younger deciduous forest of the surrounding shore, and thus the island received its name. However, the aging of the lakeshore forest means Spruce Island's forest is no longer visually distinctive.
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Famous quotes containing the words surrounding and/or forest:
“Formerly, when lying awake at midnight in those woods, I had listened to hear some words or syllables of their language, but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry of the loon. I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)