Let me tell you: The squirrels don’t care. Not about Fibonacci numbers. Not about the Black Forest. Not about Gothic cathedrals. Well, maybe they care about the flying buttress-like branches of evergreen cathedrals.
I took an August morning walk under a majestic bower of conifers not far from my mom’s home. The cicada symphony was tuning up as the morning fog lifted. It is an outdoor cathedral of elderly pines and Norway spruce that I used to visit quite often as a young teenager, walking our family dog, Bear. It’s been years. No, decades.
The arms of the Norway spruce arc toward the heavens until they tangle in amongst the branches of the next spruce, creating tall, vaulted ceilings. Off each large branch are dozens of dangling branchlets of short, dark needles, dancing like a stallion’s mane.
It is a holy space; holier than I’ve visited for some time. As I look down, there is a mosaic of copper and green scales from immature cones littering the soft ground. Then, I notice the russet-colored cobs. We are enjoying corn on the cob; the squirrels are gnawing on spruce on the cob. In case you are interested, they don’t chew typewriter fashion, but instead, go round and round, starting at the broad end until they get to the tip.
Norway spruce is the tallest native tree in Europe, towering to nearly 200 feet. They were planted on this side of the Atlantic for their majestic evergreen form and because they grow quickly, 3 feet a year in their first 25 years.
The female cones of the Norway spruce are up to 8 inches long. They are concentrated on the higher branches. Their male counterparts are found lower on the individual tree, so that the female cones are pollinated by the wind blowing off male cones on other trees, an evolutionary trick to prevent self-fertilization of individual trees.
In August, the cones are green (they turn brown as they age). Their scales overlap like shingles on a roof, with two tiny, naked seeds wedged under the base of each scale. Those seeds are what the squirrels are after, as they strip each leathery scale from the core.
The scales are arranged in geometric spirals. This brings us to an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci who lived in Pisa from 1170 to 1230 during the time of St. Francis of Assisi. Fibonacci was fascinated with conifer cones and other spirals of nature, such as petals on pinks and delphiniums, leaf arrangements on oaks, beech and cherry trees, and seedheads of poppies and sunflowers.
The mathematician became famous for a mathematical progression which he calculated and is now referred to as the Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. Each number in the list is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The scales of Norway spruce cones are arranged in two distinct spirals, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, with a 5/8 arrangement.
Clockwise … hmmm. Perhaps that is one reason clockmakers in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) of Germany were drawn to Norway spruce cones. Beginning in the 1700s, they fashioned the cast iron weights of their cuckoo clocks after Norway spruce cones, the predominant conifer of the Black Forest. And that, in a nutshell, is why Norway spruce cones are sometimes called “cuckoo clock cones.” Laurie Lynch
Bull Horn Peppers: When Norway spruce cones are green look for green Bull’s Horn peppers in your farmers’ market. We’ve been getting them in our weekly market share. My favorite way to prepare them is to remove the tops of each pepper, slice it lengthwise and remove seeds. In a small bowl, mix crumbled feta cheese with a dash of olive oil and chopped mint leaves. Stuff the peppers with the mixture and brush each pepper with a little olive oil, placing them in a Pyrex baking dish that was also brushed with olive oil. You can then put them on the grill or broil them in the oven until the peppers soften and start to brown at the edges.
Written on Slate: “We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.” –Andre Dubus
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