Minnesota Mystery Wood

[barbender]

Ok, I'm trying to ID this small hardwood that I often find growing on the old windrows of debris in pine plantations. It usually only gets to 6-8" diameter before it dies. One forester told me it was tag alder, but I'm kind of wondering if it is cherry? We are outside of cherry's range, but it is common in Southeast MN and Wisconsin. Anyways, I had a stick I noticed when I was processing firewood tonight, so I thought I'd see if anyone could ID it from my severely aged and degraded specimen😁

[barbender]

Hmm, I seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties. Let's try again-





The top two logs in this picture-

[Southside]

That bark is identical to the poor, small, twisted, field edge, Cherry I see around here.  

[Don P]

I see the lenticels but alder and cherry aren't ring porous  ???

[WDH]

Cherry can have one row of larger earlywood pores that give it the appearance of being ring porous, but it technically diffuse porous.  It certainly looks like black cherry to me. 

[Clark]

We aren't out of the biological range of black cherry but we are far from the economic range! Black cherry, paper birch and balsam poplar are the three species I would name as most common in a pine stand windrow. I have seen exactly one black cherry in northern MN that was 14" DBH otherwise they tend to bend over from snow and not recover. 6" is a more common max diameter.

Clark

[barbender]

Thanks Clark. I have a couple that might be 9" I'm going to saw up for the heck of it.

[SwampDonkey]

Black cherry, the kind of junk we grow up here after the monkey bears, moose and black knot have a run at it. ;D :D

I've got pin cherry big enough to saw up here. Most places it's destroyed by the moose. I just cut a block with the clearing saw and I mowed down a bunch of it. It's a hard wood for a tree that will put on 6' in 3 months, harder than red maple, but lighter wood. :D

[thecfarm]

Sounds like the cherry that I have here. Does not get that big and grows crooked.
Am clearing a place now and found 2 there. I left them to watch them grow and grow crooked and then die. 
Then the stumps will last 50 years too!!! Still solid when I dig them out.