Bi-Weekly Topics for Aug. 1, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060104150744/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?TreesAndPlace
Trees and Home
I have lived a long life among tall trees and remember trees, as much as I recall the Appalachian hills and coves that have given them root, when I think of places I have lived and known. It is individual backyard trees that I first remember as significant markers of place. I recall them as favorite barriers to hide behind in hide-and-seek; branches to climb in and fall out of; horizontal limbs to swing from, letting go the rope and falling into muddy creeks; and of course, for their blessed shade from the blazing Alabama sun. Later on, I have clear memories of the sweet clean smell of pines at summer camp; of arching Live Oaks festooned in a tinsel of Spanish Moss on our deeper-south vacations; and the scrub oak of second growth forest where I often explored with my BB gun-- these forests of broad summertime leaves have become inseparable parts of my personal ecosystem of place.
Few who live here would know or care that we inhabit what forest science calls the Temperate Broad leaved Deciduous Forest-- a living realm or biome that consists of a collection of habitats similar to just a few other forests in the world (see the map). Where I have lived-- in the unglaciated southern Appalachian part of this biome-- is found the greatest diversity of broad leaved trees in the world. These tree species characteristically burst into flaming color in the fall of the year, then drop their leaves and live dormant and bare for six months. This alternate dressing and gaudy undressing of the forest creates the Jekyll and Hyde vegetative calender and paints the backdrop in which southern mountain lives are lived out. In this, there must be myriad ways that trees create in us a sense of who and where were are, where on Earth we belong, effecting our rhythms and cycles in ways that would be unknown to one living in treeless places, or in evergreen forests that change little through the seasons.
While the treescape that surrounds me here in western Virginia most certainly has an impact on my way of thinking and of fitting into place, the forest -- and this is true of any vegetative script no matter where you live-- is itself the consequence of just so much moisture, a particular range of temperature through the growing year, a certain period of daylight and dark, of soil pH and depth and chemistry, and the effects of succession or change over short and vast stretches of time. And so if we are 'at home' in a world of particular tree species, it is also the climate and geology and history of that forest or prairie or desert that we are connected to by our familiarity with the plant life in those unique places. We live anywhere we chose; plants are tenants who must live where they can get along with the elements over the ages. There is a stability in this that I find grounding and comfortable.
Even though the southern forest was right out my back door while I was growing up, I confess I was an animal bigot for all of my precollege years. I thought plant study was for sissies until I had an eleventh hour botanical conversion midway along the path to a Masters in Zoology. Since that enlightenment in my mid-twenties, trees and flowering plants and lichens and ferns have consumed much more of my attention than snakes and mammals. I have taught field botany to college students, led innumerable field trips, and enthusiastically shown slides of Appalachian native plants to groups young and old. My family will testify that I can barely keep my eyes on the road or the trail for attending the trees and flowers and ferns that go by.
Today from my window, I look out on a vast green forest of rhododendrons and tulip poplars, mountain ash and basswood, spicebush and white pine. I watch the wild flowers bud and bloom from creek bank to ridge top. I can name them, and they are like old friends. The trees from our wooded valley here built this house, where the walls, floors, and ceilings are made of old, slow growing heart pine and the siding crafted from poplar trees that took first root on this piece of land more than 200 years ago. Our forest is inseparable from our weather and our bedrock's history, its trees are built up around me and shelter me, and it is among the whispering shadows of these wonderfully adapted fellow creatures that I feel truly at home.
This essay is written as part of the regular biweekly topic post at the Ecotone, where this week the focus is "Trees and Place".
Posted by fred1st at 06:32 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Comments
RE: Mouth Toys If you arent already familiar with this product, then by all means go get one! http://www.kongcompany.com/ they are the greatest dog toy (especially labs and retrievers and any other mouthy dog) ever. Period. No if ands or buts. Virtually indestructable (I've had one last two puppys now). The dogs love them, and you'll learn to love them too. One of my favorite things to do is to fill them with peanut butter , give it to the pup, and be able to have a nice long 'quiet time' as the pup industriously trys to lick it all out.
Posted by: dave at August 18, 2003 07:50 AM
Yes, we've heard the peanut butter story. Some friends of ours make it last even longer by storing it in the freezer. How the heck do they get it all out? And what becomes of left-over PB inside? Whatever. If it works to preserve my poor hands and forearms from puppy incisors, I'm all for it! He'll have a Kong tonight!
Posted by: fredf at August 18, 2003 09:31 AM
Source: http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/archives/2003_08.html#001359
Tree House
Ecotone Topic—Trees and Place
Trees lined my babysitter Mona’s front yard on both sides, each one a different type, and one large tree stood apart from the others at the top of the yard by the fence and the road. I remember a walnut tree—its shells on the ground underneath—and a weeping willow. I can’t remember what types the others were. Tracy and I, and sometimes other kids, played house with those trees in the summer. We each claimed a tree as our own for the afternoon. We’d visit each other often, of course, to pretend a lunch or play tea, but then we’d return home and stay alone for a while.
At the willow, we’d try to swing on the drooping branches and fail, but I still loved the willow. Its lashes formed a swaying wall around me, and inside its cave I felt removed from the rest of the yard, secret, in another place all together. I also loved the tree at the top of the yard, huge and alone, its shaded ground the best throne this world could offer, and I a tiny queen underneath, surveying Mona’s yard from the slightly higher ground into which it had taken root many years ago. We would cartwheel across the entire yard with that tree as our destination, as our mark of accomplishment.
The early real estate deeds at the Archives where I work mark boundaries with trees. Surveyors used them as solid and permanent fixtures on the land. Steel posts mark my property now, but my home is still defined by trees. Returning from a far off wonderland, I am warmed by the sight of leafy trees carpeting hillsides or of stark bark in the winter spiking up from the ground, intermingling shards slicing the air. And then just add the wind. When it blows, the leaves and the moving air give each other voices, and their sound calls me back, interrupts my messy mind for a moment or two so I can live here, now.
Less often than I should, I lie beneath a tree and search up through its leaves and branches, peek at bits of broken sky above. From my point of view, close and surrounded, the green of leaf and blue of sky are on the same plane, forming one mass of color. I am still and under cover, playing house.
—————-
Read a passage from Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, in which the narrator describes the fairy tree of Domremy.
—————-
Read a poem I wrote remembering those times in Mona’s front yard.
I have often said that the quality of my life is directly proportional to the amount of time I spend lying outdoors on my back, looking up. Like you, it has not been enough of late.
Posted by: fredf on August 1, 2003 08:23 AMYes, we are tiny queens when we're "inside" trees - these images and memories really resonated with me. And I have been staring at the gorgeous images at the head of this piece - those pinks and rose colors - absolutely beautiful, first thing this morning. Thank you.
Posted by: beth on August 2, 2003 10:44 AM
Source: http://otherwind.fademark.net/archives/000367.html#000367
the largest pecan tree in the world
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and we just felt like getting out of town. I had read about a garden in Weatherford that was open to the public and we decided to drive there and see it. With time on our hands afterwards we drove back through town and found a tourist center at the edge of downtown. It was open and we walked into a small room with a counter and an assortment of brochures and guidebooks.
We found somethng interesting. It was a photo-copied page with a black and white photo of a tree and a brief paragraph headlined “Largest Pecan Tree in the World.” There was a little map that showed it was just 3.5 miles north on Highway 51. The guy behind the counter had never been there, but Highway 51 was right outside the door. I pulled the car out of the gravel lot and headed north through the farmland, measuring the miles on the odometer.
I have always been happiest in the company of trees. When I was a freshman in Houston I used to take my books out to a grove of pine and oak in a forgotten corner of the campus and sit underneath a tree reading in the warm afternoons. Sometimes I would pace back and forth and read my essays out loud. I cannot recall ever seeing another person in that grove. Except for the squirrels and birds I had it all to myself. Years later I think I remember the trees better than the books I was struggling to understand. I would stay there until the light played out and then head back to my dorm along sidewalks set between parallel rows of oaks drenched in Spanish moss. In the waning light the trees seemed dark and mysterious and at the same time compelling.
Maybe my affinity for trees comes from having grown up in a forest. The property I grew up on southeast of Fort Worth was part of the Crosstimbers, once an impenetrable forest of trees with wood so hard that it was called the "cast iron forest." I did not realize that it was a forest until years later after the property had been sold. The trees were post oak and blackjack oak, what some call scrub oak because they are small and scrawny. Of course they had been thinned out to make room for suburban housing. My parents planted their own favorites - crepe myrtle, redbud and two tall pines in the front yard - but it was the small oaks with lichen-covered bark that I played under and learned to love. I have driven by the property recently. The pines now dominate the street, but the oaks all still seem to be about the same size. They are probably much older than their size would make them seem.
We passed a small sign by the side of the road that said “big tree” and had to double back. We saw a small farmhouse with a driveway, but we were reluctant to turn in there. The paper we had picked up warned that the tree was on private property but said the owners welcomed visitors. A couple hundred yards further I turned the car off onto a dirt road between a ploughed and fenced field and a pasture. The road wound past a barn and then toward a clearing in a line of trees. That looked like the destination.
But as we passed the barn I saw in my rearview mirror a man waving his arms. Apprehensively I stopped the car and got out. It was the farmer who owned the place. He knew we were looking for the tree but sure enough he did not mind. Although it turned out we were heading the wrong way and he would prefer that we park the car and walk before we got it stuck. He pointed the way and we set out across the field. We crossed a dried-up creek on a footbridge and passed into the woods.
The trunk of the pecan was huge and gnarled. It’s enormous branches dipped low to the ground. Tricia and I stood at each edge of the canopy and tried to guess how far apart we were. The literature said the tree was 91 feet tall and over 200 feet across. It was believed to be over 1000 years old. We looked for pecans underneath and found a few but they were old and broken. It was not the right season.
A grove of trees always seems like a special place. Prairie Point is such a place. Over 150 years ago pioneers established a church there in a grove of oaks. The church closed its doors long ago but people from all over still gather there every year in July for a picnic. They bring food and set it out for everyone to eat on long boards nailed between the oaks. After they have eaten and socialized most head for the cemetery beyond the fence where they have friends or relatives.
Groves were some of the earliest sacred places. My ancestors worshipped the spirits of trees in ancient European forests, as have people of many other cultures. Maybe they were on to something. Touching the trunk of the big pecan it was hard not to feel that there was a consciousness there that transcended our own.
We walked back to the car and drove to the farmhouse. We signed the guestbook on the front porch and petted the dogs and then got back in the car and drove back the way we had come. We stopped at a farmers market and bought a watermelon. Weatherford is famous for its watermelon. Back home we sat outside in the warm evening under our own much younger grove of pecans and ate watermelon and spat the seeds onto the lawn.
This is part of the discussion on "trees and place" at the Ecotone wiki.
Posted by Bill Hopkins on July 31, 2003 08:28 PM
Comments
Mmmm. Now I want some watermelon. 1000 years old. I remember touching the stones of castle ruins in Wales and feeling excited to be connecting to the past. Touching a tree that old must bring an even greater connection, to the past and to the present.
Posted by: Wendy at August 1, 2003 08:36 AMReally? A thousand years old? I know you're glad you went, what a great memory.
Posted by: fredf at August 1, 2003 08:37 AMBill, I'm so glad you mentioned groves, because they are so special, so memorable. It's no wonder we humans have often considered them sacred. I hope that pecan tree is still there too.
Posted by: beth at August 2, 2003 09:49 AMI've been smelling pecan pie ever since I read this the other day.
How many pecan pies could it theoretically make in a good year?
Posted by: Joel at August 3, 2003 01:29 AM Source: http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/archives/000124.html
rubysuz
the place whispered to my soul, the grounds sprang up around my feet, the dense moss drippy canopy climbing upwards like graceful old cathedral spires, this alaskan coastal forest breathed so heavy with life, it left cray-pas stains on my hands. settling down to its winters rest, the forest was no less alert, no less piercingly perceiving the pervasively pristine perspective. shhhh. i find forests so comforting in their group embrace, neighbor tress sofly carressing each other stories over my head, creating another biosphere about giant eyes height. an extreme environment, worn down with permeating marine rain, leaves of lichensuggling up the feet of trees, crawling alongside creeping moss electric mini verdant afro. my favorite path in our long fibrous hike thru alaska.
The Tree & The Big Tree
By O'DonnellWeb
Note: Fred has encouraged me (and probably anybody else who visits his blog) to join him and a few others in a bi-weekly writing effort focusing on "Place." This weeks subject is Trees and Place. It immediately triggered a memory - so I'm in this week. No guarantees I'll be a regular...but we'll see.
My first memories of childhood come from Torrejon, Spain, a small town outside of Madrid. My father was in the USAF, a member of the Strategic Air Command helping protect the world from the evil commies in the USSR and East Germany. We lived off-base, in a community of Americans that did not qualify for on base housing. The central gathering point for the kids of the neighborhood was The Tree.
I can't even guess at what type of tree it was. It was large and it's defining characteristic, and the reason it was so popular with the kids, was a wealth of very low hanging, very thick and sturdy branches. This was a tree designed for climbing, and climb we did. This tree seemed to have a safe occupancy level of about a dozen kids. I'm not sure the fire marshall would have approved, but I can't remember anybody ever falling out and being seriously injured. I also don't remember us allowing girls in the tree. This was back in the early 70's and the whole equal rights thing had not reached us yet I guess :) I'm not a height guy today , and I wasn't back them either. Although I did climb the tree, I had to if I wanted to maintain my standing among the other 6-8 year boys, I think I stayed on the lower branches most of the time.
This particular tree had another feature too. It extended over the fence and into the swamp. The swamp was off limits. It was not part of the military facility, and we were warned time and time again by our parents to stay out of the swamp. It was land owned by a crazy Spanish farmer who shot at American kids on his property. It was a dangerous place, inhabited by snakes and gypsies and all sorts of dangerous things. Of course, crazy guys with guns and mysterious gypsies are just the sort of things bored 7 year old boys are looking for. If they had told us the swamp was infested with girls we probably would have stayed away. As it was, we spent a lot of time in the swamp. We got in by climbing The Tree and jumping down on the other side of the fence. I don't remember seeing any snakes or gypsies. I do have a vague memory of a shotgun warning, although I really don't know if it actually happened, or it was the product of our over active imaginations. Probably the latter...
The big kids hung out at The Big Tree (Our naming conventions lacked pizzazz). The Big Tree was off base somewhere, not accessible by foot or pedal power. The big kids used their mopeds to get there. Again, I have no idea what kind of tree it was. The big kids had built a fort in the tree. As I remember it, it wasn't much of a fort. It was a few planks spread between branches and a floor made out of scrap plywood. Ever once in a while, the big kids would let us come out to the The Big Tree with them. They gave us rides on their mopeds. This being the early 70's helmets were for sissies. I remember the big tree being fairly remote. It wasn't a good climbing tree at all. You really couldn't do anything there except climb up to the fort, which of course was off limits to us little kids. We were just happy to be there. The big kids would climb up into the fort, have a smoke, and then we would go back home. It seemed so exciting at the time.
As I was writing this, the appeal of The Big Tree finally hit me. This was the early 70's - smoking was cool. The big kids could smoke cigarettes on base all they wanted. I bet those weren't Marlboros they were smoking at The Big Tree. Funny how that connection hit me almost 30 years later.
PermalinkComments
Smoking a fat one in the brances of a big tree... a wonderful double entendre of 'getting high' eh? Great post, thanks for joining the topic at Ecotone, Chris!
Posted by: fredf at August 1, 2003 10:27 AMChris, what a good story and well-painted picture! Happy to have you along at the Ecotone - please keep posting!
Posted by: beth at August 2, 2003 10:53 AMChris: Did you live in Royal Oaks, by any chance? I grew up in Madrid and though my father was not in the military, wasn't even American, we spent some happy Girl Scout summers in R'Oaks and an occasional Thanksgiving dinner on the base... I'd love to know if that Big Tree was still there. It sounds like an encina, an oak--do you remember if it could have been that?
Posted by: Pica at August 2, 2003 11:30 AM
Source:http://web.archive.org/web/20060104150744/http://www.odonnellweb.com/mtarchives/000648.html
8.1.2003
By Fieldnotes
His obsession was the result of unwavering imagination. And so when I'd awake just past dawn and find myself alone in the dome, I'd know where to find him. Coffee cup in hand he stood with a hose or a hoe, ant spray or fertilizer, tending his trees. When I looked at them, I saw their upward form, their tall smooth trunks, graceful few fronds on top, and the coconuts that greened and fattened there, then dropped milky and full. But he saw something hidden, something I couldn't see. His battle was with the roots. The roots needed tending, for it was the roots that would save him. Whatever time of year, the rainy season haunted him. There was never enough time to prepare, to fortify against the torrents that would inevitably come and wash away his land. Roots were needed.
The two-and-a-half hectares sloped down towards the ocean, and when he first bought the land, he'd done two things: he'd planted it with coco palms to stave off erosion, and he'd built a sea wall to fight off waves and the tides. The sea wall could be worried over--was it holding? was it tall enough?--but it couldn't be worked like the trees could be.
Every day was a march against the weather. Mornings, he'd do the weeding, the turning of soil; late afternoons he'd set up a hose from the holding tank at the top of the property, and water the trees. He never stopped, and in the evenings he'd worry because he hadn't done enough--could never do enough.
And in this way it was established that I could never do enough. There was no room in his world for a person who wasn't working. The world was a harsh place, and in Mexico, harsher still than elsewhere. He judged the inhabitants of our villge, our friends, by their willingness to work hard. A person who worked from dawn til dusk and beyond was doing just what was required. And many of our american neighbors shared this work ethic, obsessively fighting the jungle, the decay, the weather, and the relaxed work habits of our hired hands.
He never loved what I loved about Mexico. I loved what he hated, and what he feared. I loved and still do, the almost indecipherable shrug, the turn of the mouth, the raised eyebrow, the words half-praise, half-surrender, "manana, this is Mexico". I love the crashing of the rainy season, pounding pouring rains that leave mud and rivers where there was parched earth yesterday, the sweet smell of fecund jungle--decay and growth indistinguishable, the slow afternoons when friends stop by unannounced and everything stops, meals prepared, games played, conversations go all night chased by laughter.
But in his way, he loved his trees. He'd nurtured and cared for them like nothing else on this earth. For years, he'd kept a year-round caretaker who tended the trees while he was in the states. Now, we lived here, and he bent to the work daily. He'd wrap a shirt around his head for coolness, but leave his brown back exposed to the heat.
After each meal, I'd dump a little bucket of rinds and leftovers into the dirt around one of the palms, then chop the food into small pieces with a long-handled shovel, burying the coffee grounds, the egg shells, the tortillas that had hardened beyond use. The palms near the kitchen got the most compost, and they needed it more than the rest, because they were closer to the salt spray of the ocean. Gardening on the beach is challenging for that reason. On our land the challenges were greater yet, because the soil was loamy. That's why the dirt at the base of the trees needed constant turning. The ground was red with clay, and didn't absorb water well. When the rains came, streams ran down the property everywhere: the driveway, at the edges, and around the buildings. The soil just left with the rain, leaving a new upturning of Huichol Indian shards to be discovered, taking the topsoil and depositing it useless onto the sand.
Perhaps ground cover would have been a more useful obsession. But where I saw streams and topsoil runoff, he saw a bigger calamity. He saw that someday the land would be taken away from him, ripped away by the roots. He knew that no matter who his lawyer paid off, no matter how many trees he planted, no matter how many fences he built, that land wouldn't hold: it would slip through his hands. He was right, the hurricane last year decimated the kitchen and both of the other palapas, but that was just the beginning. After his long fight with the federal agency who originally held the land, it was finally taken away from him early this year. After almost 20 years holding the soil, those trees will come down now, if they aren't already down. In their place will be a hotel, and nobody in those rooms will ever know what toil came before, what held the land, what lost it.
I like to remember hot afternoon breaks. We'd lay a coconut on a stump, then holding a machete high overhead, chip away at one end until a thin membrame was exposed. Then with the point of the blade, we'd pop a hole, and pass the coconut around and drink its sweet thin milk. Afterwards, we'd chop the hollowed ball and chew the fruit until we tired of it, and went back to work.
**
This post is part of a collective of posts--all in one way or another about Trees and Place--over at Ecotone: Writing About Place Please come and join us for discussion, or add a post. We'd love to have you!
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:09 AM link | comments [postCount(105974697767876706);]
Source: http://www.field-notes.net/2003_07_27_archives.html#105974697767876706
A cleanly drawn wild
by One Pot Meal
My father’s family is full of schemers brimming with schemes: my great-grandfather who built the Maryland house I grew up in and founded his own hellfire religion because the others weren’t enough for him. His son, my great-uncle, who bought the house and planted acres of would-be Christmas trees, his fortune waiting for harvest, but instead he grew restless, sold the house to my grandparents who sold it to my parents, and the only trees harvested were cut down by us for our own holidays, choosing a trunk each year to gnaw with soft, plastic saws until we got cold and my father chewed it down with the teeth of a chainsaw.
The pines covered the hill at one end of the property, a long, dark horizon filling our view from the bay windows at the back of the house, stretching from the collapsed garden shed and small vineyard on one side to the thick maple and birch woods that bordered the highway on the other. We were smaller then, my brothers and I, and the lowest branches of the pine trees drooped over our low heads as the canopies of tents and the black ceilings of caves and dark night of African jungles carpeted with rust. Air and light couldn’t even break in through the tight weave of branches and boughs, and the sour smell of needles and soil settled in the backs of our throats as we hushed in awe of the quiet we’d found. We could slip under the canopy at the bottom of the hill and climb to the top invisible, emerging into the cluster of clearings strung together in rooms inhabited by my younger brother’s invisible friends, a whole family worked out in detail, each member assigned a break in the trees, a history, a particular design of his friendship.
The rows were deliberate, the straight lines of hand-planting I’ve seen later in the Scottish Highlands where sheep and landlords cleared forests and geometricians work to reseed them, rivers of darker green pines curling between lighter fir banks up one hill after another. Our own forest was a small swathe of that planning, the map of my great-uncle’s desires and dreams, and the schemes that were dreams set in motion, so why not a house laid out among them? Why not a family living in the negative space of our childhood, surrounded by the jungles and caverns and frontier forts on the edge of our cleanly mowed yard? For all the wild, open spaces we ran through and worked to make tame the banks of our pond stocked with catfish and snapping turtles that could, we assured ourselves, take off a dangled, pink finger; the baseball diamond/football field/soccer pitch/battleground my father scythed clear of the high grasses that fought yearly to claim it; the swaying yellow fields he’d given up to those same grasses where a leap in the wrong direction covered a body with bristles and thorns, the wide open fields whereI vanished when kidnappers from the news stole into my sleep we spent a lot of time under the pine trees. We packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and set out on expeditions into architected danger and chaos, a cleanly drawn wild where we felt safe in our terror. We knew the bounds of our darkness, our jungle, and in a world that was always getting wider and more dangerous we could always follow the flow of the hill to safety. When we crept into that particular darkness, we always knew what we were getting into.
I don’t know when the pine trees stopped growing, or when I overtook them, but they’re smaller now than they were before we sold the house a decade and a half ago. I visited once during college, snuck into a stranger’s yard ringed by clusters of identical glass-and-brick houses, squat and heavy as bullfrogs, instead of by cornfields, their front yards sprouting hedges instead of loose cows and old tractor parts. I could hardly crouch to slip under the canopy, and was shocked by bright beams of light that slipped untroubled through the withered fingers of boughs that scratched my back as I crawled. Giving up, I backed out and saw that tall grasses have encroached on the ballfield, on the pond banks and house, so the whole place feels smaller; even the hill lies down flat. And I’m tall enough to watch traffic roll by on the highway without a glance toward a few scraggly pine trees in a clump on a hill.
Written for Ecotone: Writing About Place
01 Aug 03 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Comments: My grandfather also had a Christmas tree "ranch", as we called it, up on a hill in New York State. I didn't even think of it as a potential topic until I read your evocative story. That place has changed a lot too due to years of inattention, but it used to be dense and magical. Thanks for this excellent post and for reminding me of a part of my own childhood. Posted by beth at August 2, 2003 11:03 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040307104426/www.onepotmeal.com/2003/08/index.html
August 1, 2003
By Bowen Island Journal
My contribution to this week's Ecotone collective blogging project on trees and place:
Have you ever seen an orange forest?
There is a moment every fall in Ontario when the maple trees turn orange and red and the sky becomes deep blue, the deepest blue you have ever seen, and the air sharpens up a little. I lived for that moment every year for about the first 26 years of my life. For me, living in Ontario was epitomized in many ways by the experience of that moment. When I ask the question to folks out here on the coast and describe the experience, I am met with genuine awe.
The year I moved to British Columbia, I was surprised by how overwhelmed I felt by missing this scene. Here the fall progresses through deeper and darker shades of grey, and the forests become greener and wetter and more pungent. Mushrooms sprout everywhere and the trees seem to sigh and draw a breath to gird themselves against the winter wind storms to come. I was sorely disappointed when my mid fall moment never materialized. I remember feeling totally dislocated.
It took me a couple of years to anchor myself to the moods of the trees on the coast, and it happened in 1995 on Cortes Island, about 150 kilometers north of here. One hot day in July I was sitting on the porch of the cabin we frequent, reading and writing a little when I suddenly noticed that everything had stopped. There was no bird song, no wind, and strangest of all, the tress had stopped moving. Not so much as a Douglas-fir needle stirred. I became acutely aware of a feeling that the season was turning; that everything that had grown and sprouted to this point in time had reached its peak and was now turning towards decay. It was a profound moment, as narrow and fine as a knife edge, and just as palpable.
I have a new relationship with trees, and they certainly define my place here. In the fall there are days when the term "rainforest" seems so appropriate. The rain falls and when it stops, the trees keep it going. They drip and spray water on the forest floor for hours afterwards.
And in the winter, when the Pineapple Express winds blow at speeds exceeding 80 km/h, it's the threat of a Douglas-fir limb coming through the ceiling that puts the profundity into the moment.
So surrounded are we with the big trees of the coastal Pacific rainforest - the Douglas-firs, hemlocks and red cedars - that I almost take them for granted. I don't think of them much on their own, neither their overwhelming presence or huge size.
Once in a while though, like last week when my brother was here from Toronto, the sheer breathtaking girth of them is brought to my awareness again. Out on a walk in Crippen Park last week, my brother pointed to an old Douglas-fir that rose straight and cylindrical out of the forest floor up a couple of hundred feet and said, very quietly, "Look at that."
And it truly is an amazing thing. a tree so huge, five people can't join hands around it. So tall that it rakes the clouds for moisture. So green that the light beneath it takes on a permanently cool hue.
As amazing as an orange forest against an azure autumn sky.
Source: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2003_08_01_archive.html#105975983672632842
July 26, 2003
Review: The Trees in My Forest by Bernd Heinrich
By Northwest Notes
I learned one of my favorite tree facts from this book: the explanation of how water rises to the topmost, thinnest twig of the tallest trees—and does so with no energy expenditure on the part of the tree. Adhesion and evaporation of water molecules provide the mechanism. A water molecule is absorbed into a root and pulls other water molecules behind it; meanwhile a water molecule evaporates out of a leaf in the top of the tree. The next water molecule is pulled up by adhesion, pulling all the water behind it in a chain reaching all the way back to the tree’s root. Water moves hundreds of feet straight up, one molecular step at a time.
Bernd Heinrich is a biology professor who grew up loving the woods of New England and was eventually able to buy his own large piece of forested land in Maine. Over a period of decades, he’s studied and managed his forest. He plants for healthy native diversity, thins areas of rampant growth of a single variety, plants seeds to see how they develop over years, and marks trees for further observation. He makes detailed and beautiful drawings of hundred of trees and their flowers, seeds, and leaves, some of which are included in The Trees in My Forest. He supplements his experimentation with readings of the research of others, speculates on the influence of natural selection on the trees in his forest, and presents the results of his passionate study in this book.
Heinrich’s writing style is so relaxed that I felt as if I were walking with him through his woods, with him pointing out amazing details and explaining their significance. He has strong opinions about lumber companies’ replanted “forests,” which aren’t really forests but homogeneous crops of identical, cloned trees of the same age, and little else. A forest is a mind-bogglingly complex system, not a farm. But Heinrich doesn’t raise the reader’s blood pressure by stridently harping on the mistakes of the modern economy; instead he adds to our understanding and appreciation of forests. Most of his more activist-styled writing appears toward the end of the book and is as well-mannered as the rest of his writing.
Take a walk in the forest with this author.
(This review is also posted on Blogcritics.)
Posted by Fran at July 26, 2003 08:05 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Well you can imagine this book captured my attention. Thanks for the pointer and the captivating review as well.
Posted by: fredf on July 27, 2003 02:55 PMSounds like a great book! I’ll have to check it out. I’ve always loved trees and forests. I’m dying to see these illustrations you speak of too.
Posted by: Josh on July 28, 2003 07:22 AM Source: http://www.northwestnotes.net/archives/000256.html
TREES: Ecotone Topic for August 1
By cassandra pages
Birches. Photograph by J.
I live in a forest. Anyone who doubts that should fly over northern New England: you cant see the people for the trees. When visitors arrive from un-woody places, like England, or our new neighbors from virtually tree-less Iceland, they are overwhelmed by the omnipresence of trees, and the way the forest dominates not only landscape but life. We heat with wood, build with wood, boil tree sap into syrup; smell wood being cooked into paper and sawn into boards, wait for lumber trucks and trees being skidded out of the forests, watch rivers of yellow tree pollen flow in the streets after rain, see trees breathing their oxygen back into the clouds. Our world here is green, and blue, and more green: Ver-mont was aptly named.
In a city we find ourselves one among many, and so the woman in the red dress, or the man who sings out from his newstand as you pass it each day becomes a focus. Here there are too many trees to comprehend, and so its the white pine standing taller than all the rest that captures your attention; or the grove of thorny locusts above the riverbank, knarled and conversant like old souls. I could write in a dozen directions about trees, but for todays topic Im just going to offer an essay I wrote several years ago about a tree that shared my place on earth for many years.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Wordsworth, Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey
The big willow is being cut. Im upset about it, know it has to be done, but its such a great and beautiful tree, worthy of being mourned. Ive looked up into its branches for twenty years now, especially on summer evenings, when the only light was from the moon, to see stars shining through the leaves so far above my head, and fireflies dancing among them. It always felt like its own world, up there, in the bowls formed by those great dark branches, populated by things of the air and heights. A pair of orioles nested in the tree each spring, serenading me as I turned over the first soil in the garden; later their purse-like nest swayed above me. And it was home to many smaller birds: chickadees, nuthatches, warblers, feeding no doubt on a vast colony of insects. Kneeling next to the garden beds Id feel drips of water raining down on me all summer, even during dry weather, and wonder whether willows really wept, if that was how they got their name.
Branches fell continually, especially in spring storms, and I used the long supple tender ones to make woven fences and supports for herbs and other plants. It was a high-maintenance tree for us, and we didnt even own it, but I never minded. I drew it many times, painted a watercolor, wrote a poem --trying unsuccessfully to capture that mysterious, secret world suspended in the sky.
When this hill was a pasture, a stream flowed between our property and the neighbors, and along its banks a line of willows grew up. Ours was the first house cut out of the farm proper, near the turn of the century. Over the last twenty years, the hillside, divided and subdivided, became house lots. The willows -- streambank trees, never intended for shade -- were left in one back yard or another, sending their shallow roots into basement walls and dropping branches each spring. Homeowners, sympathetic at first, grew tired of taking care of the trees and worried when major damage occurred in thunderstorms. Its understandable. But as is always the case, it doesnt matter that the trees were here first, that we are, in fact, the ones who have encroached on them.
Last night, after dinner, the chain saws in the neighbors yard were finally silent. I went out on the back porch and looked over at the willow. The tree stood there still, its great wide crown shorn, one main trunk remaining with all its branches and leaves, the others amputated into huge logs that lay around the base. It was a horrible sight but heroic in a way; the tree, still alive, retaining something of its nobility and the strength emanating from that huge solid trunk, easily five feet in diameter at chest height. Yet it was doomed; this would be its final night, the last time those branches reached toward sunlight, leaves stretching a few new millimeters in length. I came back upstairs, drew a basin of water for the dishes, and started to cry, filled with sorrow for mankind, for being alive at a time and in a culture which values the safe, the cheap, the fast solution: whatever fits easily into our lives and causes the least inconvenience. I cried rueful tears for myself, made so sad by a tree -- how out of step I am, and how painful it is to stubbornly refuse the cries of a culture that would gladly give up Bach for the sitcom-of-the-moment; where artists, musicians and poets eek out a living and developers get rich.
Ill remember the willow best on those nights, years ago, when I was trying to figure out if God existed. After Id meditated for an hour, the incense burned down to ash, candle extinguished, Id come out into the night, and to my polished mind, open, newly innocent, every sensation appeared fresh, important, astonishing. The Milky Way had never seemed so vast, the air so exhilarating, the snow under my feet so white. And there the willow loomed: hugely alive, pulsating with being-ness and a quality of home that strangely did not feel closed to me. I stopped trying to paint it or write about it, but just stood there, night after night, as if it were part of the meditation ritual; looking up, not thinking, I let it tell me whatever it had to say.
7:43 PM |
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_07_27_cassandrapages_archive.html#105978142617160590
The Elfin Forest
By Pax Nortona
I’m surrounded by a sparse forest of tall trees. Long leaf pines, eucalyptus, liquid ambers, mimosas, and purple plums sprouting from an emerald green lawn make this sun-charred place resemble an Eastern woodland or, in real estate dreams, Scotland which is over the horizon and alive with the sounds of sheep — as these hills once were a century ago. The landscaper’s artifice is to equate home with the place where you escape from the freeways and the concrete of the workplace. There are several office complexes down the hill here and they are not landscaped much differently. There’s concrete in both places and a lie being told by the trees.
Not a single one of the trees that I mentioned is native to this land. We have here a forest that most overlook because the trunks are short and the canopies beneath our waists and beneath our knees. The “Elfin Forest” is what Francis Fultz called the brush in a book written in the 1920s. It’s the chaparral, the land that rips your clothing off if you run too fast through it, named for chaparro, the scrub oak. The land loves fire. Every few years a conflagration rolls through these parts, tearing away the round top bushes of the dwarf trees. For two or three years following, medusoid black stumps carry the memory.
Then seeds in the ground and deep rootstocks start to replace what was lost. A shrub which poets call “chamise” and fearful landowners call “greasewood” adapts itself with bellicosity to the circumstances here. Drop a match on a stand of greasewood and you have a fire that burns as insanely as a frying pan. It not only sacrifices itself but its self-immolation carries to the white sage, the manzanita, and the coyote brush which stand adjacent. The terrible holocausts that you see on television from your chairs near those Eastern forests — those are fueled by greasewood. When the storm has blacked the land, a secret manifest destiny has begun. Chamise resprouts from its own roots. Following the season of rain, stands crop up in places where underground pathfinder branches reached in previous seasons of abundance. The stuff spreads, conquers. Homeowners fret because greasewood lives only for itself and the fire which took everything seems to be prepared to give everything to this plant.
It behaves a little bit like the Bush Administration in Iraq, you see, destroying and giving itself favors in the reconstruction.
Other plants have learned to resist, either by paratrooping down as seeds, or, like coyote brush, being resistant to fire. Gardeners who want a natural feel about their canyon homes love coyote brush: it does not tempt or scourge.
Coyote brush, scrub oak, and greasewood live on dry slopes. What Easterners would call “real trees” live in the clefts between the slopes. The live oaks rise to heights of thirty to fifty feet. If I showed you the leaves, you wouldn’t take them for an oak because they are toothed ellipses. They have acorns: that’s the giveaway. Near me, a long line of such oaks overarches Trabuco Canyon Road. It’s like those arbors you see in old films about people who visit rich relatives in overwrought mansions. Except the color coming down through the leaves at midday is turquoise. Again our habitat declares its separate identity from the false forests of this hilltop.
Someday, when California fades like all the old cosmopolitan civilizations did and tourists come to visit the ruins of the Crystal Cathedral and gawk at the faux Matterhorn, these trees will unite with the bunch grasses to reassert their claim to us. I’ve been to Greece, I’ve seen how great centers of trade can disappear in a wheatfield or under a rocky slope. The plants shove themselves forth and cover our artificial promontories. The real mountains here will spit forth endless tons of gravel and dirt, burying our lives. When we are the subject of archaeology, our motion pictures mere fragments of celluloid that researchers will squint through or imprisoned on unreadable DVDs and video tapes, the short forest will show that it knows the land better than the liquid ambers and the purple plums. The song of the chaparral shall flow off the hills, giving the grasses space so that eyes can see the duet.
Maybe there will be sheep again, bighorns come down from the adjacent stone summits.
Posted: August 1st, 2003 under Ecotone. Comments: 2 | Twitterings
Comments
Comment from fredf
Time: 8/2/2003, 2:43 am
Our eastern forest, too is somewhat artificial, at least compared to that of several hundred years ago when the original Americans used fire in their game management practices, opening up the way for shade-intolerant species.
The topic of plant success and succession… esp as one sees when ‘lost civilizations’ are reclaimed by the native vegetation… is always a humbling reality we often forget. Thanks for the reminder. Ashes to ashes, landscaped office parks to dust…
Comment from beth
Time: 8/2/2003, 11:47 am
A nice piece, Joel, with excellent and humbling points about nature’s eventual supremacy. And thanks, now I understand what “chaparral” really is - I’ve seen it, but I didn’t get it.
Source: http://paxnortona.notfrisco2.com/?p=1482
Little Apple
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
This entry is another Ecotone collaborative blog on place, which this time looks at trees.
Some trees are meant to be touched.
I think it's the manzanita's bark. Warm copper-red and smooth, smoother by far than eucalyptus whose bark has shredded off in shaggy, untidy strips. The manzanita's shredding is subtle and delicate, waxy rolls curling like planed metal or even plastic. But there is none of the coldness of metal or lifelessness of plastic. This is a warm tree with a warm heart.
I first saw manzanitas in Napa Valley, in the hills above Calistoga. I couldn't stop stroking their trunks. Madrones have a similar bark--both these trees are in the Ericaceae, same family as blueberries--but with their larger, more imposing bulk and leaves, seem less inviting to touch. Many manzanitas rarely grow taller than eight feet, qualifying more as shrubs than trees--perhaps it's the scale, as well as the irresistible bark, that draws me. The same is true of Brancusi's sculpture of a seal in the Pompidou Museum in Paris--the combination of scale and smoothness--that makes touching it irrestistible (a headache for museum staff).
Ursula K. LeGuinn set her utopian anthropological novel Always Coming Home in a Napa Valley with a different future than the one it seems to be embarking on... the characters share a strong kinship with the land they inhabit, share a lot with the Native Americans who lived there over 200 years ago. They greet all the living things they encounter with a "heya" as if they were meeting a friend on the road.
Heya madrone, heya coyote, heya jackrabbit. Heya foothills. Heya northern chaparral.
Heya, manzanita, I still say, even if sometimes not out loud. This one is never a stretch for me. It is a tree with a warm heart. Touch me, it says.
Posted by Pica at August 1, 2003 09:10 PM | TrackBack
Comments
In our woods, ironwood or musclewood has the same tactile imperative. However, being a tree hugger, it takes little provocation to touch a tree; yet some are more huggable than others.
Posted by: fredf at August 2, 2003 08:24 AMI can't stop touching trees, either. For me a favorite is yellow birch, although we don't have so many here as where I grew up. There was one I used to visit everyday, and I rubbed places on its trunk into burnished gold.
Posted by: beth at August 2, 2003 12:00 PMSource:http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/08/01/little_apple.html
To All the Trees that I Have Loved
By Laughing~Knees
Tree watching over a dolmen, Funen Island, Denmark, 1988 (I'm not sure what kind of tree this is. I think it's a beech, but if anyone knows, I'd be grateful if you'd inform me)
This is the fourth installment in the ongoing online essays series at Ecotone, this time on the theme "Trees and Place" Please drop by and have a look at what other people are writing, or possibly contribute your own essay if you like.
Love knows no bounds, so the saying goes. At times I wonder about the cogs that spin around upstairs in my attic, because most of the emotions that have twirled and waltzed me around to that indescribable music seemed sourced to some transmitter on another planet, completely disconnected to any wires in my own little control panel. I've had my share of relationships with women and each time some tugging force manifested itself without my say so. Each of the women were different in so many ways, and each went their own way with vestiges of wonder, joy, and sadness. Without having known each of these women, the steps that I have taken so far through my life would have left me that much further behind in my unsteady progress across the stepping stones in the river. Men have, of course, played significant roles in the drama, but none with the intimacy and intensity of what I have known with women, to whom I have both completely opened the gates, while at other times letting out the monster. Love has turned me inside out, lifted me to where no man had gone before, and dragged me kicking into the open.
So it has been with trees, too. Perhaps it is their seeming immoveability, their tendency to be there when you get back. When you look up, there they are. They can usually be counted on to take you as you are, without comment, and to listen without prejudice. And unlike so many friends, perhaps, their stationary nature provides a pillow against time, somehow creating the illusion that nothing changes and that you can rest easy in their infallible devotion to one place. They are the friends that preserve the substance of memories when you return home.
The first tree that arises in my own memories was a venerable old Weeping Willow that stood in the back yard of the Parkway Village housing complex in New York, back in the 1960's. It was a craggy old stick with crooked branches and a wide gash in its abdomen where mud dauber wasps found refuge. The long strings of its leaves cascaded from the scant branches that clawed at the sky and swayed in the wind. A grey squirrel resided in a crook in its cranium, dashing out along the limbs to chatter at me as I sat playing among the roots, or tightroping out to the ends of the branches when I clambored among the boughs. For four summers that tree and I grew together, and when my family moved to a new apartment that looked right out at the backyard, I would greet the Willow every morning from my bedroom window.
Then, in the winter of 1968, a great blizzard hit, turning the night blue and the wind screaming across the window panes. In the middle of the night a great crack woke me and when I ran to the window I witnessed, through the indistinct blurr of snow and darkness, the great form of the Willow lying prone in the yard. I cried that night and still grieve for the loss of a great friend.
My family moved to Japan the following year. New trees that I had never seen before stood watching as I took my first tentative steps in the new country. Among them I discovered new creatures and fresh adventures and as I grew the visions that they evoked seeped into my making. One particular tree, a Camphor Tree, five stories tall and just as wide, with a trunk as wide as a Volkswagen, stood behind my junior high school building. It was a place few students ventured and where I loved to retreat to when I wanted to be alone. One afternoon I was reading a book at the Camphor's base, when three boys, Peter from Australia, Marcel from South Africa, and David from America, found me there. There was little talk. They were big and strong and thorough. Afterwards I lay sobbing between two huge roots, blood from my nose spilling across the wrinkled bark. I lay there until night fell, clutching the great roundness of the tree.
After high school I moved alone to Oregon, on the west coast of the United States. In all the ten years that I lived there, no single tree stands out. Rather it was like walking into some grand banquet hall of giants, 30 meter tall Titans, the Douglas Fir, standing at attention at every corner and every open space. The mountains were covered by them. The university campus ran like a green carpet under their legs. When I looked up at their faces their eyes were far away, as if contemplating the sea to the west. They never looked down. And so for ten years I scuttled among these mighty sentinels, getting smaller with each day. When I left Oregon I was no more than a mouse, but my eyes had learned to consider the horizons, and the distant clouds, and the wind.
Boston was my next stop. After Oregon it seemed as if walls had closed in. The company of trees dwindled to what the verges allowed, but I was grateful for the Plane Trees around Harvard. And one sunny spring day I stared amazed during my first encounter with a weeping tree, a Sugar Maple leaking sap with the first warm spell of the year, a delirious joy at the retreat of the cold of the northern winter.
I had found a woman I loved in Boston, but could not love Boston itself and I felt I had to leave. So I forsook what I had started there and returned to Japan. The distance was great. The telephone bills ate half my paychecks. The one who was waiting for me couldn't bear the strain and left. In my sorrow I took to the mountains around the small town at the foot of Mt. Fuji, every weekend walking farther and harder, till my feet ached and I would sing Beatles' songs at the top of my lungs as I descended in the evenings. On one small and almost unnoticed mountain that pitched itself right at the knees of Mt. Fuji and commanded a wide perspective of the entire waistline of the great volcano, stood four aging Japanese Cedars. They reminded me of my beloved Douglas Firs in Oregon, standing in the same regal straightness and also looking away over my head. Many afternoons I fell asleep at their feet, bees buzzing in the grass and crows cawing in the distance. One time I decided to camp there and I sat all night listening to Racoon-Dogs, Red Foxes, and Sika Deer shuffling amidst the underbrush. The following morning I stood naked beside one Cedar trunk, watching mist rising from the valley, as Mt. Fuji rose like a golden queen in the rising sun.
And so the circle made a full turn. Tokyo is my home again. The trees that I have loved still stand behind me along the long road, and I wonder if they will be there if I were to return to give them my regards. Tokyo is cutting down much of its tree kin. It is a lucky gift if you can open your window and hear the leaves sighing. And in that perhaps I am lucky. For, outside my window, for the past three years, I am able to rest my eyes upon a big chested Magnolia Tree. In spring she bursts her corset and waves at the sky with a thousand white gloves. The first bird of the dawn, the Brown-eared Bulbul, heralds the light with his piccolo screech, from atop the highest branches. And in strong winds, such as the big blow earlier today, all the fat leaves turn up in prayer, asking only for another day. Just another day. I watch and smile and nod in agreement.
Posted by butuki at 02:04 AM in Japan, Community, and Daily Life | Permalink | Comments (3)
Comments
Thank you for this wonderful memoir. No wonder you shared my grief atthe loss of that willow. I especially appreciated your writing about the majestic Douglas firs with their faraway gaze, and the Japanese cedars. Many of us see to be commenting on the “protective” quality of trees for us, in addition to our need to care for them, and if that’s so, it makes sense that we feel dislocation, grief, and even anger when we lose them.
Posted by beth at August 3, 2003 04:56 AMMy earliest memory about trees was that of seeing an orange grove near our home bulldozed, piled, and burned. The ashes fluttered out of the sky as we came out of a bakery and my mother told me to cover them so that I wouldn’t catch one between the lids.
That’s behind all the landscape here in Southern California for me now. That and dairies that are no more.
Posted by Joel at August 3, 2003 07:15 AMThe rootedness and permanence of trees providing landmarks to come back to, versus their being plowed into heaps and burned, or our grief when they fall victim to storms… this is a tension that recurs in Ecotone posts where we look at the things that contribute to our grounding in place, and your essay is a wonderful contribution to this subject. Thanks.
Posted by fredf at August 3, 2003 08:01 AMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20041206233057/www.butuki.com/archives/2003_08.html#000054
The Aging Of Neighborhoods
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This is a post on trees for the biweekly discussions of the Ecotone wiki.
If one looks at satellite imagery of Davis, two neighborhoods show up as being heavily wooded, the College Park area north of campus, and a tract north of Montgomery Street in South Davis. Both are quite desirable and expensive places to live, owing in part to the large trees there. Though there are a few valley oaks amongst the trees, most of these trees are not native to the site, and were planted when the tracts were laid out.
The time it takes trees to mature exceeds the planning horizons of most developers and city workers by a good bit. When I travel through new developments like Mace Ranch shown above, a place with a very low tree canopy to rooftop area ratio, a place where the garages dominate the houses which dominate their lots, I wonder if it will ever appear as forested as College Park. Somehow I doubt it.
Posted by Numenius at August 2, 2003 11:16 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Why, it looks as if those homeowners have a veritable forest...THREE trees...of a species not expected to gain much girth, apparently, planted so close to the house.
Can you point me to a site that allows public use of satellite imagery (I know about terraServer) and would work with a dialup connection?
Posted by: fredf at August 3, 2003 03:27 AMmy son says that those new areas in davis have no personality. no trees, all houses look the same.... i agree! :-)
Posted by: Fernanda at August 3, 2003 09:04 AMSource:http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/08/02/the_aging_of_nei.html
I Think that I Shall Never See…
By Travelertrish's Journal
I'm astonished at how fast the grass has grown in a week. Apparently, it has rained like the dickens all summer while I was traveling and certainly this week has been no exception. The folks out West would pay dearly if they could have about half of what we've had. There are fires still burning out there, and I'll never forget the smell of the forest fire, the sinister yellow look of the sky and the sight of all those burned, whitening carcasses of trees along the Oregon highway. It's hard to imagine what it's like to live every summer as a Fire Season. As I drove along the burn-blackened highway, I wept for the trees.
I was telling my British friends about my American acquaintance who is lobbying hard in our little town for a tree ordinance that would require a permit if someone wanted to cut down a venerable old tree or even a young stand of trees. The Windles looked at me amazed. The very idea that just anyone could cut just any tree down without so much as a by-your-leave was unheard of. If you let people do THAT, you won't GET the mature trees, they said.
Maybe I have developed this sensitivity to trees recently, a consequence of my young friendship with the Brits. But now that I think about it, I was a tree climber, a tomboy who once aroused the fervent concern of our neighbors because I'd climbed so far in the tree the trunk was as big around as my fist, and I was singing the Star-Spangled Banner from the very top, swaying in time to the music. My mother thought I was a strange child, and had not a clue what to do with me, so she just let me climb trees and make fantasies up in their branches.
And the sound, this winter, unmitigated by any whirring electrical appliances (since the power was out for days), of tree branches cracking and crashing in the park behind my house, one after another, all day and all night, was one of the saddest sounds I've ever heard. We had two ice storms last winter: the first deposited two inches of ice on the trees, the second an inch. The trees suffered. Truly hurt. I knew it, to my bones, and wept for them then.
A guy from the Scottish mystical commune Findhorn gave a lecture I attended in which he gave the formula for talking to trees. Imagine yourself a tree, he said. What would your life be like? Rooted in the same spot, immobile except for the smaller branches. Receiving weather, not running or sheltering from it. Drinking what rain arrives. Knowing wind, in all its moods. Visited by birds and squirrels. Lived in. Touch a tree, he said. Put your arms around it, as far as they can go.
Then he got into more mystical pursuits, like feeling the tree's energy, listening to the sounds of the leaves as if they were whispers of what the tree might be saying to you. Talk back, then, he said. Tell the tree the kinds of things such a creature might understand.
My travels this season have taken me to the feet of some extraordinary trees, the Sequoias of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the towering Douglas Firs of the Olympic Peninsula rain forest of Washington State. One man at the Olympia National Forest called the grand old fir "Old Doug." And there was the General Sherman Sequoia, 2700 years old and the largest living thing on earth in sheer volume. I admit to having hugged a couple of trees, too. They grow so big out there, so old, so silently.
As I drove back into the East, I was struck by our long, winding tunnels of trees overhanging the roads, all the green in such profusion that I knew how miraculous our landscapes would seem to those westerners whose trees are few and far between, stuck on mountains while the valleys below are dessicated and sparse or watered with the life of lakes and streams that can, some of them, ill-afford to share.
This year, the Windles taught me to appreciate the individual tree, to admire its shape against the fields, to notice how different-shaped trees work in a wide vista in a garden. Our forests here in the East are a jumble of well-watered trees, little dogwood flowering white in the understory in spring, maples blazing red and orange in fall, but usually just tunnels of dark green, masses of them making our mountains furry and soft. To see the individuals, to begin know their lives or to hear their voices, I had to go West, where they are burning or scarce.
Source: http://travelertrish.livejournal.com/61722.html
Desiring Daphne
By The Coffee Sutras
Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiuolo
I became interested in the myth of Apollo and Daphne after reading the first, somewhat terrifying pages of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. The story goes basically like this: Apollo, having angered Eros with an insult, is struck by one of Eros's golden arrows, causing him to fall obsessively in love with the nymph, Daphne. Daphne, for her part, has been struck with another arrow causing her to be repulsed by all thoughts of love. Apollo pursues her relentlessly. Desperate to be saved, Daphne begs her father, a river god, to change her form. Immediately she is changed into a laurel tree, thus providing Apollo with one of his key symbols. You can read the story in detail here.
It's interesting to me that in this myth we see joined art (Apollo was god of the arts), desire (eros), and nature. I've often loved particular trees, and have felt moved to remember them in verse. A glance back through poems I've written over the years show trees to be a recurring image. Here's one I wrote more than twenty years ago:
By Drakes Creek
Between this neighbor farmer's pasture
and Drakes Creek
there is a strip of woods
free of undergrowth
where cows stand in shade
during the heat of the day
The edge drops off to the water
about fifteen or twenty feet
Along it grow beech trees
tall and very old
One fell recently
and lies across the creek
its leaves and tufts of grass
on the mound of dirt it carried with it
still green
The soil here is eroding
These trees shall fall
The root system of one has been exposed
and reaches out above the damp earth
dark and interwoven
Along this cliff there is also a wall
built of stones
running straight for some distance
an earlier farmer's attempt
to mark his boundary
It no longer fits this scene
with dirt working its way slowly
toward the wide creek--
the perpetual movement of earth to water
The wall is a mere gesture
inescapably part of the process
covered with moss and small plants
and changed in other ways I cannot know
But the struggle of these beeches is my own
The grasping roots of this tree, clinging to falling soil
remind me of veins
standing out bold on my arms
when I lift a heavy object
or bulging along the length of my calves
when I run a long distance
For more on trees and place, visit the Ecotone wiki.
Source:http://web.archive.org/web/20051024025444/sainteros.com/weblog/archives/000346.html#000346
The Universe Tree
by bird on the moon
My little home is marked on all sides lush stands of old trees. Pine, oak, apple, cherry; even our names for these upward yearning beauties are gentle... the words roll off the tongue like a twilight breeze that stirs the branches. I am thankful for them, and the cicadas they presently harbor, for both give the day and night a kind of rhythm, of rustling and murmuring. Their presence comforts, the offery density and continuous summertime happenings; wrens chastising inquisitive cats, mourning doves in courtship, a lone mockingbird in jazzy solo.
I watched in wonder today as rainwater beaded on the leaf of a red bud tree. The leaf held it as the sun made a jewel of it, bright enough to star my eyes. Then it slipped away, on to nourish soil and roots. Leaves really do something for me; touching them, feeling them as I pass by, shaking hands of a consciousness I cannot grasp. Once recent evening, as a mild encounter with wine loosened the stones of my synapses, I bent down to kiss a leaf. I don't remember the exact tree, but I do remember the response. It was my breath on the intake, a reminding that this leaf is a fountain of oxygen. Breathe deeply, and for a brief but ever replenishable second your lungs become the repository of untold verdant giving.
As for a particular tree that has grown roots in memory, it would have to be that maple in the schoolyard in sixth grade. I remember a distinct awareness that this being, sheltering the back of the socially awkward and befuddled me, was alive. Downright alive, coursing with an intelligence that questioned not and did as it did. Each branch that tickled that child-giggled sky was an adaptation, each bird that alighted there some far off sage. That tree stood for, in sixth grade cosmology, that this place, nestled under it's canopy, was safe. Whole worlds can pivot off of such graces. I sat at that tree everyday... many times it was refuge from bullies, but more often it was an unraveler of imagination. It gave me dreams, drifting peace where all the hubbub and turmoil of middle school melted into other worlds as I held onto the trunk of something sure. It's ecosystem, rooted there in that worn sneaker-trod earth, taught gently and without admonishment. Sometimes, it was my only friend. In a way that it's taken me a long time to consider, it was my own personal Yggdrasil, the Universe tree. From there, in those shaded recess reflections, seeds grew that made me who I am today.
Perhaps I'll never know quite how that tree worked it's magic. Perhaps I have more to learn. Just think of the teaching impact trees have: Buddha and his Bodhi tree, Newton and his gravitationally impaired apple, Washington and his fabled cherry, and those are just the history book names. We are a world teeming with vast ripe minds, and there's enough shade to cover them all and enough upward yearning to pry them from their worries. No wonder the Kabbalists place such value on the Tree of Life.
Not far from my first home in New Castle, Delaware, there is a tulip tree that surpasses generations of our industry and technology in age. At it's base is a semi-circular bench that was placed there an eternity ago. The builder of that bench had the right idea; sit here, lean back, maybe even close your eyes and release your cares in a sigh... the tree will take your exhalation and from it make a future's inhale. Like the strong embrace of a friend, it will hold you up, as your wonderstruck eyes attempt to fathom the sky that the branches so easily uphold.
---
This post was inspired by a discussion over at EcoTone Wiki. Go and see.
jaybird gave you this @ 23:08 in "Journaling the Infinite" | Birdfeathers (1) | Moonbeams (0) | PermalinkSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20041227192852/birdonthemoon.com/archive/week_2003_08_03.html#000390
In the Company of Trees
By Notes from an Eclectic Mind
Note: This is my late addition to the Ecotone Trees And Place topic. After weeks of not hearing from any clients a ton of work was dropped into my lap last week cutting into my writing time and my play time with my new iPod, a marvelous little device with which I fell completely in love in the first half hour. Add to that experiments in video compression to watch movies on my Clie and coloring mandalas with J. acquired from this wonderful site and its been a full few days. We have, by the way, finished our first mandalas, which I will try to scan later in the day and share. Many thanks to Julie for the original link to the site.
Memories of my father naturally mix with images of trees. Spreading pecans encircled the house back in the Little Town, trees which received yearly pruning, faithful webworm eradications, and regular fertilizing. On the adjoining lot, acquired when I was in grade school, Papa planted more pecans and a few fruit trees although they didn’t flourish in the harsh climate with its brutal summers and unpredictable rains. Papa babied his trees and gloried in their thickening trunks and spreading limbs.
In the early evening after supper he often walked among them, setting hoses to soak thirsty roots or simply laying a hand lovingly against rough bark. When I reached tree house age he forbade me and my motley boards and nails access to the branches of those precious pecans. Papa consigned me instead to a non-bearing mulberry that was practically in the alley. Secretly he hoped I’d kill the nuisance mulberry so he could plant another pecan tree in its place. Alas he subscribed to an elitist take on trees with pecans at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
There was something infectious about Papas love for his trees. I often walked along with him as he inspected low hanging branches and speculated about the fall yield of nuts. Off and on for several years we employed a wetback, an illegal alien, who worked around the house and yard. Ben was the first really poor person I ever knew but he seemed rich to me in his love of family and of growing things. From my father Ben caught the pecan bug and optimistically lugged sacks of them back to Mexico where he nurtured the nuts into seedlings. When we took a vacation south of the border and paid a call on Ben and his family, he immediately dragged Papa out to see the transplanted trees-to-be. Papa spoke lousy Spanish and Ben’s English was atrocious but those two could talk an animated pidgin pecan polyglot.
Perhaps the arid West Texas environment and the landscape dominated by low-growing mesquite, scrub oak and cactus explained the widespread local veneration of trees. Where trees grew in abundance people gathered, in the shady river bottoms for fish fries and barbecues, on the courthouse lawn for concerts and flea markets, and in the city park for the county fair and class reunions. Trees beckoned and welcomed and people heard and congregated.
The first court of law convened in the county in frontier days used a board wedged in a forked pecan trunk for the presiding judge’s bench. And I’m certain some thick branch in a pecan grove along that same stretch of river felt the weight of the hangman’s rope. The trees have stood watch there many years now and harbor their vast store of secrets, of blood feuds settled by gunfire and of kisses stolen by moonlight. Trees don’t give their secrets away but hold them close down among the rings that record their own stories, keeping their knowledge with concentric fidelity.
Papa taught me to fish amid the exposed roots of an ancient pecan on the bank of a quiet backwater pond, a little bit of magic tucked back from the mainstream where the perch grew fat and smart from one too many dangled hooks. I can see us sitting there in the shade, his hands wrapped around my tiny ones on a cane pole. In my mind I often go to sit among those roots and fish by that river, safe and quiet with the trees and the water.
This weekend on All Things Considered I heard an interview with a Memphis man whose neighborhood suffered severe damage in the recent high winds and storms that swept the city. A lifelong Memphis resident, he spoke of the huge old trees that once lined his street and sounded a little lost and confused now that they are gone, those sentinel landmarks familiar to generations but so vulnerable to natures violent temper.
And Saturday morning on the street where I used to live five teenagers speeding down an all too inviting hill lost control of their car, which slammed into a massive tree and split in two killing four. The weight and velocity of technology crumpled on impact with a tree whose roots have reached deep into the earth for half a century and more establishing quiet power and presence.
I bristle when I hear the term tree hugger used derisively, for in my life I have watched men nurture a deep and personal love for trees that have, for a brief span of their own lives, fallen into the care of a mortal. I have known and experienced dreams born amid their branches and seen death occur at that solid place where they rise from the earth. Unlike Tolkiens Treebeard they do not walk among us but instead stand witness to our lives, coming before us and remaining long after we have gone.
On the Vicksburg battlefield in a row of graves down by the river the small stone of some nameless Confederate soldier has been taken into the trunk of its neighboring tree, half the marble face now encased inside the wood. I remember leaning against the trunk and looking down at that tiny marker, thinking of the man resting down amid the roots. I am only sorry that no tree shades Papas grave and no roots hold him in his rest. As I walk among them now I believe that his trees miss him and that in their depths they carry a memory of the man in the white shirt and workpants who brought them water and laid his hands on their trunks.
Comments:
Source: http://www.ranablog.com/?p=365
Trees
By Creek Running North
The late garden writer Henry Mitchell used to try to talk people out of planting trees in their gardens. A spruce that looks perfect in a five-gallon pot will rapidly outgrow its place in the garden, shade out the irises and muscle the azaleas aside, overwhelm the house. Mitchell recommended planting anything other than trees. If nothing else would do, he said, one should restrict one's self to dwarf or slow-growing trees, miniature Alberta spruces or flowering cherries grafted onto dwarf rootstock, which would know their place in the garden and stay there.
The longer I garden, the more I sneer at the notion of "slow-growing" trees. I plant them, turn my back, and turn again to find they've tripled in size. I'm not talking about the silver maples I planted in our yard in New York, which now overtop the house, if the owners haven't yet cut them down. Silver maples are "trash trees" - they can grow six feet a year. I'm talking about Catalina ironwoods, Xanthorrhoeas, cutleaf Japanese maples: the kind that pout out a few leaves each spring, an inch of new trunk, and that nonetheless seem to grow at an amazing rate, nourished with a thick mulch of calendar pages.
This isn't just a problem with trees, of course, as the image of my grandfather staring out from my bathroom mirror will attest. But still: last year I went out to scrape clean every squirrel-planted live oak and black walnut, and this year they're back twice, three times as tall.
Tree, squirrel or person, we all grow in the same direction. This week, I built raised garden beds from 350 feet of redwood two by six. Not even close to old-growth, the trees from which my lumber was made were probably younger than I. The boards were green. They didn't yet realize the trees had been cut. Driving the decking screws to join the planks I watched tears of sap well up to the surface of each hole, tremble at the lip of the countersink, then weep onto the thirsty soil.
This is a belated entry in a collective writing project on Trees and Place at the Ecotone Wiki.
Posted by Chris Clarke at August 4, 2003 04:44 PM TrackBack URL for this entry:
Comments
The wonderful little-used word 'fecundity' comes to mind.
Posted by: fredf at August 4, 2003 06:45 PM
I'd happily wait a number of days for that last paragraph.
Posted by: beth at August 5, 2003 08:05 AM
Source: http://www.faultline.org/place/pinolecreek/archives/000367.html
Fly, leaf
It may tell you something about where I live that on the day the city cut several aging, spotty oaks in Horseshoe Lake Park near my house, several women were roaming the grass with tears in their eyes. One of them told a reporter she had touched a tree's spirit and that it was sad, but not angry.
The oaks dated to the 1920s or before, when the city and the park were the epitome of dignified, expensive grace. After World War I, slim white oaks were planted along the north and east sides of the park, with copper plaques at their feet bearing the names of soldiers lost to fighting or disease. The trees grew to shield the streets from the sun -- straight, tall, handsome memorials that remain long after the men themselves have been forgotten. Now, even the purpose of the little round plaques needs explaining, though the city loyally replants those trees when they die and someone plants little flags at their roots.
It may tell you something about the changes taking place here that a few of the plaques have been pried from their mounts and that over-muscled youths have pulled a couple of the concrete mounts themselves half out of the ground. The power company has had its way with some trees, and as of this summer, a couple more are due for a decent removal. The city stopped spraying its elms in the '90s, for fear of what the spray was doing, and those trees are going fast, too. Older oaks and other species, too, succumb to age, disease, bugs, accidents and zealous utility workers.
Still, "mature trees" was near the top of my list when I moved here. Most likely the real estate dealer looked at the price range and went no further, but the result was the same -- it's ironic that urban trees often grow up with the houses at their feet, but the higher the tree, the lower the price. It's immaterial that I wouldn't want to live in a former pasture surrounded by toothpicks -- I couldn't afford to.
The gregarious family I bought my house from had a treehouse out back. The tree, a beauty, still has galls that confirm the story, but a friend I found after moving in added, "I got my first grope in that treehouse!"
Even if it were legal -- safety-minded parents and control-minded city officials saw to it that it isn't -- I wouldn't consider re-housing that tree, for fear of hurting it. I would not consider myself a tree-hugger, but I reflexively rush to the defense of my underbrush when the power company comes through, and when the city's tree nazis took half the gum tree out front, I was outraged, but too late.
I think it's because they're mute, and attractive, and helpless in the face of chain saws that we rush to protect trees. Considering what we get back, I guess that's OK.
P.
Source:http://web.archive.org/web/20051231071733/my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Trees.html
Trees and Place
By Mulubinba Moments
Trees can play as significant a role in our memories of place as familiar land features and buildings. The following piece has been written as part of a topic post on "Trees and Place" on the Ecotone Wiki. This essay uses as reference an article entitled “Our land is their land” written by Mike Scanlon, Newcastle Herald, 14th August 2003. It serves to remind us that the history of place and people are closely interwoven with the natural features (landscape, flora and fauna) of that place.
In the 19th century, sailing ships used to discharge ballast from their cargo holds after entering the port of Newcastle. Much of this ballast was dumped around the edges of Newcastle harbour. The ballast consisted of foreign soil and rock from as far away as Britain, the Mediterranean, Singapore, China and the Americas. Rumour has it that “quake rubble" was brought out following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.The north Stockton foreshore rapidly grew as fleets of ships came to load coal and discharge their ballast to form training walls.
Soon, Stockton’s roughly topsoiled ballast walls began to sprout strange fruits including a bitou bush from South Africa. Also growing was what has become a much loved Stockton landmark - a “Crown of Thorns Tree” (acacia karoo) which normally grows in the savannah of Africa. This “gnarly orphan tree” had been growing next to the Hunter river for over 100 years - grown in soil from ship ballast.
Over the years, children used to play and hide in it. The men of Stockton. in the 1930’s, were said to have met every Sunday inside the tree’s canopy. It apparently could hold up to 20 men who would play two-up and drink a keg of beer within the privacy of its 40 foot cover.
Two weeks ago, Agriculture NSW officials removed the “Crown of Thorns” citing it as a “dangerous, toxic pest”. The Hunter Committee of the National Trust tried to save it but authorities moved too swiftly and the old tree is now only a memory. A few days later someone planted a cross on the site to mark its passing.
Comments
It was impressive how many folks, in their Ecotone "tree" posts, lamented the loss of a well known and remembered tree as if were the passing of a friend or family member. Sorry to hear about the loss of your community's old friend, the African acacia.
Source: http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/2003/08/trees_and_place.html
[Lifescapes]
The mesquites that grow abundantly here in the Texas hill country are usually small trees, but large in spirit, large in generosity--not well loved by the local ranchers, though, who hate mesquite with about the same passion intensity that they direct to prickly pear cactus. Mesquite are deep-rooted and compete with grass for the limited water. And, back in the days when cows were rounded up by real cowboys on horses, you could lose half your herd in a thorny mesquite thicket. In fact, mesquite is on the Texas hit list of invasive plants. But there are fewer ranchers than there used to be in Burnet County these days, and it's getting harder to object to mesquite. The tree is perfect for xeroscaping your yard (as long as you don't let the kids go barefoot where they can step on the thorns). The wood is a natural for barbecue, and mesquite jelly is delicious, sort of like apple jelly. Settlers hereabouts processed the dried beans into flour, which was in turn made into bread and, cunningly fermented, into booze. And artists are discovering the exotic beauty of its wood. On Lifescapes for 8/26/03: a photo of a mesquite vase that my Bill turned on his lathe. Lovely to have the mesquite outside my window and inside, on my desk.--Susan
Discussion
I don't have my thoughts together enough to speak them out clearly, but wanted to say I thought this biweekly collection of essays was particularly interesting, and appreciate the several first-time posters! This is great, and I hope we'll continue to find new voices contributing here. I'm going to finally get around to posting some images over on the pages Joel has created, and would like to begin to SEE what some of you familiar folks see when you look out your windows, or hike near home. -- Fred
August 4th, 2003 at 11:39 am
You are very welcome, Rana! I am having fun as well. Coloring is good therapy!
August 4th, 2003 at 1:37 pm
There is a LeGuin story called, I believe, “Relativity” that I think you would absolutely love.
It is not a pretty story, any more than the ones with which you closed your post… but you will still love it.
It’s been anthologized, but I’m not sure where off the top of my head.
August 4th, 2003 at 2:46 pm
This is a moving and beautiful post, Rana, thanks for writing it.
May 23rd, 2004 at 11:47 am
Trees are being removed from the skin of the planet at an alarming rate. I hope I’m dead before they’re all gone. Trees mean a lot to me, maybe because I grew up in a forest. At one time in my life I had to travel to El Paso, Texas with some frequency. That place always gave me the heebie-jeebies and after two days the angst was driving me nuts and I had to get the hell out of that place.