Trees & Mysteries

It is never too late to become a dendrologist.

"Continually it is so: I breathe most deeply and refreshingly, am most inspired, out of doors in the presence of birds and trees, away from straight lines and cement, away from human hubris, kindness, meetings, frivolity, and so-called 'news'". So I wrote in a chapbook titled You Are Here.

Trees are radical.

"Trees reach upward, higher, visible, at the same time they extend downward, deeper, hidden. Rooted and growing. Humans and trees are alike this way." (From You Are Here again.)

Trees have a remarkable ability to bend without breaking.

Thoreau wrote in his journal: "I should not be ashamed to have a shrub oak for my coat-of-arms."

Shrub oaks, white oaks, burr oaks, red oaks.

An oak is not simply an oak, an acorn not an acorn. And brown is not brown.

Thoreau in January: "The oak leaves are of the various leather-colors. The white oak... has to my eye a tinge of salmon-color or pink in it. The black shrub oak is... dark-reddish..."

Three days later: "Observed this afternoon the various oak leaves..." Still distinguishing between browns, describing seven different leaves:

"For color, perhaps, all may be called brown, and vary into each other more or less. The 1st, as both sides are seen, pale-brown with a salmon tinge beneath. 2d, clear reddish-brown, leather-like, above, often paler, whitish or very light beneath, silveryish. 3d, dusky-brown above (not always), clear tawny (?) brown beneath. 4th, clear pale-brown (except the unfaded red ones), leather-like, very generally reddish, nearly the same both sides. 5th, quite pale brown or slightly reddish, nearly the same both sides; some, prematurely dead, are yellowish. 6th, deep rusty-colored brown, often bright leather-red, silveryish-white beneath. 7th, leaves on ground pale-brown, much like a withered red, but whitish beneath like bear shrub. The oak leaves now resemble the different kinds of calf, sheep, Russia leather, and Morocco (a few scarlet oaks), of different ages."

The study of what other people have studied about trees leads to words such as "ovate" and "imbricated".

Why do some oaks hold onto their leaves during a winter while others do not? This has to do with something called "abscission layer". One article on the topic says that "triggered by daylight, temperature and their own genetic codes, trees undergo a metabolic change in the fall. Cells swell, vessels that transport water and nutrients are blocked and eventually the cells separate, forming what is called an abscission layer as the leaf is shed." This report says non-native trees may hold leaves longer than natives "because they read environmental clues of winter's approach differently" -- that trees from southern nurseries often have a later leaf fall.

Another says that trees which hold onto their leaves "often do not produce an abscission layer during spring development" and that "leaves may also fail to fall if an early freeze stops the late-season development of the abscission layer. In the fall, this layer, which is found at the base of the leaf stalk (petiole), is supposed to do two things: release the leaf from the tree, and produce a protective barrier over the leaf scar to prevent infection." But this piece adds: "It is not known... why a few deciduous species (like oaks and their kin) regularly fail to drop their leaves at the end of the season."

There is always a deeper, unfathomable mystery.

I've found a useful website for tree identification.

Thoreau again, from his journal, October 7, 1857:

"I go across Bartonia Meadow direct to Bear Garden Hill-side. Approaching the sand-slide, I see, some fifty rods off, looking toward the sun, the top of the maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the hill,—-a strip, apparently twenty rods long and ten feet deep, of the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits or any tints ever painted. As I advance, lowering the edge of the hill, which makes the firm foreground or lower frame to the picture, the depth of this brilliant grove revealed steadily increases, suggesting that the whole of the concealed valley is filled with such color. As usual, there is one tree-top of an especially brilliant scarlet, with which the others contrast.

One wonders that the [people] of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at that season when the maples blazed out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshipped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and surrounded them with horse-sheds for....

Look into that hollow all aglow, where the trees are clothed in their vestures of most dazzling tints. Does it not suggest... that [people]'s spirits should rise as high, that the routine of... life should be interrupted by an analogous festivity and rejoicing?....

When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape, and I sit down to behold it at my leisure...."

According to the magazine Northern Woodlands there exists such a thing as a "low-grade tree". Imagine that.

Some birdwatchers refer to "trash birds" or "trash species". And some people refer to other humans as trash or scum.

This is heresy.

Trees are divine.

Weeping willow, red spruce, white pine.

"Tree" is a verb.

"In Japanese the verb ‘to wait’ and the noun ‘pine tree’ are both pronounced ‘matsu,’" says Matsu Ogata in Rowing the Eternal Sea. (So I noted in a chapbook titled Baptism River)

Trees are musical instruments, wind, percussion, and strings.

One week in northern Minnesota I shot four rolls of film. Out of nearly a hundred prints, all but two had trees in them, and that was a close-up of a leaf in the snow.

Who is more patient than a tree?

"So much depends upon a tree," I wrote in a chapbook titled Canyonlands. And: "A tree cannot refuse to be a tree." And: "What is the motivation of a tree? The world’s biography might be told through the story of its injuries, one by one, hurt after hurt. Title it Each Ache."

From another chapbook, titled Walking to Walden: "'Dead tree' is an oxymoron."

William Van Waffle writes, "When a tree dies it goes through several different phases of decay. A standing dead tree is called a snag. Depending on tree species and the soundness of the wood, the snag may be described as hard or soft. As decay progresses, the tree attracts different organisms. Eventually, rotting and falling to the ground, it performs yet other important functions in the ecosystem. Fallen trees in advanced stages of decay are known as nurse trees." ("Snags and nurse trees")

Here's a lovely photo of a nurse tree.

Here are more.

Trees are dancers. Wind shakes their top branches like pompoms. Sometimes tree trunks themselves not only sway but seem to pivot.

"The power of trees. The world in each one, the energy at the end of each branch, like fingertips, fingers, hands." (Walking to Walden)

Is there a stronger love than trees' love of soil and birds' love of trees?

All trees are beautiful.

I once watched oak leaves float down from an empty sky. (Are there trees up there in the heavens?)

Some links

Richard Reames' Arborsmith Studios (arborsculpture)

Axel Erlandson's Tree Circus