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Category: trees

Golden Glow

Golden Glow

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I walked downstairs yesterday and was enveloped in a golden glow. It was the witch hazel tree, that stalwart of the garden, earliest to bloom and gracious in its un-leafing.

Perhaps because I’m sauntering through the season with our little doggie, I’m noticing the autumn colors more this year. The oak at the end of the street is at its most fetching, an almost neon orange set off by the green still left on the tree. I have a favorite view of it, which is from the meadow where it’s framed by bare branches.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood there are russets and roses and burning bushes bursting by the roadside. Northern Virginia has never been a fall wonderland — we have our springs, after all — but for a week or two we sport a kind of mellow beauty that speaks of the serenity this season can hold.

Fortunate Day

Fortunate Day

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I was waking up slowly when the sound of a falling branch catapulted me into full consciousness. It’s a hazard of living in the midst of a waning suburban forest, a place where the old oaks have outlived their three score and ten.

This time we seem to have been spared. It was either a branch from the common land, or a smaller limb off the tree in our yard that’s already slated for demolition next time the tree guy comes around.

But the swoosh and thud did serve as a rousing alarm. It got me up and into the morning, where I took a delicious amble through humid air and young birds doing that little looping fly that is so endearing.

A day that begins with an early walk, no matter how one comes by it, is a fortunate day indeed.

Picking Up Sticks

Picking Up Sticks

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Is there a less glamorous but more necessary lawn task than the picking up of sticks?

It must happen before mowing, of course, but preferably sooner than that. Around here, it needs to be done every day or so, at least in the spring when strong winds rattle the oaks and do as much pruning as shears or clippers.

With every bending down and picking up, I fell myself that I’m building up a pile of kindling for a bonfire some day. Or at the very least enough to stuff a can of yard waste for the recycling pick-up next week.

Most of all, I tell myself that these are nothing, mere toothpicks, the balsa wood of yard flotsam. The big trees they came from, they’re still standing. And that’s what matters most.

The Lusty Cherry

The Lusty Cherry

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Frequently writing about nature and the out-of-doors means that I often notice the same things every year. I’ve learned this by now — and have become more careful not to repeat an identical observation. Such was the case today when I thought about the Kwanzan cherry trees.

So I will not call this piece “The Other Cherry,” because I already used that title. But I will say that yesterday a grove of Kwanzan cherries once again stopped me in my tracks.

The trees were waving and petaling and being their lovely selves right in front of my office. I reveled in their peak bloom (and snapped some photos) as I ran out to the post office in the mid-afternoon.

I’m not the only one who appreciated them. Suzanne texted me this morning to say she’d noticed them on a run through my work neighborhood.

Every year I have this internal debate: Which is more lovely, the ethereal Yoshino or the lusty Kwanzan? I’ll never come up with an answer.

Baby Shade

Baby Shade

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As I’ve mentioned before, spring is farther along downtown and in Crystal City than where I live. Which means that when I strolled down the tree-lined stretch of Crystal Drive that leads to my office this morning, I was not seeing winter-wan trunks without a hint of green. Instead, I was walking beneath baby shade.

Baby shade comes from trees just leafing, still unsure what they’re meant to do. They are uncurling, unfurling, making themselves useful not just to the plant in general but also to the pavement below.

We on the pavement are remembering what it’s like to amble beneath a great arched umbrella of greenery: how it cools us and calms us, how it intercedes between heaven and earth.

Baby shade is wan and tentative, but it is all we have now, and it is precious in its fleetingness.

Procession of Bloom

Procession of Bloom

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According to my favorite weather site, the cherry blossoms may last as long as 10 days this year. Though I haven’t checked on the Tidal Basin flowers since Monday evening, I can tell by the hordes on Metro that hanami is still in full force.

As the blooming season moves out to my neighborhood (always a few days later than the city trees), my ho-hum daily drives are taking on a hanami quality of their own. I’m slowing down, seeking out the streets I know from years past.

There are the Bradford pears in Franklin Farm, the redbuds on Folkstone, the Kwanzan cherry in my own front yard. All of this, if the weather cooperates, in a slow steady procession through dogwoods and azaleas — a riot of bloom that takes us from the gray trunks of winter all the way to the vivid fuchsias and scarlets of  mid-May.

The Volunteer

The Volunteer

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In so many ways, the name doesn’t fit. When I hear “volunteer,” I think of a smiling face with a hospital tray, or a badge-wearing angel at an airport information desk. There is a lot of goodness in the word, to be sure. But the word also a martial implication, young men marching off to war. How odd, then, that trees that spring up where they aren’t planted are also called volunteers.

But they are, and I can now stand amidst the branches of one — a weeping cherry that was spared at birth by our neighbors the Morrisons, the same neighbors who are more than halfway through their around-the-world cruise. Decades ago, they left the cherry alone while it spread its roots, enlarged its trunk and sent its branches down in a cascade of blossoms, larger and more fulsome every year.

The tree sits far too close to the street, is off-center, is too big for its footprint. But it has thrived, just the same. And watching it bloom this year makes me wonder at the wisdom of natural selection.

According to the itinerary they left behind, the Morrisons recently left Sri Lanka for Indian ports. These will be followed by a long string of sea days, then Jordan and the Suez Canal. The Morrisons aren’t in Virginia to see the small pink flowers bud from the hanging stems. For this, they will need a stand-in — and  I volunteer. 

Green and Blue

Green and Blue

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On a walk last week I stopped to snap a picture of a blue spruce with its new green growth. This happens every year, of course, but for once I was in a position to notice it.

I love the dusty blue of the  mature tree, how it looks so wintry in winter with its cool tones, its chilly hue. But I think I love it even more now after seeing the green behind it.

Look beneath the hood, it tells me. See what there is to see,

Baby Trees

Baby Trees

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“A society grows great when people plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.”
Greek proverb

Last winter I sent a $10 donation to the Arbor Day Foundation, which promised to send me an American redbud, crape myrtle, crabapple, Washington hawthorn and white dogwood in exchange.

And that they did.  The trees arrived last week in a little bag, their roots protected with a watery gel. Here they are in a jar of water, looking more like a dead plant that a bunch of potential trees.

It’s not that I expected lush greenery for my tiny investment. But I was still a bit shocked by the meagerness of the saplings.

Still, they have potential. One day these sticks will grow roots and leaves, trunks and boughs. They will turn their faces to the sun, rustle their leaves in the wind. One day my grandchildren may sit in their shade.

At this point, though, I have modest expectations for the baby trees. Given the number of tall oaks we’ve lost the last few years, I just hope that they bend rather than break when the wind blows.

The Aftermath

The Aftermath

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They came yesterday to see about the wood, the two straight trunks bisecting the back yard. Did they pass muster as lumber, or must we bring in the tree guys with their whirring chainsaws and chipper?

Don’t know the answer yet, but I wonder if they saw the potential, the long straight boards locked into those twin trunks, the 80-foot expanse of prime oak.

What I see is the chaos, the splintered branch, like bone through skin, the errant stick impaled in earth. I see the volunteer cherry uncentered and the earth ball like the underside of a mushroom.

I can barely stand to look at the trampoline. Of course, I can barely see the trampoline, so lost is it beneath the branches.

I see the heft, the waste, the terror. I see everything you don’t expect and some of what you do.