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Category: trees

From the Top

From the Top

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Looking at the springtime miracle, watching it unfold. What I notice every year — and most certainly have written about here before — is how it starts at the top.

Those uppermost branches, the ones that scrape the sky and soak up the sun, they are the first to bud. Everything else follows in kind.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, metaphorically speaking (and — given that I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in Intro Biology — that’s the only way I can speak). Flowers, plants, crop, they all grow from the ground up. But blooming starts at the top and works its way down.

There has to be message here somewhere. 

Anne Frank Tree

Anne Frank Tree

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I usually walk right by it when I stroll around the Capitol, but for some reason yesterday I did not.

It seemed like nothing more than a fenced-in stick, so slender and insubstantial. But the fencing told me something important must be within — so I took a peek. I learned that the young tree is a sapling from the white chestnut that  grew outside the window of the Secret Annex of the Frank House in Amsterdam.

In May, 1944, less than a year before she would lose her life at the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp, Anne Frank wrote, “Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.”

The tree was brought down by a windstorm in 2010, but its chestnuts were gathered and germinated and the saplings donated. This little twig of a tree was one of its progeny. Here is what its parent meant to Anne:

Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my
lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and
the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine,
appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I
thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies,
while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.

(Photos: Wikipedia, Architect of the Capitol)

Teenage Forest

Teenage Forest

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“We call it a teenage forest because it’s messy,” the ranger said. “There’s a lot of stuff lying around that you could trip over.”

It’s not the most scientific explanation I’ve ever heard but it made me laugh, as I thought of some teenage rooms I have known. So I took a photo of this teenage forest, of the downed trees, crowded saplings and logs like random tennis shoes.

But the forest grows up too. The mature growth crowds the patchy sunlight that allows young trees to grow. The old growth forest is placid and lofty and purposeful.

Not nearly as much fun, though.

Plant a Billion

Plant a Billion

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Every year the yard becomes a bit brighter, the sun more inescapable. Every year the pools of light go up against the patches of shade. And the light is winning.

While this is comforting in a metaphorical, good-versus-evil way, it does not bode well for the tall oaks. There’s another one dead this summer, and another that is ailing. Is it drought or cold? Improper care? Lack of mulching?

None of the above, I imagine. It’s probably old age, the natural life span of this venerable fellow. Eight decades are enough; he’s had it.

But a report yesterday in Nature puts my yard in perspective. A team of scientists aided by satellite measurements and computer models found that there are a little over 3 trillion trees on Earth, 422 per person, a lot more than previously thought. But apparently not nearly enough, because we are losing 10 billion trees annually. Trees counteract global warming by capturing and storing carbon dioxide. We need trees now more than ever.

The Plant a Billion Trees Campaign aims to plant a billion trees by 2025. It has ten years and hundreds of millions of trees to go. Makes my tired oaks seem pretty insignificant. 

The Utility of Trees

The Utility of Trees

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Thinking this morning of the utility of things and how they change through time.

The tree that once shaded the backyard, whose sturdy trunk supported first a baby swing and then a porch swing, has been a branch-less trunk for more than a year now. It’s the Venus de Milo of the backyard.

But what it lacks in shade and stability it makes up for in bird habitat. No branches for nests but a great tall expanse of trunk for woodpeckers. I heard the birds yesterday, rat-tat-tatting for insects and grubs, and thought of the tree’s gracefulness in good times and bad.

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do,” Willa Cather said.  She could have been thinking of this noble, denuded, pockmarked oak.

Baby Shade

Baby Shade

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The trees are sure of themselves now. Even the most timid have leafed out. The only outliers I see  are the crepe myrtles, and I get their reticence. They are in glorious bloom at the end of summer; they need to bide their time now.

Leafing trees mean a canopy between us and heaven. They are an aural presence, something for the wind to blow through before a storm.

And of course, they also mean shade. At this time of year it’s baby shade. Not the deep cool gladness of June, July and August. The shade of May is a winsome thing, still finding itself.

Come on, baby shade! You can do it!

Wild Cat

Wild Cat

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It would have been easy to blame Copper, but he hadn’t been outside yet yesterday morning when we noticed the cat up in the tree.  Not just any cat — a large, wild-looking one with a raccoon-striped tail.  And not just any tree — one of the tall oaks.

From what I could figure he was 30 or 40 feet up. The temperature was in the 20s, with a stiff breeze that moved the trunk from side to side. 
The cat had found a perch of sorts, and at times looked content, as if sunning itself. But the longer it remained, the more agitated it seemed, shifting position, making half-hearted attempts to claw its way down. 
Finally, there was real movement, a quick scamper, an impossible leap and — after a few heart-stopping seconds when it seemed as if the animal almost certainly hadn’t survived the fall — a glimpse of that same striped tail moving side to side. 
Within seconds, the cat had scampered out of the brush, under the fence and into the woods. 
Destination unclear, motivation unknown. It may not have been a wildcat … but it was a wild cat.
Morning Happens

Morning Happens

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When I work at home I can see the morning happen, can see night peel off around the edges.

No dramatic sunrise today, just steadily less dark. A lighter shade of gray and the tall oaks emerging from it, first the trunks, then the large limbs and finally a crowd of branches at the top.

Only now can I see the houses, three from this vantage point — gray, tan and brick. Only now do I notice the dark fringe around the horizon, the woods on the far side of the road.

But I keep my eyes trained on the sky, on the vast ceiling above us that finally gives way to day.

Holly Blossom Time

Holly Blossom Time

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I drive with the windows down now. Not just because I like the wind in my face but also because the air smells like honeysuckle and holly blossom.

The former is a well known harbinger of summer; the latter has taken me a while to recognize. It is subtle and tender, not as overpowering as honeysuckle but just as redolent of warm weather and freedom.

Here is the holly flower, blurry and slightly past peak. A blossom hidden under the canopy of this prickly, upright tree.

We think of the holly around the holidays but it’s just as important now, when it sweetens the air with its scent.

A Fluff Piece

A Fluff Piece

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For the last few days cottonwood fluff has been floating through the air. I think I know the source, a tree that’s half a block or so away. But every year at this time when the wind is right and the air is clear, I see its progeny.

So light, so fragile, yet tenacious enough to go the distance, it lodges itself in driveway cracks, leaf piles and sometimes even on the ground. It’s hard not to see it as wishes spun from the spring air, spores of hope.

I read about the tree, learn that it’s a type of poplar that does well in stressed soil. It became the official state tree of Kansas in 1937, the state legislature dubbing it “the pioneer of the prairie.”

Funny then to see it cast its seeds out onto the tidy, mulched lawns of suburbia. Perhaps we are the final frontier.

(Photo: Wikipedia)