Reflections of a Tree Hugger

I love their dark corridors of summer, the skeletal silhouettes against the snow; while most prefer the fall harvest, I favor the early spring veil of every imaginable green, threaded with the occasional rust or silver or gold, fallen across the hills and valleys.  Yes, I am, admittedly, a tree hugger. People are surprised to learn that our house was built on an empty lot – a completely empty lot.  Not a single tree grew on a parcel hemmed in with stands of pines and a stone wall.  Now there are twenty-five.

Every one of our trees has its story. Most of the oldest of them were house-warming presents. A pair of crab apples from my uncle to frame the front door with burgundy foliage, flowers and fruits, the purple umbrella of a Japanese maple from a close friend, a Japanese lilac with its primrose racemes from another. My parents christened the property with a weeping cherry, a fountain of pink parasols in springtime, a neighbor, with the Korean mountain ash, an autumn crown of bittersweet berries. Other neighbors dug desirable seedlings from their yards to adorn ours:  a “Kousa” dogwood smothered in spring with ivory bracts, a mimosa with exotic fronds and feathery flowers all summer, a purple-leaved peach producing fall fruit. One neighbor dug a Norway maple from his garden which has grown into a sixty foot tree to provide the yard’s shade, and another let me search his fields for a swamp maple to provide a splash of rust to the chartreuse, sage and olive pallet of spring’s emerging leaves. The cutting from a Main Street home has turned into a fifty foot tall twisted willow, an impressive sweep of corkscrew limbs, which has since given countless visitors their own.

Other trees we purchased for their attributes – a shadblow for the subtle beauty of every one of its seasons and its friendliness to birds, the dogwood “Wolf Eyes” to lighten a dark woodland corner with frosted leaves, a zelkova that anchors the property, elm-like and statuesque, a lot of salixes – the black and the white pussy willows, an orange twigged, the variegated, a silver weeping willow — to soak up spring’s puddles, a “Heritage” birch for its winter, a witch hazel for its winter scent, a magnolia for blossoms that resemble flamingos, a “Carolina Sweetbell” for its ceiling of white flowers in the moon garden, katsura and sour wood for their glorious fall foliage, pinkish orange and bright scarlet rivaling the burgundy dogwoods and the bronzed oaks and the flames of maples in the lawn and beyond. When you study your yard, it really tells you what it needs.

There are those trees I wish our yard could accommodate.  Anyone who has the room to grow a copper beach — should. It requires its own acre.  A tree we plant for posterity, you’ll never live long enough to witness its 100 foot girth, but strangers passing your property generations hence will thank you for it. Similarly, I wish there was space for a gingko, a 100 foot tower of shimmering yellow fans in fall, or robinia ‘Frisia’ which requires a large area to absorb the chartreuse of its summer foliage. I’m still searching for a suitable site for Cornelian cherry, near enough the house to appreciate its haze of late winter yellow flowers, and stewartia, which deserves a special place to showcase its multi-stemmed vase of bark mottled grey, green, cream and russet, spectacular fall foliage, and camellia-like flowers. I’m also still contemplating spaces to exhibit the trunks of a cluster of paper white birches, or a single lace-bark pine which exfoliates silver, olive and pale purple.

I know we can’t be the only family who actually visits certain places because of their trees. The Redwood Forest, for example, Joshua Tree and Sequoia National Parks, the plantation, Oak Alley, with its 300 hundred year old allee of live oaks, the National Arboretum. There are the groves of crepe myrtles in the South, the pines that create the Black Hills, the allees of palms in Hollywood, the elms of Central Park’s Promenade, the trees dripping Spanish moss in Savannah’s squares. Where ever we are, I always have to spend time with the native trees there. Serious time.

And then there are those of our own town — the Glen named for its hemlocks, the Charter oak at the end of our road, the one on Connecticut’s quarter. I still remember the trees I climbed, the leaf piles they produced, the one from which my swing hung, the ones we picnicked beneath, those that bore apples and pears. As a matter of fact, I can remember every tree that grew in our yard, and many of those in our neighborhood. Growing up, we learned to identify trees by their bark, form, and foliage. We learned of their importance to the environment, the uses of their lumber, their place in the wild even after their demise, finding evidence in the woods of their decay and its benefit to insects, animals, and eventually the soil, learning the cycles of their seasons, and life. We discovered art in their fall foliage, adventure in climbing on their limbs, and peace reading in the crooks of their branches, and resting in their shade. A visit to a tree would immediately calm my children when they were infants, for scientific reasons — the abundance of oxygen, the play of sunlight through leaves — yet I always felt that it was something more — something instinctual, spiritual — that cast this spell.

Arbor Day was an important holiday at school.  Every class was responsible for some form of reverence – pictures and posters, stories and reports. Someone would recite Joyce Kilmer’s poem, and, of course, the ceremony would always culminate with the planting of one. These were important concepts to instill in children – how to plant a tree and how to take care of it, along with all the lessons as to why – the scientific reasons and the personal ones. Whether you celebrate at a ceremony in a school, or a public place like a park, or your own yard, there’s almost always room for another tree. And time for all the lessons that accompany the planting.  Happy Arbor Day!