Xylotheque: "Song of the Redwood Tree"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Song of the Redwood Tree" first appeared in South Dakota Review in 2011.

Excerpt from “Song of the Redwood Tree”

We look and look, but we do not see the trees. There is no place to stand to see an entire redwood. For hours we crane our necks, peering into the sky where the trees disappear from sight. We circle their behemoth trunks, stupefied. We are underwater. The light on the forest floor is murky, greenish, yet freighted with clarity. There is levity to our steps on the spongy duff. We are walking on the ocean floor. “The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean,” writes Richard Preston in The Wild Trees. Hundreds of feet above us, the trees collect fog from the air. Their canopies are like root systems reaching into the sky. They seem as distant as the stars from where we stand in our green-tinged seafloor environment. The trees reach into the earth and into heaven, drinking, drinking. We are blind to the work of the roots under our feet, to the slow constant pull, to the enormous suck, the seep of water upward, unceasing for centuries.

“You really can’t tell much about what’s happening in a forest from the ground,” says noted redwood expert Steve Sillett in 2009 National Geographic documentary titled Climbing Redwood Giants. So true. From the ground, we do not see the life that teems within the canopies hundreds of feet above us; we never glimpse, for example, the salamanders that live their whole lives in trees without once touching the ground. We do not see the epiphytes, fifty-plus species of mites, copepods, earthworms, bumblebees, huckleberries, lichens, voles, rhododendrons, currant and elderberry bushes, or the bonsai groves of California laurel, western hemlock, Douglas fir, tan oak, Sitka spruce, and buckthorn that perch atop the sprawling canopies that are like land masses held aloft in the sky. The canopies of the world’s forests, I learn, contain half of nature’s species. The scientists who rappel themselves into the trees, scaling redwood trunks like the faces of sheer cliffs, go into this undiscovered country. And they see.

Science has other ways of seeing. Researchers peer at the redwoods through microscopes, poring over cellulose, lichens, the structure of shrimp found snarled in trees hundreds of feet above sea level. They fly over the forests in twin-engine planes, using LIDAR, light detection and ranging, to create highly detailed maps of the topography of redwood forests, determining the heights of the tallest trees from the air. Dendrochronologists squint at great slabs of redwood cross sections, peering at the rings, counting, seeking out minute differences in annual growth. All of these are ways of seeing. And all ways glimpse only pieces of the whole.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Ginkgo biloba

For three years, I’ve been going on tree tours alone, and my daughter has been asking to go. Finally, this past weekend, I took her on her first tree tour at the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. Except for one other eight-year-old, the attendees were all adults—many older than me. A number were devotees of Ed Richardson, the grand master of trees in Connecticut. (I’ve written about him previously here and here.) But this isn’t about Richardson or the trees that he talked about; this is about my daughter looking at trees.

At each tree that the group stopped at, my daughter would listen for a minute or two to Richardson’s wavering voice, but then some other tree nearby would catch her attention, and she would wander off, armed with her camera. (For the record, she took 102 photos during the two-hour tour, and I took 89.)

 

UConn’s arborist, John Kehoe, was on the tour as well, and my daughter asked him about seeing a ginkgo tree. Serendipitously, we were at that moment standing about thirty feet away from a blazing yellow gingko. Kehoe pointed at the tree and told her to go get a leaf. She came back with one, beaming. Into her pocket it went—along with an assortment of other leaves, acorns, and cones. Her pockets swelled with treasures; her camera filled with photos.

Later, Kehoe pointed out another ginkgo—this one completely green. She collected another leaf sample and asked the tree expert why one tree was all yellow, the other all green. I didn’t hear Kehoe’s answer, but later she explained to me that it was because the green tree was older, more established, with a more extensive root system. (Yes, she said established and extensive. She pays attention.)

She also asked where the biggest ginkgo in Connecticut is, and Kehoe told her it is in Hartford. Later, I asked her why she liked ginkgo trees. “Because there are no other trees like them alive today,” she told me. “They’re dinosaur trees.”

Later still, apropos of nothing, she said, “You know that champion ginkgo tree in Hartford? I want to go see it.”

Oakling

A ten-minute walk from our house, on the edge of a college parking lot, grows one of the two largest white oaks in Connecticut. A stately, burled giant, it is likely around three hundred years old. I often take the children to visit the tree.

 

I write more about this tree in a recent essay in Adventum. I write about how the tree has become like a friend to us, one that we visit regularly, in every season. I write about how our first fall in Connecticut, nearly three years ago, we picked up one of the oak’s plentiful acorns and planted it in a pot at home. The acorn sprouted, and the following summer—two years ago—we planted the seedling in our yard.

This is the continuation of that story. Our oakling, progeny of a mighty tree, is flourishing. Its first year, the tree had six leaves. This year, it has thirty-four. Oaks are notoriously slow growers, and none of us will be here to witness the tree reach its full mature splendor—if, indeed, it ever does. But this is one of the joys of life we should teach our children—to hope for and anticipate a future that is not for us, but for others.

How to Tell a Story

Fall, 2012

I'm with a group of about sixty tree nuts at historic Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, and Ed Richardson is leading us around, pointing out magnificent specimens and describing how he inventoried approximately 1,800 big trees on the cemetery grounds. After completing his inventory, he tells us, his project was written up in the Hartford Courant, and a former Cedar Hill groundskeeper called him up to talk about his work. Facing his audience and speaking into a small microphone, Ed Richardson launches into the meat of his story.

So this guy, this former groundskeeper, said, “What about that weirdo hemlock on section 16?”

“Weirdo hemlock?” I said. “I’m not sure about that. Is this a grave tree or a big tree?”

“A grave tree.”

“I didn’t inventory the grave trees,” I told him.

Ed Richardson briefly explains the difference. Cedar Hill, designed by landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann in the 1860s as a rural cemetery, features park-like common areas landscaped with large trees, while the family-owned plots have smaller shrubs and trees planted near individual graves. In his inventory, Ed Richardson had focused on the large trees.

“Well, you ought to go look at it,” he said.

“Is it a dwarf?” I asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know anything about dwarf trees. I’m a big tree guy.”

They talked about it some more, he tells us as he leads us among the graves. Even though I’ve heard this story three times on three different tours, I still can’t get enough of it. I hang on every word.

“I’ll go take a look at this dwarf tree you’re talking about,” I said. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

Well, I looked at it, and I thought, this is a weirdo alright. It had little short needles coming right out of the trunk and branches. Looked like an evergreen cactus.

 

I was able to find one cone. He holds up a finger. It was an Eastern hemlock cone. So I thought it might be a cultivar.

He takes us a bit further, and we all stay close, waiting to catch his words. He describes going home and looking in his four-volume encyclopedia of trees, translated from German, and finding a list of around seventy-five cultivars of the Eastern hemlock, each with a dense paragraph of description.

This is hopeless, I thought, but I just kept reading. And then about halfway through, I came to a paragraph and thought, man, that’s it on the nose. I kept reading, and at the end of the paragraph, I came to a sentence that said, “This is the Huss hemlock propagated by John Francis Huss of Hartford, Connecticut, around 1902.”

We arrive at our destination. Ed Richardson points at a monument flanked by two slender hemlocks. He hits the climax of his story:

The name on the monument was Huss.

 

There are murmurs of surprise and delight as his listeners stand looking at the stone and its guardian trees. After the story has had its full impact, Ed Richardson goes on to explain that Huss had been a groundskeeper at Hartford’s Goodwin mansion at the end of the nineteenth century. He doesn’t know how old the trees are, he continues; they may date back to Huss’s death in 1925 or even earlier.

I read the names on the monument and come up with my own narrative. Huss had two wives who predeceased him: Rosalie Mouillerat, who died in 1907, and Helen E. Hamilton, who died in 1909. So I imagine that John Huss himself planted those two trees, his own cultivar, one for each of his loves.

 

 

Tree Nuts

Fall, 2011

I arrive at the college parking lot early on a Saturday morning, and already the chartered bus is nearly full, my fellow travelers sipping steaming coffee and munching muffins, waiting for the show to get on the road. I sink down into my seat, anticipating a day of private pleasure. I’ve left the kids at home with my husband.

“I’m an Ed Richardson groupie,” says a woman several seats ahead of me. It’s an apt description. We are a bus full of Ed Richardson groupies.

Pulling up at Green Cemetery in Glastonbury, we make our way outside, gathering around the man with the bullhorn standing in front of a weeping mulberry. Once we’re assembled, he raises the bullhorn and begins to talk about cultivars, about weeping and grafting. The grey sky overhead ekes out a smattering of drops, but no one pays attention.

“Why are there so many weeping trees at cemeteries?” someone asks.

“Well, I guess because weeping and cemeteries go together,” the man with the bullhorn says wryly.

Laughing, we follow him to the next tree. He is our guide, Ed Richardson, an unassuming person, a retired insurance man, a sprightly octogenarian. Only his quavering hand on the bullhorn, his quiet voice that occasionally fades out betray his age. Wry and thoughtful, he is a plainspoken man who cares about trees. Not an arborist or botanist or horticulturalist, Ed Richardson is a self-made expert on notable trees, a self-proclaimed tree nut. And we are his converts, a bus full of them. We follow and we listen, learning the ways of a tree nut, learning how to pay attention to trees.

I once told an acquaintance about going on the tree tour.

“You did what?” she said. She’s my peer—but only in the sense that we’re the same age and have children of the same age.

“I rode around in a bus all day looking at trees,” I explained, but I could see in her eyes that she didn’t really get it, that she didn’t really want to get it. She changed the subject to preschools, and I didn’t breathe another word about trees.

It’s like my writing: a private pleasure. My way of engaging with the world. Looking at trees. Writing things down. I could do worse.

I’m a newcomer to Connecticut, this crumb of a New England state that I could barely locate on the map before moving here the year before. I’ve been a newcomer to so many places that I’ve grown weary of learning the towns and the attractions, of meeting people and learning their names. And then leaving. This time, I am meeting the trees—some of the state’s oldest inhabitants, and the ones most likely to stick around awhile. My mental map of Connecticut is now bristled over in trees, growing denser and more varied the more I encounter. Ed Richardson, lifetime resident of the state, is helping me to populate my map with trees.

To know trees as well as people makes for a good life. A balanced life. Sometimes, I confess, I prefer the trees.

“When you’re looking for big trees, you’re not looking out in the forests,” Ed Richardson says. “The forests of Connecticut have been cut over many times. You’re looking for owners who had the money to maintain trees.” In other words, you’re looking at the grounds of colleges, hospitals, cemeteries, parks, and private estates.

American Forests, headquartered in Washington, DC, maintains the National Register of Big Trees, and state organizations, like Connecticut’s Notable Trees Project, keep their own statewide lists. Since his retirement from the insurance industry in the mid-1980s, Ed Richardson has catalogued and measured a great many of Connecticut’s notable trees. A champion tree is identified based on a formula:

Trunk Circumference (inches) + Height (feet) + ¼ Average Crown Spread (feet) = Total Points

When two trees of the same species come within five points of one another, they are declared co-champions. Of course, measuring, recording, and cataloging are just one way to know the world. Ed Richardson knows trees in other ways, too.

He knows that trees have stories. And he knows how to tell those stories. Listeners stand spellbound as he describes “the most spectacular discovery of the tree world in the twentieth century”: the dawn redwood, believed to be extinct, found growing in China in 1943. He tells of his encounters with Hackberry Jim, a colorful character with a passion for finding hackberry emperor butterflies in their native habitat. He traces the provenance of a particular white oak, planted in 1911, identifying it as the grandchild of the Charter Oak, the legendary tree that in colonial times served as the hiding place for Connecticut’s constitutional charter.

The tour stops at a vineyard in Colchester for lunch, a wine tasting, and a tour of the property with an eye to the trees. Several large trees grow along an old stone wall, and we walk to get a better look, going past an unassuming birch growing at the edge of a small pond. Most of us trudge right past the shaggy, multi-trunked tree without giving it a second glance, because most of us don’t know how to see. But Ed Richardson, bringing up the rear, stops at the tree, his trained eye locking on it, seeing something extraordinary.

Eventually we’re all herded back to the birch, a sense of expectancy suddenly permeating the proceedings. A discovery has been made. We wait for Ed Richardson to speak, and finally he does, announcing that the tree—a gray birch—is most likely the new state champion and even possibly a new national champion. Cheers sound all around. Ed Richardson adds a disclaimer: He’s only eyeballing it, and the tree will have to be measured properly. But it’s enough for us. People pose for pictures in front of the new champion tree, still rather scraggly and unkempt looking, but a tree that I’ve already plotted on my mental map.

We’re promised that once an official measurement is made, we’ll receive news of the gray birch’s status in an email.

Actually, if you pressed me, I’d have to admit that I’ve been on six Ed Richardson tours: two all-day affairs by chartered bus, and four smaller ones at a public park, a cemetery, and a private garden. Whenever I see notice that Ed Richardson will be somewhere talking about trees, I make it my prerogative to be there.

Shagbark hickory. Tulip tree. Arborvitae. Dawn redwood. Hackberry. Shingle oak. Weeping beech. Kentucky coffee tree. Sweetgum. Silver linden. Sycamore. Mono maple. Lee’s hybrid oak. Old man’s beard. Cucumber magnolia. Speckled alder. Chinese chestnut. Catalpa. Stewartia. Flowering dogwood. The lists of trees fill my pocket-sized notebooks, a litany of beings I’d like to get to know.

“This here,” says Ed Richardson, “is a Japanese threadleaf maple.”

We draw nearer the bullhorn and wait for more.

The email comes a couple of weeks after the tour. 

The gray birch has measured 157 points, making it a new state champion. The current national champion, at 156 points, is located in New Jersey. Last measured in 2007, the New Jersey tree will likely be re-measured, and if it comes in within five points of the Connecticut tree, the two trees will be listed as co-champions on the national register. The updated list of national champions won’t be available until the spring, and it’s only fall. For the time being, the national status of our Connecticut gray birch is in limbo. That’s Ed Richardson’s word: limbo.

And so we tree nuts wait in limbo, while the gray birch lives on, free of such uncertainty, invested in its girth and height and spread far beyond any of our capacities to measure or record.