Daily rounds...

(Yes, these are the pignut hickory buds I've been following!)

Ein einziger Frühling

At the bookshop of the Cradle of Forestry in America, which we visited Sunday, I happened on a lovely little book by old-growth forest advocate Joan Maloof. Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest is from 2005, the first of several popular books by this biologist. The essays are short and personal, most rhapsodizing on a familiar Eastern tree and some of the animals which live in and with it, but I was especially captivated by the way Maloof made use of images and poetry to demonstrate the mutuality of species which is the heart of ecology. 

The images, starting with the one on the cover, are taken from am opulently illustrated work published in London by one John Abbot in 1798, The Natural History of the Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia. (A digitized version, with subtly different watercolors than the one Maloof consulted, is available here.) No plant appears without caterpillars, pupae, and the moths or butterflies they become. It was fun to find trees I'm seeing budding into leaf - and some already being chewed by caterpillars - here! Hello tulip polar, hello black oak!

Weaving Abbot's insect-focused images of trees into her text lets Maloof suggest a lineage of citizen ecologists - and images more than two centuries old are the age of "grandfather trees," so endangered in our forests and parks of juveniles rarely older than 100 years.

The main poetic interlocutor is Rainer Maria Rilke, especially the ninth of his "Duino Elegies." Maloof quotes from it throughout the book, and then appends a translation (by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebman) at the end, the reading of which, as different passages hum with familiarity, produces an almost ecological joy of recognition.

A few lines near the end could serve as an epigraph for my time here:

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise

in us invisible - Isn't your dream

one day to be invisible? - Earth! invisible!

What if not transformation is your urgent commission?

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, no more

of your springtimes are needed to win me over -, one

oh, a single one, is already too much for my blood. 

Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar 

in uns erstehn? - Ist es dein Traum nicht,

einmal unsichtbar zu sein? - Erde! unsichtbar! 

Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drängender Auftrag 

Erde, du liebe, ich will. Oh glaub, es bedürfte 

nicht deiner Frühlinge mehr, mich dir zu gewinnen -, einer, 

ach, ein einziger ist schon dem Blute zu viel. (68-74)

Meanwhile, I'm particularly struck by a passage where Maloof describes the frantic efforts of the owners of a new subdivision, built on old corn and soybean fields, to plant trees. 

Do they know that here in the East we can have trees for free? All we have to do is: nothing. Stop mowing. Forest is our land’s natural calling, and if you leave just about any spot here alone for long enough it will become forest, thanks to the birds and the wind. (82)  

That "forest is our land's natural calling" is precisely what I, a desert westerner, don't know! Or am only slowly coming to know...

Blueskying it

Today's task was to look upward. Radiant blue sky mostly helped.

(vines are hard to photograph!)

(a little hard to make out but this is a pair of vines)

How to convey just how tall these trees are? This almost worked:

Posey from the trees overhead on our driveway

Leafing out

This isn't the half of happenings on my local round these past days!

(These showed up in reverse chronological order, who cares?)