No Blog as Lovely

After waking early and reading several more chapters of the book by the former EHM (see yesterday's post), I drove through a soft rain to Northport, appreciating the muted fall colors and thinking, "I need to write about trees."

One of my favorite books on the subject is Bernd Heinrich's THE TREES IN MY FOREST. Woods rambler, tree climber, sketch artist, landowner and timber manager and professor of entolomology, Heinrich has strong feelings for trees, along with deep knowledge of them. I'm fascinated by his analyses of growth, flowering and seed production in terms of a tree's general "economy," i.e., how much energy it has to put out to make its gains. "Trees," Heinrich writes, "are in a dilemma. They have to use their hard-won energy to produce wood (which is dead tissue) and often disposable leaves in order to grow, so they can obtain more energy. Usually this process results in a net loss, ultimately killing the tree."

The individual tree dies, but first, while it lives, it produces seeds, and the species survives. Like our old neighbor, Julius Houdek, Heinrich loves and recognizes individual trees, not just tree species. "Every birch, every old oak, is different from every other tree that ever lived and that ever will be."

A beautiful and surprisingly inexpensive recent publication is THE MEANING OF TREES, by Fred Hageneder. This book covers "botany, history, healing, lore," and exquisite color photographs of aged specimens the world over steal center stage, stopping this reader from reading, as I lose myself in the images, each tree my "favorite" until I turn the page to the next. Trees, like horses and dogs, call on us for emotional response. That response is inextricable from their meaning for us.

THE WILD TREES: A STORY OF PASSION AND DARING, by Richard Preston, is an entirely different kind of book. Here the subject is extreme tree-climbing and the adventurous naturalists who explore the canopy of forests. Like Heinrich's, this book is illustrated with modest, evocative sketches but is primarily a book to read. I like to live my death-defying escapades vicariously. Armchair adventure is my sport. Climb to the top of an 800-year-old redwoodf? Thanks, I'll read about it instead. Admiration of the trees in my daily life, on the other hand, is part of that daily life.