Fungi are arguably as essential to the composition and functioning of a forest as trees are. My mom’s nature column for July describes some of the most charismatic and tasty mushrooms found in our woods, as part of a portrait of Bill Russell, “The Mushroom Man.”

You know, one thing that really annoys me about suburban people who move to the country (one of many things, I admit) is their tendency to cut down all the trees around their house for fear they might someday fall on the roof. Now, if you live in a fire-dependent ecosystem such as a Ponderosa pine forest, keeping trees and brush away from your house is exactly the right thing to do, but otherwise — um, why exactly did you want to live in the woods in the first place?

High winds are by nature unpredictable, and no life is without risk. But it turns out that being surrounded by trees can actually save you from far worse damage if you take a direct hit from a large tornado, as Debby Kaspari and her husband discovered.

Although we lost a lot of near-irreplaceables and irreplaceables [...] we got a lot back, too. We took every recovery as a miraculous gift.

This miracle was brought to us by our beloved trees, which were destroyed utterly. As a parting gift, they fell inward onto the roof, holding down what was underneath. This included a floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the center of the house. When the house fell, the bookcase dropped face forward; books stayed in place as they fell, the solid wood back of the bookcase adding its layer of protection. Although the wall behind the bookcase crumbled, roof and shingles fell straight down on top like a lid, and heavy oak limbs latched it down tight.

Be sure to click through and read the whole thing (along with Debby’s other posts about the tornado). The photo of her hugging her banjo the day after the tornado is worth several thousand words at least.

John Cage has always been a hero of mine (I love the quote that Laura includes in the sidebar of her blog, The Ordinary and the Wild: “I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.”) Diego Stocco’s arboreal music-making also reminds me of another favorite quote, by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez: “The orange tree outside my window is a greater influence than all the poets put together.”

Stocco’s video (read all about the making of it at the Behance Network) is one of several things that blew me away at the latest Festival of the Trees complilation of blog links. Go. Visit.

It was early spring. In the last light of evening, as the quacking calls of wood frogs were giving way to spring peepers, a coyote ghosted down off the ridge and followed the small creek that ran for a little way along the edge of the woods before disappearing into a sinkhole.

Something was different. He stopped and sniffed, trying to puzzle it out. He smelled fresh sawdust and gasoline, yes, but also the moist earthy spoor of rotten tree — a lot of that. As if some enormous coyote, its gut full of fur and seeds and scales and all manner of indigestible things, had stopped to leave a massive calling card.

The truth was almost as massive and hard to digest: the great white oak had toppled, splitting open near the ground. Many of its limbs were as big around as regular trees, and at its base it was half again as wide as a coyote is long. A small limb next to the humans’ trail had been cut — that’s where the sawdust smell had come from — but otherwise, for once, they seemed to be leaving it alone. One massive limb had jabbed into the earth at an angle and broken off, and now it made a very convenient — in fact, an irresistible — ramp up onto the fallen trunk.

Quick as thought, Coyote was on top of the toppled giant. The smooth plates of its bark felt very agreeable, and as he nosed about, he saw and smelled not a tree but a maze of paths, all of them leading back to him. Mice, squirrels, weasels, chipmunks, fishers — nothing can resist the open highway of a log. If he waited here long enough, they would come to him.

But that’s cat thinking; Coyote doesn’t hunt like that. Any path that is too obvious can make him vulnerable to his ancient enemies the wolves, whose own lack of imagination had doomed them here in the East, and most other places besides. Coyote didn’t take over by being predictable. No, an obvious walkway like this is good for one thing and one thing only: saying hello to other coyotes. And so he did, and hopped down, trotting off without a backward glance.

A few weeks later, he happened by again, and remembered his missive. He climbed up onto the tree to take a look, and sure enough, there was a reply — a long one! He read it carefully. It said, I’m a nursing mother, I’m eating well, and I can kick your ass. He thought about it for half a minute, then left a short, neutral response — I’m still here — scurried down off the tree, and trotted rapidly back the way he came.

It was late autumn before he returned to that end of the valley again. The tree was still there, and though it had human odor all over it, at least three more coyotes had been there, too — the half-grown offspring of the mother who had left a message earlier, perhaps. There was a sort of uniform character to their odor, as if they’d all been dripped on by the same tree — which a family would be, of course. The oak itself had lost a great deal of its pungency, and his paws detected a bit more give in the bark. He squatted once again. Though in life this tree was what foresters call a wolf tree, with its huge spreading crown of crooked limbs keeping sun from getting to other, straighter, more marketable trees, in death it was definitely going to the coyotes.

For the April Fools edition of the Festival of the Trees, “humorous trees,” at Vanessa’s Trees and Shrubs Blog. See the complete details.

The smoothness of their bark makes beech trees, both American and European, among the sexiest and also the most grotesque of trees. Branch scars and other markings that would virtually disappear on trees with more bark-like bark are hard to miss on a beech.

Some beech trees look downright neurotic. But who can blame them? The great beech forests of North America are gone, clearcut two centuries ago to make way for farms, to such an extant that most people who spend anytime outdoors assume that beeches actually prefer the mountainsides and ravines in which they’ve made their last stand. The passenger pigeon, which once visited beech forests the way hurricanes visit Florida, has been extinct for a hundred years. And now a non-native scale insect is helping beech bark disease decimate the remnant stands, though thankfully it hasn’t appeared in Plummer’s Hollow just yet.

It was the trees’ abundant mast that accounted for their popularity with passenger pigeons, of course, and beechnuts still feed many species today. But the grotesqueness of beech trees has wildlife value, too: the frequent hollows in older trees can provide den sites for a wide variety of birds and mammals. Many trees rot out as they age, but beeches seem to get started on it early.

Nor does the grotesquerie end with weird, vaguely human scars and orifices. The self-grafting ability of beech limbs can produce some bizarre effects, as in the above specimen, which grows right next to the Plummer’s Hollow Road.

I am kind of at a loss to explain how this happened… or why it took me so many years to notice it. I don’t know how many more years we’ll have canopy-height beeches in the hollow — not too far north of here, all the big beeches are dead — so I figure I’d better start paying more attention to them now.

Beech bark disease won’t wipe them out completely, but it will probably kill almost all the mature beeches and keep new root sprouts from getting very big, just as the chestnut blight has done for American chestnuts. The grotesquerie will be all but lost, and the tree from which the word “book” is derived may become little more than an asterisk and a footnote.

Watch the full slideshow (13 photos in all) or browse the set (easier for people with slow connections).

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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees. The deadline for the next edition, at The Voltage Gate, is Friday, February 26. See the call for submissions for details on how to participate.

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Be sure to check out the latest Festival of the Trees at treeblog.

Steady rain turned into a downpour early Sunday evening and didn’t let up for another fifteen hours. And just like that, we had a flood. In the same way that you get flash floods after hard rains in the dry West, here in the winter when the ground is frozen hard and the trees are leafless and dormant, there’s little to keep the water from running into the nearest ravine. We lost hundreds of dollars worth of quarry stone from the Plummer’s Hollow Road in just a few hours.

It would take a solid week of hard rain to get this kind of flood on a forested landscape in the summer. If these rare winter floods serve any purpose, it may be to remind us what would happen — what has happened here in the past — in the absence of forests: every hard rain turns into a flood.

At the bottom of the hollow, the Little Juniata River wasn’t so little anymore. It roared just a couple feet below the deck of our access bridge, which shook as floating logs and tires thudded against the pier. The riverbanks became instant swamps.

Nor was the flooding restricted to low places; the ephemeral ponds at the very top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed grew and merged briefly into one big pond. Then the temperature dropped and everything froze.

By the time I got up there to take pictures yesterday afternoon, the water level had fallen by half a foot, leaving a sagging ice ceiling with little underneath it and nothing but scattered tree trunks to hold it up — an ephemeral architecture, like some boom town gone bust.

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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival. The deadline for the next edition, at the UK-based treeblog, is January 30 — see the call for submissions for details on how to submit.

Also, be sure not to miss the interview with Pablo, Jade and me at the Nature Blog Network. We talk all about the Festival of the Trees: how it got started, why we do it, how it’s not really some kind of freaky tree cult, and why you should join us.

I’ve been remiss in not linking to Jason Hogle’s wonderful Festival of the Trees #43: The Celebration Tree Grove. It manages to be everything that the previous edition of the FOTT, hosted here at Via Negativa, was not: elegant, concise, thoughtfully composed. Nor did Jason neglect to include a conservation message:

The grove stretches out before me, stone trails and wooden benches leading me through the birth of a place where loved ones are honored, remembered and celebrated. Not remembered through statues and not honored with memorials. A more important kind of dedication celebrates lives lost: the planting of trees. The grove represents the very spirit of 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity.

Go visit and enjoy a feast of links.

Today was the last day of deer season in Pennsylvania. These three does, which often hang around the houses, weren’t quite out of the woods yet when I photographed them from my front porch today around 11:30. Today was the sunniest day we’ve had in quite a while, and I had been intending to capture the long shadows and sharp contrasts when the deer showed up. Thank you for making the forest more photogenic, even as you do your best to ensure that it has no future by eating as many shrubs and seedlings as you can.

Feasting on the limbs and saplings felled by October’s freak snowstorm is O.K., though, I suppose.

If you’d like to be included in next month’s festival at the U.K.-based treeblog, here’s the call for submissions.

This tree with its pair of crazy limbs has always reminded me of some kind of wizard. The photo originally appeared in “Haiku for a day in January.”

Trees that grow along forest edges often develop a lopsided appearance as limbs on the open side try to grab as much sun as they can. The powerline right-of-way that crosses the mountain a couple hundred feet south of the houses is a century old now, which has given the older trees, such as this rock oak (Quercus prinus), plenty of time to grow strange.

Penn State University has spared no expense in trying to protect its stately old American elms (Ulmus americana) from the ravages of Dutch elm disease, physically separating the root systems from one another with underground barriers and removing trees as soon as they contract the disease. This picture gives some indication of why they go to so much trouble. Maybe if the University Park campus didn’t have so goddamn many ugly buildings it wouldn’t matter so much. The elms present an alternate architecture of the spirit.

This is what the forest looks like near my house after a long winter: the moss is in its glory. I mentioned the song of the blue-headed vireo in the original post, “In the vernal pool,” and that’s the soundtrack you ought to imagine here. You can hear a sound clip on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology page, which characterizes it very well: “a broken series of slurred notes, with each phrase ending in either a downslur or an upswing, as if the bird asks a question, then answers it, over and over.”

Amelanchier arborea and its congeners go by many names: shadbush, shadblow, serviceberry, Juneberry, sarvis. It’s one of the earliest native trees to flower, and a personal favorite. I wrote about it back on April 26: “In shadblow time.”

For me, summer starts when a walk turns from a pleasure into an insect-bedeviled chore. I snapped this shot of a deerfly on white ash (Fraxinus americana) leaves on a hot, humid day in early June when “in less than a minute after entering the woods, I acquire[d] an aura of insects.” The photo, of course, captures none of the misery — and taking it helped me see the beauty of my persecutors, if only for a moment.

Speaking of persecutors: trees and forests worldwide have suffered the effects of overgrazing for millennia, especially by goats. It was with that perspective in mind that I shot this image of a goat resting at the base of a white oak (Quercus alba) at the Amish farm in Sinking Valley where we buy most of our vegetables. I selected and lightened the tree trunk to make the bark more visible, but this didn’t make the goat look any less otherworldly. Commenters on “Livestock,” the post in which it appeared, likened it to Pan or a unicorn.

A black rat snake in a black walnut (Juglans nigra). I don’t think I ever blogged this photo, because I was too busy making a black-and-white video poem out of the footage I shot that day. Two months later, we spotted the snake emerging from the same spot under the eaves we’d watched it enter in July, and I combined the footage (in color this time) for a straight-ahead wildlife video.

This photo and the next were both taken at a lovely property of some friends of ours an hour to the west of here on the Allegheny Plateau. (See the complete photoset.) The species here is red oak (Quercus rubra), and our hosts told us that its hollow center often served as a home to porcupines. Like many oaks, red oak can live for hundreds of years due to its effectiveness at sealing off dead portions with thick scar tissue and preventing further decay. This particular tree seemed to owe its longevity in part to the good fortune of being located on a property line.

Eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) don’t start life on top of stumps nearly as often as, say, yellow birch, but our friends’ forest did contain a couple of examples of trees that had begun that way. I read somewhere that tree stumps and nurse logs, as they’re called, are actually highly infertile environments, but they act as refuges from certain soil bacteria that can otherwise be toxic to seedlings. I wonder if such perches might not also afford some protection from mice, which also kill quite a few tree seedlings.

I was taking the garbage to the compost pile one evening after supper when I spotted this luna moth on one of the big black walnut trees in front of the main house. Its wings were still damp; it hadn’t been out of the chrysalis for very long. Somehow in looking at the green wings one notices the green and blue lichens on the tree bark, as well. Impossible not to wax poetic.

Of all the tree photos I shot in the Adirondacks in October, this dead stump was my favorite. I’m not sure of the species, but it’s probably a birch, and certainly a hardwood, though anything but hard by now. (See “On Adirondack Trails” for the original context.)

Amelanchier again, this time during our freak October snowstorm.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), like shadbush, attracts attention in part because it flowers when the woods are brown and bare. It’s the most common understorey tree on the mountain, shown here with the most common canopy-height tree, rock oak (also known as chestnut oak). They are both exceedingly ornery species which stump-sprout vigorously in response to cutting, which helps account for their abundance.

And speaking of cutting, here’s one of several photos of a neighbor’s high-graded woods which for some reason I decided to try to turn into daguerreotypes.

I’ve written about the wild apple tree behind my house at some length in the past. This time, I just needed an illustration for a poem I wanted to post called “Wild Apple.” It was overcast and the light was poor, so I was surprised this hurried shot turned out as well as it did.

One last black walnut tree photo, this time from a barn window, looking up across the field toward the black cherry (Prunus serotina) woods of Sapsucker Ridge.

Welcome to the 42nd edition of the Festival of the Trees! When I announced this edition on the coordinating blog, I joked that I felt a little like the Once-ler, the hermit-like narrator of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, who gives the boy a tree seed to plant at the end of the book. I’ve been saying for years that I felt we needed to be focusing on reforestation as a society, but did anyone listen? No, they did not. Until now.

Suddenly, tree planting is hot. This month in Copenhagen, world leaders will assemble to try and hammer out a new climate change agreement, and forest preservation is front and center. Deforestation has been estimated to account for around 20 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide — more than the cumulative total from cars and trucks. Countries from the global South are angling for compensation in return for halting or reversing deforestation, but even developed countries like the United States are seeing a renewed interest in restoring forested landscapes. As Science Daily reports, “Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases.” That’s a quote from a planning expert named Brian Stone, who “recommends slowing what he terms the ‘green loss effect’ through the planting of millions of trees in urbanized areas and through the protection and regeneration of global forests outside of urbanized regions.”

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, wrote back in August:

Scientists predict that as the temperature rises, soils in the tropics will dry up. Trees and forests could die off on a vast scale, and fresh water will be less available. The rivers leaving Kenya’s Mau forest, which replenish many lakes, including those essential to the tourism industry, are drying up. Where government policies are inadequate, communities hungry for agricultural land degrade forests, exacerbating the negative impacts of climate change.

The world hopes that in Copenhagen, governments will be guided by the realities of available scientific evidence, and act accordingly. I welcome the development of new incentive mechanisms, such as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), which should also address degradation of agricultural land. REDD would compensate developing countries for environmental services provided by indigenous forests left standing.

Other mechanisms have been proposed and should be considered, including an “emergency fund” by the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project, which would provide payments from public and private sources to countries that protect their rainforests.

On carbon markets, a lot is yet to be learned. The Green Belt Movement is implementing pilot projects with both the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and voluntary carbon credit schemes, the experience of which is valuable. It’s important that such markets serve the forests, conserve biodiversity and improve the livelihoods of communities.

Public education is also essential. In 2006, the Green Belt Movement partnered with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Prince Albert II of Monaco, and the World Agroforestry Centre to launch the Billion Tree Campaign. In March 2009 we passed the three billion mark for new trees planted by governments, organizations, communities, the private sector, and individuals. Our new goal is planting of an additional seven billion trees by the end of 2009 — roughly equal to what the human population will be then.

Of course, trees and forests are far more than just carbon sinks and preservers of fresh water supplies. To begin with, their sheer aesthetic impact on the human psyche cannot be minimized. Rambling Woods blog presents an unusually comprehensive post on fall foliage, including the transcript for a National Public Radio story from the end of October about how deciduous leaves fall (it turns out they’re actually pushed), as well as precise directions for how to preserve colored leaves. Leslee at 3rd House Journal writes about the “Conservation of Color” in language taken straight from the biology of deciduous trees — but in a fully lyrical, satisfying, short poem. To her, the trees promise

curatives for sharp tongues,
faintness of heart, muddlement,
sensitivity to cold and darkening days.

Jade at Arboreality shows us “Black Cottonwood in Autumn Gold,” a striking sight. At A DC Birding Blog, John watches the sky for red clouds of berries, sign of the winged, shining, flameleaf, or dwarf sumac, A.K.A. Rhus copallinum. Another D.C. blog, The Natural Capital, advises Washingtonians to look for “Witch Hazel, the Last Flowers of the Year.” In addition to the ornamental Asian species, which flowers in the winter, there is apparently native, fall-blooming Hamamelis virginiana in Rock Creek Park.

Witch hazel is also the subject of a post this month at Connecticut-based Hill-Stead’s Nature Blog, whose proprietor sent along a link to post on Sassafras, as well. Both posts blend the personal with the scientific and folkloric into brief but comprehensive posts — tree-blogging at is best, if I may say so. They do have a bit of an unfair advantage with the witch hazel, though: Hill-Stead is right up the road from “the witch hazel capital of the world.”

At Yips and Howls, a species account of the western larch by Elizabeth Enslin mixes the personal with the scientific, while Florida panhandle-based writer Beth Westmark is revisiting Sequoia National Park.

The Ella Bay wilderness in far northern Queensland is home to endangered cassowaries, among other treasures, and it seems the giant, flightless birds are there in part due to a rich diversity of fruiting rainforest trees, according to the blog Ella Bay Forever. Russ Constable not only took great photos but also consulted with three different scientists in the identification and ecological significance of the fruits gathered on just one walk along the beach.

From the island of Oahu in Hawaii this month came word of a hanging potato tree — or so blogger Sarala dubbed it at first. She figured it might be a non-native species, and so it was: Kigelia africana, or sausage tree, native to West Africa. “The island of Oahu seems to have trouble taking care of its native species,” she notes.

Wildlife biologist Ellen Snyder blogged a species sketch of the eastern hemlock at Spicebush Log, drawing attention not only to its identifying characteristics but also to its role in the ecosystem and the threat it faces from an invasive insect pest, the woolly adelgid. Unfortunately, this a threat we’re all too familiar with here in central Pennsylvania.

A New York Times article, “Building with Whole Trees,” by Anne Raver, describes forester and architect Roald Gunderson’s unique approach to building with whole, unmilled trees, often painstakingly shaped into arches while still alive, a process taking years. Most foresters look at the woods with an eye shaped by industrial monoculture, the predominant mindset of forestry schools in agricultural colleges across North America. But the best foresters — such as those employed by mountain villages in Switzerland — are really gardeners, and Gunderson is clearly in this camp. If the Times article is any indication, Gunderson’s homes are beautiful, too.

Here at Via Negativa this month, I blogged about a more typical, destructive approach to timbering on a neighbor’s land — high-grading. On a more positive note, I also shared a photo and short poem about wild apples.

Sometimes, apparently catastrophic die-offs of trees are simply part of the natural cycle, and I hope the climate change mitigation planners recognize this. At the aptly named blog under the ponderosas, Jennifer presents “Reason 645 why my blog readership is so low” — her penchant for telling the unpalatable truth about ponderosa pine forests. They’re fire adapted. They’re meant to burn. “The lodgepole forest is dead; long live the lodgepole forest,” she intones.

But the threats to trees by greedy humans seem never-ending. This month I was incensed to learn that sandalwood trees are under attack from smugglers. “How do we protect these trees?” asks Chennai-based blogger Arati. “Maybe each one of us can do our bit by not patronizing sandalwood products, be they in soaps, powders, oils or perfumes.”

In another post at Trees, Plants and more, Arati wonders about the logic of planting lines of trees from a single species. “If a disease struck one tree would it not strike all others on the same road? Does this not compartmentalize the ecological diversity of the area?” Good question. There’s clearly more to this tree-planting business than meets the eye.

Pablo at Roundrock Journal is taking a decidedly laissez-faire approach to planting trees in his Missouri woods, scattering bald cypress seeds in likely spots around streams and draws in hopes that the next flood will deposit them in optimal locations for sprouting.

Greenspade blog shares tips on planting trees for energy efficiency around your house, but local ecologist takes it a step further, delving into the question of which street trees to plant from an ecosystem standpoint.

Large stature trees — like red oak, London plane tree, or sweetgum — do interfere with overhead wires, but they also provide greater ecosystem benefits than do small stature trees: they sequester (store) more carbon, filter more particulate matter from the air, and intercept more rainfall via leaves, trunk, and soil (and slow runoff into storm drains). And, because of their larger crown spread and evapotranspiration capacity, larger trees cool larger areas of surrounding air (cooling nearby infrastructure and buildings, too).

This is no ordinary blog post; Georgia has done some of the research herself and has the data to back up her claims. Everyone with an interest in urban landscapes needs to read this essay.

Local ecologist does feature lighter pieces, too, including a couple photo-essays this past month on the trees of Sir Winston Churchill Square in Greenwich Village and the St. Louis City Garden.

In addition to the many more obvious values of urban trees (aesthetics, cleaner air, shade), their penchant for making leaf prints on concrete sidewalks can turn an otherwise ordinary stroll through the ‘hood into a magical thing. Neighborhood Nature takes a close and thorough look.

On his North Carolina mountaintop, Christopher C. wakes up one morning to find that a tall black locust tree has split and is threatening to crush a nearby apple. This is a situation I know all too well: the black locusts around the houses here on our Pennsylvania mountaintop have constantly calved limbs over the years. Great as black locusts are for fence posts and for forest restoration projects, they do not make good yard trees!

Crackskull Bob unwinds from watching the Sunday morning talking heads by sketching a broken tree, while the wonderfully cracked artist Christoph Niemann at Abstract City, a New York Times blog, shapes real leaves into a Shel Silversteinian form of biodiversity. His new “finds” include such rarities as Rod-Blogojevich’s-Hair Tree and Eighties-Jeans Tree.

Trees appeal to all kinds of artists, it seems. Withering leaves on the ground inspire UK blogger Suzi Smith, who uses walnut ink to reproduce the “sludgy colours” in her haiku calligraphy.

Photoblogger Catherine Kennedy shares a couple shots of Achray Forest, which is part of the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park in the Trossachs, in Scotland. Just west of Edinburgh, Crafty Green Poet reports on a walk through the Almondell County Park’s ancient woodland, notable for its very old birch trees.

I confess I didn’t realize that Dutch elm disease was a problem in Europe, too, but in a “meeting with a remarkable tree,” the Oxford Elm, British blogger Tony comments that large old elm trees have become scarce “as 80% of Elms succumbed to Dutch Elm disease. Dutch Elm disease has been with us for centuries but in the 1960s a virulent strain arrived on these shores from North America. Some 20 million trees were killed.”

Ashley Peace in Sheffield, England shares a photo-essay on Autumn in Millstone’s Wood, where the ground lies thick in fallen beech leaves.

Arati from Chennai sent along one other post late in the month, reporting on a local Free the Tree campaign: groups of people get together, in this case organized by Arati herself, to remove the hundreds of nails pounded into roadside trees over the years to hold advertisements. The volunteers then fill the wounds with a mixture of soil and turmeric paste to help them heal. I had known that turmeric is considered something of a heal-all for humans, but hadn’t realized it works on trees, too.

Novelist and poet Marly Youmans is someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what trees and humans have in common. She sent along the link to some of her recent treeish poems in the online journal Mezzo Cammin: “The Foliate Head,” and “The Throne of Psyche,” which begins,

A soul’s mysterious as any tree–
It drives a root as deadly low as hell,
It stretches peaceful branches heaven-high,
It harvests light with leaves of memory.

The last submission I received for this month’s festival returns us, once again, to the theme of tree-planting. A post at Nature’s Whispers captures the solemnity, the pathos, and the unintended humor of a tree-planting ceremony to honor two stillborn children.

We had told my 3 year old daughter that today we would be planting a tree. As we all know, the world revolves around every toddler so my daughter obviously understood that to mean that she would be doing the planting. She picked up our precious sapling and flung it around like a majorette twirls her mace before plonking it unceremoniously into the hole, upside down. I heard my intake of breath as my heart rested in my mouth and I gasped ‘be gentle’. It all turned out all right in the end, the tree was planted. My daughter helped pack the earth around the roots with her hands, as she did on the days her sisters were buried. You’ve got to love that girl, I’m sure she was born a healer.

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Thanks to everyone for sending in links and restoring my faith in the long-term viability of this blog carnival! The next edition of the Festival of the Trees will appear at xenogere on January 1, 2010. Email your links to Jason — jason[at]xenogere[dot]com — by December 30.

By the way, if you want to be sure not to miss Festival deadlines and new editions, consider subscribing to the coordinating blog via email. We’re also on Twitter now, and of course the blog has an RSS feed, but nothing beats an emailed reminder.

That first sacrament’s
cratered snow was already
turning brown
while they marvelled
at its tartness, the luster
& tight fit of its skin,
its curved descent to orifice.
Then oh the aftertaste —
like wood, like clay.

Click photo for a larger version.