Trees – Page 20 – Via Negativa

This is without a doubt the Undiscovery Channel’s finest production to date, and possibly the most gripping, action-packed 6 minutes and 14 seconds of film you will ever see.

Actually, all kidding aside, this is the closest I’ve ever been to a pocupine while it was feeding. Usually they’re at least thirty feet off the ground, and most often it’s after dark, so all I see is a fuzzy silhouette against the stars accompanied by the sound of chewing. This one, which currently resides in the crawlspace under my house, for some reason late this afternoon decided to snack on the ornamental cherry in front of my porch — only the second time that tree has been chewed on by a porcupine, I think. I discovered it there when I stepped outside to toss an apple core into the weeds.

There was barely enough light to shoot; you can see how darkness is falling in the last couple minutes of the video. A minute in, you can hear the clacking of teeth as the suddenly alarmed porcupine finally notices me standing there. And then it decides I’m harmless — not that very many things can harm a porcupine — and goes back to feeding. The camera’s memory card only allows a little over three minutes of video, so I had to go in and unload the first part before filming the second part, hence the break in the action part-way through.

Porcupines always remind me of something Tove Jansson, the great Finnish children’s author and artist, might’ve dreamed up. It’s gratifying to know that we still share the earth with such creatures. And as regular readers of this blog know, I feel a certain affinity for porcupines: fellow loners who really, really like trees.

Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to the Festival of the Trees by November 29 for inclusion in the December 1 edition at A Neotropical Savanna. See here for details.

November 17, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Geography class convenes inside tree

Cleveland, Mississippi — A decline in state funding has put university classroom space at a premium. Delta State professor of geography Mark Bonta recently decided to relocate one of his classes to the Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area, where a hollow baldcypress tree over 46 feet in circumference easily accommodates himself and the seven students. “We could fit as many as 15 in there,” he said, “but enrollments are down.”

Although the relocation deprives the students of access to the internet, Dr. Bonta said that learning to navigate the swamp forest and inhabit a tree that is probably more than 1500 years old makes up for the temporary loss of Twitter, Facebook, and Hot or Not. “Many of my students admit they’d never set foot in a forest before, even if they’ve lived in the Delta all their lives,” he said. “The first time they heard the wind blowing in the treetops, it took them a while to figure out what the heck was making that rattling noise,” he said.

The students aren’t the only ones learning something new. Though he grew up in the woods, Bonta admitted he’d never been in a southern swamp forest during high winds before. “It turns out that under the right conditions, baldcypress trees can produce an eerily accurate imitation of the double-knock call of the ivory-billed woodpecker,” he said. It’s uncertain what affect this discovery will have on the ongoing search for ivory-billed woodpeckers, which relies heavily on remote recording devices in baldcypress swamps. Bonta indicated that he would incorporate the insight into his own research.

The tree serving as a temporary classroom space is the current Mississippi state champion, according to USDA Research Forester Don C. Bragg in a message to the Eastern Native Tree Society. According to RateMyProfessors.com, Bonta’s class is “an easy A” where “a lot of the learning [is] left to the student. His lectures [are] basically outlines with no filler.”

“That hollow tree’s a little like Dr. Bonta,” said one of the students, who requested anonymity pending the assignment of final grades for the semester. “Old and bald.”

Bonta said he hoped this experience would inculcate a life-long interest in nature. The student agreed that this had been the case. “As soon as classes are over, me and my buddies are gonna sneak back in there with a keg of beer and party our asses off,” he said.

For more on the Sky Lake cypresses, see Festival of the Trees 29: Bring Out Your Dead.

Don’t forget to submit tree- and forest-related links to Mary at A Neotropical Savanna — panamaplants [at] gmail [dot] com — for inclusion in the next edition of the Festival. The deadline is November 29.

November 7, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Yggdrasil

I have been capturing darkness from all corners of the sky
& passing it through the negative lightning of my body,
pressing hard with my one free hand to keep the earth
brown & solid beneath us, honeycombed as it is
with metals & aquifers & the pale shapes of our forerunners,
who burgeoned like gastropods from a single foot.

I have been taking notes in the margins
until the book is more mine than anybody’s,
& deserves an altar more than a lectionary.
My millennia of commentaries are dry as punk.
They will flare at the slightest spark & rise on black sails,
astronauts camouflaged against the missing dark matter.

I have inserted myself into your simple narratives,
the foil for your straight man, the chuckleheaded peasant
in your tragedies. My waistline expands like an empire
out to conquer the demons of appetite through assimilation.
The shortest distance bends & blurs. You can’t get
from Point A to Point B without doubling back.

In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the tree at the center of the cosmos.

Don’t forget to submit tree-related posts to the Festival of the Trees, which will appear next month at the outstanding science blog A Neotropical Savanna — details here.

November 1, 2008September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Festival of the Trees 29: Bring out your dead

Sky Lake WMA, Mississippi

Welcome to the Halloween/Samhain/Day of the Dead edition of the Festival of the Trees! No forest is more full of the dead — or more teeming with life — than an old-growth forest, and what could be spookier than a swamp? So for illustrations this time I’m using some photos my brother Mark Bonta took in his adopted state of Mississippi last spring, on a visit to the Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area. It’s not a so-called virgin or primary forest, since some trees were cut there a century ago, but the biggest and oldest trees were left because they were hollow. Mark says the preserve contains hundreds of giant baldcypress trees with a typical diameter at breast height of 10 feet, as well as the state — and possibly national — champion baldcypress, which is considerably larger than the “average” specimens in these pictures. The best time to visit is in fall, when woods are no longer flooded. Continue reading “Festival of the Trees 29: Bring out your dead”

October 28, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The oak goddess

The Goddess has many manifestations, and some of them are arboreal.

Thus, at any rate, the eco-feminist take. I lean more toward animism, myself. So let me rephrase that:

The Oak has many manifestations, and some of them are theomorphic. And clearly very sexy, at least to a relationship-challenged hermit.

The difference is not merely semantic. I’d personally feel much more comfortable making demands of a generalized, invisible deity with potentially unlimited powers. Petitionary prayer becomes more than a bit awkward when one is face-to-face with a living being who clearly has very different priorities from one’s own.

Of course, there are plenty of regular religious folks — the kind who didn’t make it into Bill Maher’s recent film — who limit their prayers to giving thanks and asking for greater closeness with the deity, and/or greater conformity with the deity’s ways. And that’s always kind of been my style too. So I beseeched the oak goddess for acorns.

“Well, Dave,” you’re probably thinking, “that was pretty droll of you.” But it was in fact a sincere and urgent request. As sometimes happens, a late, cold spring played hob with oak pollination here, and the acorn crop seems to have failed. The deer are almost all down in the valleys gleaning corn, but many other, less mobile wildlife species are probably going hungry. I don’t actually believe in miracles, because I don’t think we should encourage lawlessness in our deities — once they get a taste for making the sun stand still or water spring from the rock, pretty soon they’re running amok and smiting people like there’s no tomorrow.

So no miracles, please. Let the natural order prevail. But if some sort of alternate nutrient were to materialize, manna-like, who’s to say my intervention with the oak goddess didn’t have something to do with it?

I’m accepting submissions for the Nov. 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees blog carnival through Friday. Details here.

October 5, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Festival of the Trees returns to Via Negativa

Foggy Woods

The Festival of the Trees will return to Via Negativa on November 1 — the 29th edition. The last time I hosted it was in August 2007, and I also hosted the very first edition on July 1, 2006.

Any and all tree-related blog posts or photo galleries are welcome (which doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll include everything that comes in) and you needn’t be the author to submit a link. Multiple submissions are fine, too, and if you have any doubt about whether something qualifies, just go ahead and send it. Submit the links via my Contact page, or by email to bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, and please put either “Festival of the Trees” or “FOTT” in the subject line. The deadline is October 29.

In the meantime, please check out the current edition at Arboreality — one of our best yet, I think.

September 12, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

The tree eaters

Video link.

Last Saturday at an antique farm machinery show I fell in love with steam engines: the shiny copper complicated piping, the valves, the pistons, the throaty puttputtputting as the great iron beasts rolled into place. They ran on firewood and smudged the bucolic sky with their hoary breath, part smoke, part vapor. And here I was, tree-lover and conservationist, cheering them on.

One venerable steam engine powered an entire sawmill with a single, long belt. Three men helped feed a tulip poplar log to the screaming blade while below, an auger laddered the yellow chips onto a growing mound. The next engine over ran a cider press, carrying apples up a conveyor to be chopped and crushed by slow screws as big around as barrels. While one vat filled, the other sent fresh cider gushing through a hose — plastic, like the jugs that sold almost as fast as they were filled.

But for that detail, this could have been a vision of a post-oil future. I had some idea of what that might mean: the long sinuous ridges would go bluer in the thicker haze, and maybe we wouldn’t notice as their wooded slopes thinned into pasture for draft horses, and the remaining woods went back to woodlot, a “working forest” in the Nature Conservancy’s 21st-century euphemism, prized only for what’s of use to people: timber. Fuel. Pulp. Maybe chemicals again. Wild game. Water for steam and for mills. I thought of Shel Silverstein’s fable The Giving Tree, and the selfishness of that boy who grows old without ever growing up. The impossible contradictory demands he makes on the tree, both to go on nurturing and to sacrifice herself.

The men who tended the steam engines and the other old machines grinned and sweated like boys at play, breathing hard. It began to rain. We made our way quickly back to the car.

September 12, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Tree art, tree stories

The next edition of the Festival of the Trees — the blog carnival for all things arboreal — will have a special theme, Art and Arboreality.

Many of us have specific, personal stories about a tree or forest from our lives. Blogging is a great medium for short story-telling, so that’s what I encourage this month: photoblog, videoblog, break out the crayons, sing a song, write a poem, whatever moves you: tell us a story about a tree or forest from your life. Or make one up. Or do something even cooler. (And then send me the link.)

Submit your blog posts to me via email at jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com, or use the blog carnival submission form.

The deadline for submissions is September 27. Don’t miss your chance to be included in what is sure to be a stand-out collection of blog links.

August 8, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

El Arbol del Tule

My brother Mark, a professor of geography at Delta State University in Mississippi, recently returned from a two-week trip to the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where he was surveying cycad populations with some Mexican colleagues. While there, he took the opportunity to visit the world-famous Arbol del Tule (pronounced too-lay), in the small town of Santa Maria del Tule. I prevailed upon him to share some of his photos of the Tule tree with Via Negativa readers. Please click on the images to see larger versions.

The tree is an ahuehuete (ah-way-way-tay), known in English as Montezuma cypress or Mexican cypress — Taxodium mucronatum. Genetic tests have shown that it is a single genetic individual, not the fused trunks of several trees as some had thought. Tule is a kind of reed; the town was built on the site of a former marsh. According to the Gymnosperm database,

“Ahuehuete” is a Nahuatl phrase that means “old man of the water,” a fit name for a tree that is always associated with swamps, streams or springs (Bautista 2005). The tree is sometimes also called Ciprés de los Panatanos (Cypress of the Marshes).

The ahuehuete is most often found growing directly in the current of streams and rivers in Mexico. It’s a close relative of baldcypress (Taxodium distichum), the most visible difference being the virtual absence of cypress knees. Like the baldcypress, the Mexican cypress is deciduous, dropping its needles in the dry season.

Santa Maria del Tule is a small valley town a few miles east of Oaxaca City. It is easily accessible by local bus. The Arbol del Tule (l) dwarfs the church; a somewhat smaller ahuehuete (r) grows to the right of the church.

The town square is dominated by formal gardens, which include some topiary. One gets the impression from these photos of a rage for order — a natural reaction, perhaps, to the otherwise overwhelming wild presence of the great tree. However, this species has been a literal building-block of civilization in Mexico for a very long time. The Aztecs and other Mexica peoples built cities on shallow lakes by first planting palisades of ahuehuetes, then filling the areas they enclosed with rocks and soil. Tenochtitlan itself was built in this manner, which means that one of the largest cities in the world — Mexico City — had arboreal grandparents, whose bones might still lie buried somewhere beneath it.

Arbol del Tule
Common name: Ahuehuete or Sabino
Family: Taxodiaceae
Genus: Taxodium
Age: More than 2000 years
Girth (circumference): 58 meters
Height: 42 meters
Diameter: 14.05 meters
Volume: 816,829 cubic meters
Weight: 636.107 tons
Source: SEDAF
Town council 1996-98 [those who erected this plaque]

The age and even the exact size of the Tule tree are difficult to determine. The plaque at its base is unlikely to have the last word.

This is the smaller tree on the other side of the church, which would be considered remarkable anywhere else. As the aforelinked Gymnosperm database page puts it,

The Tule tree itself grows in a neighborhood that also holds six or seven other very large trees — one tends not to notice them, though, because most are behind walls and not publicly accessible, and because despite their large size (over 300 cm in diameter) they pale into insignificance beside the Tule tree itself.

Regular readers know of my interest in public poetry. I was happy to see Mark’s photo of an official Tule tree poem, especially since the poem, by Juan de Dios Peza, takes a decidedly via negativistic approach. Here’s the text, along with my quick-and-dirty translation.

El Ahuehuete de Santa Maria del Tule

¡Con qué pompa a la vista
te presentas titan de estas
risueñas soledades!
Si sacuden tu copa las
tormentas sollozan en
las ramas las edades.
¿Qué te puedo decir?
Inspiras tanto que a mí
me basta recoger tu
nombre y darte mi mutismo
como canto ¡Junto a un
arbol así nada es
el nombre!

Juan de Dios Peza
5 June 1994

The Ahuehuete of Santa Maria del Tule

How grand and stately
the sight of you, colossus
of these inviting solitudes!
When storms rock
your crown, all the ages
moan in your branches.
What could I possibly say to you?
You inspire me so much,
I’d rather withdraw your name
and give you instead my silence
in the form of a song: Next to
a tree like this, a name
means nothing!

Juan de Dios Peza
5 June 1994

Mark isn’t a terribly religious guy, but he said he found it strange that people would go into the church to worship with such a tree looming right outside. Here he is, as photographed by one of his colleagues, offering a prayer to the Arbol del Tule.

Be sure to check out the latest Festival of the Trees at Fox Haven Journal. The September 1 edition of the blog carnival will be hosted by the Spain-based blog Exploring the World of Trees; email links to Dan (treespecies AT gmail DOT com) by August 29.

July 25, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Palimpsest

At last the author relinquishes his hold on the book he has been struggling to finish for almost a century. There’s a sound like the rapid turning of pages, or the beating of wings.

Two vultures were circling low above the treetops, as if in a slow-motion chase. I watched their shadows move through the forest, sliding up and down trunks and gliding over the shiny leaves of the laurel. On a cool morning, they were looking for light and warmth like everyone else. They were looking for a lift.

It’s not the vultures’ fault if their very name provokes fear and revulsion, simply because we are ashamed of where we came from. We too are scavengers with naked faces and an aesthetic preference for clean, straight bones. In the middle of the day, when the predators retreat to the shade, we venture out, alert to the crushed leaf, the snapped twig, the blood-dark berry. Stark contrasts are pleasing to us. The savanna — half grass, half trees — was our founding parchment, and we return to that garden every chance we get.

At this very moment, in some back garden in Damascus, a brand-new tree is struggling to be born.

Category: Trees

Porcupine in a tree