Root

sky roots
(Click photo to see larger version)

Mid-March at this latitude is a time when even the most ordinary things can seem like revelations, as the Theriomorph observes. There is both less and more of things than we remember. Upturned roots diminished by rot seem to draw sustenance directly from the clouds, while living roots on a stream bank eroded by floods are left clutching little but each other and a few, bare rocks. As we circle, examining them from all angles, these signs turn gradually into ciphers. Soon we risk our own entrapment in a spell of undiscovery. Did she really say, “Even the babies have rocks in their parts”? What does it mean?


(Video from the Undiscovery Channel)

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A couple of housekeeping notes: I’ve introduced a Feedburner version of the RSS feed for this site, the main advantage of which is that it displays videos to subscribers. Sometimes, as with that skunk video in “Canoe Creek,” I forget to include a note or caption to tell people reading this via Bloglines, Google Reader, or wherever that there’s a video in the post. And why make them click through to view it, after all? Other advantages to the new feed include helpful links to share the post via email, Facebook, and so on, similar to what you have on-site with the ShareThis utility. I’ve made it the new default, meaning that it’s what you’ll get if you click on the little feed icon in the Firefox browser window.

And speaking of the browser window, if you’ve noticed a question mark inside a yellow warning triangle to the left of the URL, don’t be alarmed — that’s simply my new favicon. (Don’t like it? Design me another one!) It used to be an exclamation point, but it was subjected to rigorous questioning in Photoshop. If you can’t see the new favicon, and are still still looking at the old, nearly indecipherable one (which was supposed to be a “falling rocks ahead” sign, but looked more like a sideways “V”), that’s probably because your browser is still caching the old one. Don’t worry — you’re not missing much.

Where the wild trees are

Wild Trees cover

One night in early March 2008, I woke up around 3:00 and found myself unable to get back to sleep. After half an hour or so of tossing and turning, I got up, went downstairs, and began to read The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, by Richard Preston. This was apparently at the very same time that someone whom I did not yet know, surfing the Internet on her laptop, discovered Via Negativa and became engrossed in the dense, leafy foliage of its archives. Her eyes were a murky brown. Someday our paths would cross — ideally in a grove of wild, or unclimbed, trees — and we’d give “climax forest” a whole new meaning.

The oil furnace in the crawlspace under the living room rattled awake, shaking the house, and I drew the afghan tighter around my pajama-clad legs. The book was engrossing, featuring bizarre characters in tightly crafted scenes, and I slowly got over my annoyance at the odd blend of narrative omniscience and first-person journalism. After two hours, I put the book down and returned to bed, sleeping soundly until around 7:30, when I awoke feeling thoroughly refreshed.

Over the next five days, I returned to The Wild Trees every night for a couple of hours before going to bed. I enjoyed reading about its protagonists’ off-beat childhoods, which reminded me so much of my own, and the bite-sized chunks of natural history thrown in to flavor the stew were remarkably easy to digest. Reading Richard Preston was, it turned out, highly conducive to a good night’s sleep, for reasons that scientists are only just beginning to understand. His fast-moving narrative makes few demands on the reader, yet lacks the kind of propulsive plot-line that might tempt one to stay up too late. Each chapter builds to some pearl of insight or high drama, but ends well before boredom sets in, kind of like a Billy Collins poem. This is no dreary Bernd Heinrich book, where the process of scientific investigation takes center stage. Here, the scientists’ essential discoveries are described in a pithy paragraph or two — footnotes, almost, to the “passion and daring” advertised in the subtitle.

I became troubled, though, that I’d be unable to write a glowing review of a book that does so well what it sets out to do. Was it really Preston’s fault that he failed to write the book I wanted to read? Book reviewers who take authors to task for failing to write as they would’ve written themselves have always, quite frankly, annoyed the shit out of me. I decided that Preston deserves a lot of credit for writing a book-club-friendly page-turner about people obsessed with the size and performance of redwoods. I found the lack of a bibliography intensely frustrating, but what did I expect from a publisher like Random House? If I’m to be honest with myself, I enjoyed filling a few holes in my knowledge about canopy ecosystems in such a painless and soporific manner. A couple hours of passion, followed by a long and uninterrupted sleep: what — I asked myself — was so wrong with that? But it left me ill-prepared for what would happen next.
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Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to the Festival of the Trees, the next edition of which will appear at the Brazilian tree blog Árvores Vivas em Nossas Vidas. Send submissions to arvoresvivas [at] gmail [dot] com by March 28, or preferably even sooner, in order to give the host enough time to prepare a bilingual version.

Trespasser’s will

fencerow

Yesterday I strapped on snowshoes for the first time this year — and possibly for the last (it’s in the 50s today). Unlike a lot of areas to the north of us, central Pennsylvania hasn’t gotten very much snow yet this year, so Saturday’s eight inches on top of the four to five inches already on the ground afforded our first real opportunity for snowshoeing.

There’s a special freedom you feel when walking on top of deep snow through woods where abundant fallen logs and other obstructions have mostly been buried. You get to thinking you can walk almost anywhere, albeit with great deliberation if you’re using heavy, clunky, white-ash-and-rawhide-type snowshoes. I went off-trail almost immediately, and soon found myself straying over the line onto the posted property of a neighbor with whom we don’t have very good relations. I figured what the heck — he’s not going to be up here today, and someone has to enjoy his woods in the off-season. I was after an unobstructed view of the valley, thinking I might take a few landscape photos. It was harder than I figured; there’s a lot of brushy growth in his recently logged woods.

deer bed 2

Fortunately, scenic vistas were among the least interesting things I found. I admired several dense stands of Hercules’-club. These strange, thorny trees are among my favorites, but unfortunately the deer like them, too, and often kill them by stripping off their bark, thorns and all, during the hungriest time of the year — March and early April. And in fact, I did find three Hercules’-club stems that had just been stripped to a height of four and a half feet, their pale yellow nakedness looking especially pitiful against the snow.

The deer bed in the above photo was one of three clustered around a large oak tree on our side of the ridge — the local herd, post-hunting season. But over on our neighbor’s property, where hunting pressure is lower, I was dismayed to find another, much larger cluster of deer beds: eleven of them. All had fresh tracks leading out of them; there was no doubt they’d all been occupied the night before. I saw oak stump sprouts that were still struggling to get above deer browse height, ten years after the logging. The good news is that we won’t have to listen to our hunter friends complaining that aren’t enough deer next fall — the deer, unlike the humans, aren’t constrained by boundaries.

burl 3

By far the coolest thing I found yesterday was this immense burl on a chestnut oak tree. I shot photos from all angles, including one with a view of the valley behind it: you can check out the slideshow here. It amused me to consider that the same grotesque protrusion which renders a tree unfit for regular lumber (and probably the reason why this one is still standing) can make it quite valuable in the right hands. By the same token, I suppose someone with a purely culinary interest in oysters would be annoyed to find a pearl. Liberate the pearl from the oyster, or the burl from its bark and tree, and suddenly the grotesque becomes sublime, like trading a distended abdomen for a newborn baby.

That’s entirely too many metaphors for me, though — I’m getting giddy! Confusing freedom with willfulness is always a risky proposition. Best to hike back onto more familiar ground, safe behind the ridge-top boundaries which also form our horizons here in Plummer’s Hollow.
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Don’t miss the March edition of the Festival of the Trees — a wonderful romp through fruit tree and orchard lore.

The hawthorn place

hawthorn 1

Do children still have secret places? When I was a kid, growing up here on the mountain with my two brothers as my only playmates, I had a lot of time to myself, and came to like my own company pretty well as a consequence. Being an inveterate day-dreamer, the mountain I wandered probably bore little resemblance to what the others saw. I especially enjoyed finding secret places, which often featured clearings in the woods. During the long hours of confinement in school, I remember sketching the imaginary rooflines of lonely mountain huts, suggested to me by my reading of medieval Irish and classical Chinese poems and stories. I was — it must be said — a pretty weird kid.

The best places were those I only ever saw once, and was never able to find again, so that they remained secret even from me. I won’t say any more about those. But most of the others I revisited fairly often, and I ended up sharing some of them with my younger brother, too. These refindable places had the drawback of never remaining static: I remember how devastated I was when my favorite large tree on the mountain died, and a few years later fell over. I hardly ever go back to that ravine now.

hawthorn spring

One place that’s remained more or less the same is the one pictured here. In my mother’s nature writing, she often mentions the Far Field thicket, a place right on our property line at the south end of a small meadow — the Far Field — a mile down-ridge from the houses. The thickety part is dominated by fox grape and the strange thorny trees called Hercules’ club or devil’s walkingstick, which flower in profusion in midsummer and sport heavy masses of purple berries in the fall — a wildlife bonanza. She always enters this area from above, I think, and enjoys the way the thicket acts like a blind at the same time that it attracts birds, especially in the winter.

I always preferred the area downhill from the thicket, ever since I discovered a secret entrance through the woods on the other side. I was in my mid-teens, I guess. One summer day I followed an animal trail over a dry watercourse and through dense green jungles of grape vines and emerged into a clearing right next to a gnarled hawthorn tree. It was an old charcoal hearth from the early 19th century, one of many on the mountain, immediately recognizable because of its size — roughly 40 feet in diameter — and the fact that it was perfectly level. An old galvanized steel bucket with a couple bullet holes in it lay on its side in the middle of the clearing, and I turned it over to make a seat and sat there for a long time.

hawthorn trunk

Another hawthorn grew immediately below the old hearth, and as I continued to follow the animal trail through a small, wet meadow, and then backtracked toward the thicket, I found more — maybe ten in all. The area had been clear-cut repeatedly over the last 200 years, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. To me, it was a wild orchard.

I had always mourned the loss of the Plummer’s Hollow orchard, which the old timers told us about when we moved in: forty acres of apples, pears and peaches. The previous owners had bulldozed out all but a handful of the trees back in the 1950s, we were told — ten years before my birth. When I was a kid, an ancient Yellow Delicious apple tree grew below the back porch among Concord grape trellises, and a Stamen Winesap below that. But both trees died in the late 80s, around the time a burgeoning deer population was decimating the grapes. So I suppose it was inevitable that one of my favorite places on the mountain should be an ersatz orchard whose trees were well armed against the deer.

hawthorn drupes

Which is not to say that hawthorn sprouts don’t still have a pretty rough time of it. Two springs ago I planted 50 hawthorn seedlings around the yard and adjacent meadow, hoping that at least a handful would escape detection by the deer, but I haven’t seen any sign of them since.

It would be easy to rationalize my irrational love of hawthorns. I could cite the attraction of their flowers to insects, their leaves to the larvae of many moths and butterflies, and of course their fruit to a huge number of birds and mammals, humans included. I could talk about hawthorn jelly — which I’ve never actually made — and hawthorn salad from the fresh, new leaves, which I’ve never remembered to sample. I could talk about the European folklore, which generally casts the tree as a symbol of hope, and includes the belief that Jesus’ crown of thorns came from a species of hawthorn. “In Serbian folklore, a stake made of hawthorn wood was used to impale the corpses of suspected vampires,” says the Wikipedia article on the genus Crataegus, while “in Celtic lore, the hawthorn plant was used commonly for rune inscriptions along with Yew and Apple. It was once said to heal the broken heart.”

The hawthorn place has grown a bit more open over the decades, thanks to the deer keeping wild grape sprouts and blackberry brambles in check, but otherwise it hasn’t changed all that radically. The biggest change is in spring, when the hawthorns bloom: what used to be a small patch of mayflowers has grown almost to an acre in size, completely covering the charcoal hearth and its environs with a forest of green umbrellas. The rusty old bucket is still hiding in the weeds, and it still makes a serviceable seat.

mayapples with hawthorn blossoms
Hawthorn blossoms on mayapples (photo taken in 2005 with my old 1-megapixel camera)
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Written for the special Festival of the Trees edition on fruit trees and orchards, set for March 1 at Orchards Forever.

Polyporous

black birch with Polyporus betulina fungi

Betula lenta, “pliant birch tree.” It’s true: a black birch is almost always more resilient than a white one, more likely to straighten back up after bearing a translucent burden of ice. Only in death does it lose its give and become rigid with listening, all its ears turned downward for news of the earth.

For more winter fungi, see A Passion for Nature‘s fungi category. Jennifer’s even putting together a book on the subject.

Among trees

Lorianne has assembled a rich array of links at Festival of the Trees #19. Go look.

red maple from above

This morning I spent some time sitting in a tree. It was cold, and the views were mostly of other trees. I felt like a fly at a rather dull cocktail party. The only conversation I could hear was between a dead tree and a live one about twenty feet away — a shrill squeal. Perhaps it was really more of a seance.

tracks

As I looked down at my own footprints leading away from the tree, I felt a sudden pang of what can only be described as pity for the rootless sprout that made them. A strong gust of wind set my tree to rocking, and I gripped the hand-rail of the hunter’s tree stand. Heeeeeeee, said the dead one.

Deadwood in winter

snow and fungus log

Sky and snowpack are two kinds of white, and the pale skin of arboreal fungi makes a third. Within a year or two after death, a log or snag has already become an extension of the ground in one respect: it is shot through with networks of fungal hyphae, the mycelium. This is not a root structure — remember that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. Rather, it is like a skilled miner who has adapted to the job so well that he has become almost indistinguishable from the ore.

birch snag in snow

Wood so mined becomes lighter than paper: punk wood. It breaks easily, but does not yet crumble between the fingers. It makes an excellent tinder, burning with a green flame.

catacombs

Other miners of dead trees include ants and termites and the pale grubs of beetles: stag beetles, longhorn beetles, scarabs and more. Such xylophagous insects contribute at least as much to the decomposition of trees as the fungi — indeed, some species of the latter require the openings of the former before they can begin their own infiltrations.

Various species of bees and wasps and the maggots of flies, midges and mosquitoes also make their homes in the tunnels of beetle grubs, and feed on their dried-out excrement. Though there’s very little insect activity this time of year, a half-rotted snag preserves a record as visually rich and intriguing as a Dead Sea scroll. And of course the woodpeckers also come knocking, drilling doors into larder, shelter, and sounding board. The winter woods echoes with their stacatto taps and calls.

oak snag in snow

If after all this the dead still stand, it is often at odd angles. The sun is no longer of any interest to them. They alone try the embrace of other trees, and when the wind blows, they are vociferous in their complaint.
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Don’t forget to send tree-related links to Lorianne — zenmama at gmail dot com — by December 30 for inclusion on the next Festival of the Trees. And be sure to visit the Insecta issue of qarrtsiluni, which is still in progress with a number of posts yet to come.

“El son de las hojas”: Five tree poems from Renaissance Spain

De los álamos vengo, madre,
de ver cómo los menea el aire.

De los álamos de Sevilla,
de ver a mi linda amiga.

De los álamos vengo, madre,
de ver cómo los menea el aire.

*

I come from the aspens, Mother,
from watching them tremble in the breeze.

From the aspen trees of Seville,
where I saw my beautiful lover.

I come from the aspens, Mother,
from seeing how they tremble in the breeze.

**

Tres morillas me enamoran
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

Tres morillas tan garridas
iban a coger olivas,
y hallábanse cogidas
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

Y hallábanse cogidas
y tornaban desmaí­das
y las colores perdidas
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

Tres moricas tan lozanas,
tres moricas tan lozanas
iban a coger manzanas
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

*

Three Moorish girls caught my eye
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

Three fine-looking Moorish girls
went out to pluck olives from the tree
and got themselves plucked
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

Got themselves plucked
and returned in a tizzy,
all their color gone
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

Three very lively Moorish girls,
Three very lively Moorish girls
went out to pick apples
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

**

Las mis penas, madre,
de amores son.

Salid, mi señora,
de s’ol naranjale,
que sois tan fermosa
quemarvos ha el aire
de amores, sí­.

*

These troubles I’m having, Mother,
are all from love.

Come out, my lady,
from under the orange grove,
for you are so beautiful
that the very air, I swear,
will ignite with love.

**

So ell encina, encina,
so ell encina.

Yo me iba, mi madre,
a la romerí­a;
por ir más devota
fui sin compañí­a:
so ell encina.

Por ir más devota
fui sin compañí­a.
Tomé otro camino
dejé el que tení­a:
so ell encina.

Halléme perdida
en una montaña,
echéme a dormir
al pie dell encina:
so ell encina.

A la media noche
recordé, mezquina;
halléme en los brazos
del que más querí­a:
so ell encina.

Pesóme cuitada
de que amanecí­a,
porque yo gozaba
del que más querí­a:
so ell encina.

Muy bendita sí­a
la tal romerí­a:
so ell encina.

*

Beneath the holly oak, the holly oak,
beneath the holly oak.

I was going around
on pilgrimage, Mother,
and to show my full devotion,
I went alone,
beneath the holly oak.

To show my full devotion,
I went alone.
I took another road,
and left the one I was on,
beneath the holly oak.

I found I had lost my way
on the mountainside,
so I lay down to sleep
at the foot of a holly oak,
beneath the holly oak.

In the middle of the night,
I woke up, all miserable,
and found myself in the arms
of the one I love the best,
beneath the holly oak.

Poor me! I was so sorry
when morning came,
because I’d been enjoying
the one I love the best,
beneath the holly oak.

Oh blessed be
that pilgrimage
beneath the holly oak.

**

Con el viento murmuran,
madre, las hojas;
y al sonido me duermo
bajo su sombra.

Sopla un manso viento
alegre y suave,
que mueve la nave
de mi pensamiento;
dame tal contento
que me parece
que el cielo me ofrece
bien a deshora;
y al sonido me duermo
bajo su sombra.

Si acaso recuerdo
me hallo entre las flores,
y de mis dolores
apenas me acuerdo;
de vista las pierdo
del sueño vencida,
y dame la vida
el son de las hojas;
y al sonido me duermo
bajo su sombra.

*

The leaves murmur
in the wind, Mother,
and lull me to sleep
in their shade.

A breeze blows
soft and light,
moving the ship
of my thoughts.
It makes me feel
so content, it’s as if
I’ve been given
an advance taste
of heaven,
lulled to sleep
in their shade.

If I happen to wake,
I find myself
among flowers,
scarce able to recall
my cares —
lost to sight,
vanquished by dreaming —
and the sound of the leaves
brings me to life,
lulled to sleep
in their shade.

***

NOTES

These are all anonymous lyrics from the 15th and 16th centuries, translated with the help of a dictionary. I’m no scholar, but based on Cola Franzen’s translations in Poems of Arab Andalusia (City Lights, 1989), among other lines of evidence, I can only suppose that the vivid natural imagery in the Castillian cancioneros reflects strong Mozarabic influence. The association of trees with paradise and seduction seems especially Arab to me.

Tres morillas / Three Moorish girls

I resisted the urge to translate “tan lozanas” as “hot and spicy,” but somehow the racist stereotype of the vivacious, sexually available, brown-skinned southerner feels all too familiar.

So ell encina / Beneath the holly oaks

This song is in a woman’s voice.

The holly oak, or holm oak, Quercus ilex, sports leathery, evergreen leaves and “forms a picturesque rounded head, with pendulous low-hanging branches.” The Wikipedia article also says it’s one of the three best trees under which to grow truffles.

Romerí­as were annual pilgrimages to local or regional shrines associated with saints or the Virgin Mary, and were often quite festive events — a tradition that continues to this day.

Con el viento murmuran / The leaves murmur
This could be in the voice of either sex.
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The next edition of the Festival of the Trees will be at Hoarded Ordinaries on January 1. Send your tree-related links to zenmama (at) gmail (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line by December 30.

Wild apples

Jay Pfeil - Wild Apples

Be sure to check out the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees at Riverside Rambles.

The above print is one the few original artworks I own: “Wild Apples,” by Jay Pfeil. Please excuse the reflection on the glass — since Jay makes a living from her art, I thought I’d better not make too easily reproducible an image.

In addition to its merits as a work of art, it’s valuable to me as part of the Plummer’s Hollow historical record: it depicts an actual tree that stands about fifty feet from my kitchen window, as it appeared during the the artist’s nine month tenancy in this very house, back in 1979-1980. In fact, the print came off a big press that stood, as I recall, right next to the wall upon which it currently hangs in the guest house living room.

Wild Apples
View at larger size

Here’s the same tree as it appeared a week ago, with just a little Photoshoppery to make it a look slightly etchified (excuse the technical art-talk here, folks). I didn’t notice until I compared the photo with the print that Jay must’ve reversed her own sketch at some point in the printing process, because in reality the two trunks overlap in the opposite direction from the way she depicted them. Aside from that discrepancy, one can clearly see how much the tree has grown over the past 28 years, and how much it remains the same. A couple bad ice storms have taken their toll, but every year the tree is still dotted with apples that only the deer could love — and it gets well fertilized as a result.

We have several wild apple trees around the fringes of the field, and I’m sure they represent either old rootstock shorn of its grafts that survived the bulldozing of the Plummer Farm orchard back in the 1950s, or else the direct offspring of orchard trees — apple varieties don’t come true from seed. Here’s a photo taken in what is now our shed lawn, showing a bit of the orchard in the background as it appeared in 1919.

Charles Schroyer in the garden

The child in the photo was a Plummer relative up visiting his grandparents, Jacob and Mollie Plummer, who had a house in town at the time, but probably spent at least part of the summer here in the guest house. I would love to know just how many people have lived in this modest little dwelling over the 150 years of its existence. Just the other week, someone contacted us through the Plummer’s Hollow site to say that an ancestor of his had been born here back in the 1880s, and my Dad — who has done extensive research on the history of the place — had never heard the name. In fact, that was the first good evidence we’ve had that the place was even rented out in the 19th century, when Plummers still lived in the main house year-round.

Jay Pfeil and her soon-to-be husband Richard Sackett only lived here a short time, but they made a big impression on me. I was 12 and 13 at the time, and my brothers and I used to drop in after supper at least once a week for jam sessions: Richard was an accomplished guitarist, and my brother Steve played the five-string banjo. Richard got a job with a local landscaping company, and when time and circumstance permitted, he used to go busking in the streets of State College with some of his musician friends. Jay was exhibiting her works at local and regional arts festivals, with encouragement from her artist mother, who came to visit a couple of times — the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the three of them were role models of a sort, the first people I’d ever known who put art and music at the center of their lives. True, my mother is a writer, but my parents were never what one would call bohemian.

The winter of 1979-80 was a rough one, and Jay and Richard had to leave their Volkswagon bus at the bottom of the road for a couple of months, where eventually it got vandalized. The isolation per se didn’t seem to bother them too much, but they left, Jay said, because there wasn’t enough light here. It’s a north-facing hollow, and the guest house in particular is dark because of its proximity to the woods. For me, of course, the cave-like ambience is one of the main attractions of living here, but then I work with words rather than images. Jay and Richard moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Jay continues to make intaglio prints of local trees, among other things. In a biographical statement on the Piedmont Craftsmen site, she says,

At present I am immersed in drawing new leaves in the spring, with a special love of the native Fraser (or Mountain) Magnolia. I am also continuing to work on a number of other series, such as ‘Paths Through the Woods,’ ‘Plant Portraits,’ and ‘Full Moon’ … Through my daily mountain hikes, I strive to etch or draw my work in their natural locations. Due to the time-consuming and complex nature of etching and engraving, larger works are often finalized in my studio. It is my hope that [by] conveying my enthusiasm and reverence for the wild world … others may enjoy, respect, and conserve the environmental diversity that surrounds us in a sustainable, cooperative balance.

Though Jay may have ended up putting down roots farther south in the Appalachians, the seeds she planted here continue to bear fruit, albeit in a slightly altered form.

Sawn

stumped 1

I see, said the blind man, and he picked up a hammer and saw. Not blindness, exactly, but a very objective and analytical kind of seeing is required to cut down a tree, or to cut one up that has fallen on its own and may be spring-loaded with hidden stresses. Especially in a second-growth hardwood forest, where trees aren’t so massive that their falling will always follow a straight line, the logger must stay focused on the play of forces, ready to jump back at a moment’s notice.

stumped 2
Click photo for larger view.

But as time passes and the new surfaces made by a chainsaw begin to weather, strange things can happen. Those few minutes filled with the shriek and stink of the saw can acquire a patina of legend, in the way that violence so often seems to impart a glow of significance to the grayness of the ordinary.

fungus stump

But forget all that and look at the sawn wood. Should we be surprised if something that once passed messages between the sun and the underground kingdoms of the fungi should retain, even in its severed parts, a bit of magic?
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Submissions to the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees are due by Thursday. See here for details.