Tree line

I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent program about trees that included two TED talks. One of the talks was about the giant redwoods and the other was about the communication web between trees.

These talks were fascinating and for days afterwards, I could not stop thinking about trees. The two presenters of these TED talks made me think about my own relationship with trees. I am not a scientist like Suzanne Simard or someone who is going to climb to the top of a giant redwood and sleep overnight in a hammock in the tree top, but I realized how trees have been a vital part of my own life.

Just as we trace genealogical lines I began to do a tracing of the tree line throughout my 72 years of time on the planet.

Two of my earliest tree loves were a mimosa tree that sat in a vacant lot next to my grandparents’ home in Wendell, North Carolina and the crepe myrtles in the backyard of my childhood home in Raleigh, North Carolina. These were the trees where I played as a child. None of them came even close to being giant but they were definitely childhood friends. Both mimosas and crepe myrtles are relatively small trees which made them easy to climb and easy to hold several of us on their various branches.

I remember gathering with the neighbors’ children, Jerry and Vicky, when I would visit my grandparents. They lived on the other side of the vacant lot and the mimosa tree was our hangout. I think back on how that tree felt welcoming. I have read that mimosas are wonderful for attracting hummingbirds and butterflies though I have no memory of ever seeing those around the mimosa tree as a child. Surely I would have noticed, wouldn’t I?

The crepe myrtles in our backyard of our family’s little brick house in Raleigh were there when we moved to that house. I was only 5 years old and loved climbing up into all those beautiful flowers on the crepe myrtle. They were good climbing trees for the not-so adventurous (I was—and am—in that category). I do remember once my brother climbing up fairly high with an empty paint bucket and yelling down to our playmate who lived next door to “Catch it!” Unfortunately, she caught it right in the face! Ouch. Her mother paid a visit to our mother and no more paint buckets were carried up into trees.

Southern Living magazine calls the crepe myrtle (and yes, in the South we spell it crepe not crape) the most popular of all Southern trees.

When Tom and I were first married, we lived in Craig County, Virginia and there was an amazing hemlock forest near our house. It was a true zen-like experience to go and sit in the darkness and quiet of the hemlocks. I have wondered if that hemlock forest survived the destructive and invasive insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid. I would like to make a road trip back to that hemlock forest that I remember with such awe to see if those hemlocks are still standing in all their graceful majesty.

When our children were babies, we bought a piece of land in Greene County, Virginia, thinking it would be our forever home. We built a house. We planted two trees near the house—a blue spruce for our son and a Soulangeana magnolia for our daughter. The magnolia still stands but a family that bought the house after us, cut down the blue spruce as their Christmas tree one year. That made me sad, though we had no claim there any longer

We also planted a small orchard. I remember many evenings paging through the Stark Brothers catalog to select the apple, pear, apricot and cherry trees. We never got to enjoy the fruits of our labor but I hope another family has.

When we moved into Charlottesville, our backyard was a literal sea of dogwoods, both white and pink, and redbud trees. Spring was absolutely glorious when those trees were all blooming. I smile even now when I remember the many Easter pictures we took of our family with those trees as the backdrop.

The move that took us to Memphis, Tennessee for eight years brought a house with giant oak trees that produced bushels and bushels and bushels of leaves to be raked and bagged each fall. It was our good fortune that our son was an industrious teenager, eager to earn money. We were only too happy to pay for all those leaves to be raked. The fall our son left and went off to college was the same time we decided to move to Valle Crucis. There was more to the move than just to avoid the raking but it helped make the decision easier.

The most interesting tree to me when we moved to Valle Crucis, North Carolina was the catalpa tree. They grow very, very tall —some as tall as 90 feet—and have enormous leaves. Sadly, they don’t live a very long time. They show off in the late spring with a cascade of large, showy white flowers. My husband gave me a gift of a communion set carved from the wood of a fallen catalpa. When I retired we decided to leave the set at the Valle Crucis Conference Center for future groups to use in their celebrations of the Eucharist.

Our years in Vermont brought maples—flaming reds and oranges in the fall. The Vermont autumn colors will literally take your breath away.

I don’t think lilacs or rhododendron are really trees but some grow taller than trees and both have special places in my tree line from our years in Vermont (the lilacs on the grounds of the Shelburne Museum are stunning in their diversity) and in North Carolina and nearby Tennessee, especially the views from Roan Mountain.

I have another point on my tree line from my time in Wales. One spring it looked as if the mountains were all painted pink. It was the rhododendron in bloom. I thought they were absolutely lovely; Welsh friends hated them and described them as a pest.

I fell in love with birch trees when I encountered them on retreat in Gloucester, Massachusetts and then years later on a trip to Minnesota to see our son and his family.

Even the Minneapolis airport has beautiful mosaics of birch trees.

There is a gingko tree outside my window where we live now in Asheville. This gingko is always the last to lose its leaves (usually in one fell cold-frost swoop) and the last to bud out in the spring. For two years I have watched a cardinal who likes to sit on the tip-top branch of the gingko surveying his kingdom. Occasionally a bluebird or a finch will perch there but the cardinal seems to rule.

When we need a boost in diversity we head to the nearby NC Arboretum and enjoy even more trees, including bonsai trees.

Think about your own tree line, the trees that have blessed your life, past and present.

Life is full. Trees make it even fuller and more beautiful.

I am so grateful for the program with those two TED talks about trees that sent me wandering along my life’s tree line. My special thanks, too, to my friend and fellow blogger Bill Clontz, who hosted this tree program.

Check out Bill’s blog: https://agentsofreason.com

You can google the two TED talks I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

How trees talk to each other with Suzanne Simard

The mysterious lives of giant trees with Richard Preston