I have given myself a modest project of finding out about trees. The places they inhabit. The names people give them. The ways of dendrology and common classification. In my first searches, I’ve found some very useful resources, like this Virginia Tech website that gives you a compendium of trees along with the materials of dendrology 101. There is a companion phone app you can use, but I am trying to de-appify my consciousness…I’m sure I’ll soon be addicted to it.
Tree identification is a process that truly embeds me in my amateur status. When I look at a tree, I don’t approach as the scientist, with the devices of measurement and the skills of observational categorization. Most often, I see a tree in its forms and relations to our shared landscape-mine and the trees. How it shades or doesn’t shade a building. How it stands alone in a field. How it spreads against the side of a home. How its branches finger and weave against the sky.
Recently, I have spent time in the yard and on walks looking more intently at trees and have felt the desire to connect them with their natural and human histories. During a yardwork day last weekend I asked our housemate, what kind of tree is that? And she responded, “Silver Maple. And its a pain! It spreads its seeds everywhere and everywhere new saplings sprout up. Especially along the buildings. If you see any of them, pull them up!” I took her word as gospel and have been thinking of it as a Silver Maple ever since, only today verifying its identity with the Virginia Tech website.
I don’t recall a strong memory of the first time I saw this Silver Maple, but it has held my attention, as I suppose the trees in one’s yard would. It is no special thing to you that I should have such an attachment. As I’ve watched its leaves come in and its sprouts come up all over the yard, my admiration for it has non botany related metaphorically increased. I think of calling it a name and the first convention I think of is pseudoscientific numerical: Silver Maple 001. This isn’t the first Silver Maple I’ve seen, but its the first I’ve known. And I won’t here expound a technical definition of knowledge. This isn’t science.
A bird flies up into the maple, resting on one of its high branches above the neighbor’s roof. Just as I attempt to identify it, it darts back off, over the roof, beyond my sightlines. The maple’s branches sway now from a breeze, first the thin ends and eventually the thicker, reaching arms of the trunks. Trunks, yes, to my eyes, this tree has three, splitting off from the base maybe a foot off the ground, holding a close formation that gradually spreads as it reaches its height, maybe 40 feet up. More structural arms split from the trunks, 6, 8, 13, until I struggle to count, not for number, but for the classification of the numbers. As the sizes and throws are so gradually differing, the distinction of units become impossible. Which to count as which?
I now see a robin from behind, hopping gently on the floor of our sunken yard and a small greybrown finch, a few yards behind it, pecking at the grass. I see more birds swoop and glide into the maple, up and down its arcing, horizontal branches, and out onto the telecom cables and gutters of our building.
Again, before I can make sustained observations, my eyes must follow their darting motions to some other contour, a fence, some brush, another yard. What can be taken from such, but the boundaries of my observation and the limitless forces of motion and change?
A magnolia shrub sits proudly in the center of the yard. Many of its petals are strewn on the soil and in the grass. The heavy winds of the last few days having pushed it around. Its blossoms are almost fully open. From recent walks I gather that it could grow 2, 3 or more times its current size, a size that would dominate its environs from wall to wall. I imagine this great burst of pink, fuschia space, totally encompassing my sensations as a psychedelic experience with its manifold associations. All things metaphorical in its swaying, breathing pink, luminous and shifting curtains of flower, the silk of organic matter as the dewy clothing of outwit and insight. The association chain neverending in a gift ecology, trading like flushing proteins, up and down roots and in and out of the green, cellular inertias blissing forward, the galvanic force of figures, playing in their swelters.
But the Silver Maple. It and its progeny will have things to say, as they spread their many trunks of grey and green bark, the branches pushing out wildly from ground or treeside itself. These bastards are prolific and they may soon colonize not just the yard but the block beyond.
