Throughout my oft-dark journey here of writing weekly essays on topics ranging from the groupies who gravitate to incarcerated serial killers to how much more we all seem to be rage-cursing lately, I sometimes have to pause for perspective and go touch a tree.
My tree of choice, the one that tugs at me most, is no ordinary tree but, like so much in these parts, an artifact from a Rockefeller.
My girls and I often walk in the acreage we can attribute to the generosity of our foremost family in Sleepy Hollow Country. On the dramatic riverview wooded paths and open meadows of Rockwood Hall, former estate of William from 1886-1922, where the kids sled in winters alongside the foundation for a missing mansion, there are the most magnificent trees. Monumental touchstones that move and morph.
My favorite is one rich with memories from every era of my daughters’ childhoods, a tree whose underbelly is a grand room for concocting fairy tales. You can run your hands along the scars of ancient initials carved, and climb. If I were kid, I would want to live there and set up a magical kingdom among the thick branches that seem to dip underground and reappear as new trees, adding more alcoves to this curvy castle. When it’s covered in leaves, you have total privacy to throw an invisible friend ball. I feel the urge to come and commune with the low heavy limbs and rub against them like elephant skin. I gravitate to this tree like it’s pulling me with some force and when I touch it, I swear I can almost feel sparks. The stories it has to tell, the things it’s witnessed for hundreds of years here, whispering, luring all ages to linger.
A European Beech, more specifically a Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica ‘Pendula’), bark carved or scarred from humans and time, gnarled and knuckly like an old woman’s hands clenching to her knitting, drooping branches surrounding us like a privacy curtain she has spun, a large hollow I could climb in to hide and weep my heart out. It seems like many trees have formed in this fairy ring but I’ve learned it is really only its own branches dipping so low and curving to burrow through the soil and reemerge again. A tree and these “daughter trees” are genetically all one tree. A living sculpture. Natural art, creating its own landscape. Another world, full of nooks and creative crannies, whispered or sung secrets.
What could we name this: Mother Root? Grandma Beech? Elderveil? The Secret Room, after my current favorite podcast where people intimately unearth their long buried stories in a safe space? Something with sound, texture, something musical and otherworldly, soft and inviting… Tessitura?
Tessitura from the Italian, literally, texture, from Latin textura. Defined as
the general range of a melody or voice part in which a singer or instrument performs most comfortably and effectively.
Beyond the initials of couples so cruelly carved in the fleeting heat of their young love, what is she saying? Why is she weeping?
It might be because she was choking. Last fall, there was this event to save her, as posted on the Rockefeller Preserve Instagram:
Come help save this magnificent Weeping beech tree which is being choked out by invasive porcelain berry. This vine climbs up branches of trees, out-shades them and restricts the ability of the tree to get vital nutrients. If not addressed the tree will die.
Come join us and be a hero as we slay this giant vine monster! And you will take immense satisfaction when you see this old girl returned to her natural glory!
My starting premise for this newsletter was the greening of my home (off-gassing as I ripped out gas lines and converted the detritus into a pipe tree installation). Then there are pieces about the restorative weekends upstate where this old girl returns to her natural glory in the Catskills, contemplating the restorative power of words, work and the environment. The Greening, Serenity Now. I always learn as I go, growing my rings, accumulating a few new words into my vocabulary from Japanese and German. Shinrin-yoku, forest bathing; komorebi, the light coming through the trees; waldeinsamkeit, the special solitude of being alone in the woods.
It’s a profound statement of our times that my most read piece on this platform over the last two-plus years is about the epidemic of loneliness we seem to be suffering.
An introvert fueled creatively and spiritually by solitude, nature and odd stories, I often retreat to my nook in the mountains, to touch not one but many trees. I’ve recently replaced a piece of mostly cleared land surrounded by neighbors and a glorious mountain view—along with the burden of mowing/felling peripheral dying trees (many ashes ravaged by the emerald ash borer beetle)—with larger land surrounded by less neighbors and a different angle on the same mountains. It is tree-locked with healthier trees which means a little less of the view, and surprisingly less maintenance work.
The iconic image of a grand tree is usually one alone, isolated. On the Rockefeller estate of Rockwood turned protected parkland, this particular weeping beech is iconic, but also a community onto itself, the daughters in a ring around their matriarch. Not as solitary as it seems. My own daughters and I under it, sitting on its branches, every time we go, at each stage of our own growth and decay.
A tree rarely stands alone, if it has any say in the matter.
The cover of The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How they Communicate by German forester Peter Wohlleben (2015) displays three trees in a row, one bigger in the middle (the parent to the two flanking kids, we can assume). With good reason. The theme rooting through the book is community, the social network of trees, a “wood wide web” beyond your wildest imagination of incredible interconnectedness and complicated density. Not just of trees but of all the beings of the forest—insects, fungi, weather, water. Hidden roots for miles.
The first nights sleeping in my new treehouse, I was scared the structure itself was swaying and was unstable until I became aware of how much the trees sway. It feels as if I’m in a boat at sea. I’ve become so conscious here in my perch on wooden pilings and through reading this book of the movement of tree tops, which happens much more with leaves on than off, so for deciduous trees is more of a seasonal risk, as more leaves equals greater surface area “like sails.” But the collective of a forest full of trees not standing alone helps diffuse the pressure of the wicked wind and storms. It’s the solitary trees—in parks, on streets, in separate rows on industrial plantations—that suffer artificially condensed rootballs (which might otherwise desire to extend to hundreds of yards) over compacted soil when they need more air pockets to exchange air both above and underground. They struggle against the limits of concrete and roadways when they want to extend, breathe, and connect. They aren’t meant to be alone.
I relate and now that I learned this, I empathize.
As I spend a spare hour plucking unsavory new tree growth from my patch of dirt, I have a whole moral crisis that I’m stopping the forest from doing what it wants: which is to grow very freely and incredibly slowly. Densely with families and communities who will teach each other, support each other, even feed and warn each other, and relay generational knowledge and adaptations. Trees migrate over time to adapt to climate change. They scream if thirsty; they do surge with electricity, and maybe even the capacity for multi-sensory detection and pain.
This book and its trees have seeped into my consciousness. The idea that the trees are beings, that they may be sentient, that I really may be feeling something stir when I touch them. And they can teach us confused people about the power of community and how to better treat each other. In an afterword to The Hidden Life of Trees, Dr. Suzanne Simard, forest ecologist, writes:
The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system.
Next week, let’s take a deeper peek into this book of science and poetry, as the Dr. describes and I read from my treehouse, of the
peculiar traits of these gentle, sessile creatures–the braiding of roots, shyness of crowns, wrinkling of tree skin, convergence of stem-rivers.
Do you have such a tree in your life that tugs at you? Is it lonely? You might want to adopt it. Nurture it. Talk to it, rip off the choking vines, bask in its shade. Plant more trees for it to befriend.
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I love this. And what a tree!
A mesquite tree near my dad's house stood since HS and I had/have a special attachment to it (because HS, a special girl, etc.) and as it managed to keep living through time and disease (lightning strikes?), I've long predicted that as long as it stood, I would as well. Turns out I was right! A super strong wind knocked it down a year ago.