Tuesday, March 26, 2013

On Tree Knowing

I walked today in the Audubon Sanctuary on Dauphin Island, AL.  It is a quiet little place where you can go to get away from the hubbub of springbreaking families that choke the few businesses on the island.  Most I guess wouldn't be caught dead back there on *ackgasp* hiking trails.  The trails are really more like walking trails.  Easy on the feet and wide enough to land a small aircraft in places.  I find it quiet back there even on very crowded days.  I'm not a big birder, but I am a Zoologist by training, so I do like to identify a few of the birds I see.  On todays list:

Hooded warbler
Blue Grey Gnatcatcher
Red headed woodpeckers
crows
Osprey (easily ID'd by the bent wings in flight)
Some pale reddish bird I think might have been a tanager of some sort

Birds pop in, say hello and bolt before you can even introduce yourself.

Trees are not at all like that.  You have to know a tree a long time before you may hear its name whispered by its leaves.  Some never do.  You have to build a relationship with a tree  over your lifetime, come every day to visit.  Get to know what it's like in rain, in winter, how it stands out in the fog, how impossibly green its first leaves of spring are, what the dead leaves feel like beneath your bare feet.  Then and only then they may notice you there and speak.  Very few trees have spoken to me in 51 years....the Burr Oaks at my grandparents house that were our tree tag safety, a small Chinese Maple I coddled to a height of eight feet, a maple that grew impossibly in the crack of a sidewalk that I transplanted to better ground that now is fifteen feet tall.  The only tree to speak to me in a quick manner was the Angel Oak (St Johns Island, SC).  I had pilgrimmaged there twice and loved her from afar since I saw her for the first time.  Maybe it was that love.  Maybe it was my great need.  Maybe it was the whim of one so beloved and elderly as herself to do so.  She changed my life entirely.

I have a deep love of live oaks, maybe because they are about as far removed from perfect straight and statuesque horticultural specimens as one can get.

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