Trees – Page 27 – Via Negativa

May 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Dogwood

Though flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is a New World tree, a widespread Appalachian legend links it with the crucifixion. The dogwood was once as tall as the oak, they say, but its wood was used to make the cross that Jesus was crucified on, and forever after it has grown small and crooked, and each of the four, white bracts surrounding the flower is stained with a drop of blood. Farther south, its blooming usually coincides with Easter.

The wood is uncommonly hard, and is still harvested to make spindles for weaving. In the past, it was favored for bearings and wagon wheels, and some people with the time to make things right still like to fashion tool handles from dogwood. One can see how the crucifixion legend got started: nothing but the best for our Lord and Savior! It didn’t hurt that the “flowers” were white and cross-shaped, and that the cluster of true flowers vaguely resembles a crown of thorns.

According to the new (and excellent) Trees of Pennsylvania: A Complete Reference Guide, by Ann Fowler Rhoads and Timothy A. Black (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), flowering dogwood

was used by Native Americans to treat children for worms and diarrhea, to counteract poisons, and as an antiseptic and astringent. The roots were also used as a tonic and the twigs were chewed as a sort of early toothbrush. The bark of dogwood roots was sold in apothecary shops in Philadelphia in the mid-1700s as a substitute for quinine for treating ague (malaria). […] Native Americans are reported to have relied on the appearance of the flowers of dogwood to signal the time to plant corn.

I think I like that last piece of folklore much better than crucifixion legend – for one thing, it’s much more likely to be true. Blooming times of native trees and wildflowers are excellent indicators of when to plant.

Besides, dogwood anthracnose is the real curse afflicting this species. I hear that flowering dogwoods have been virtually eliminated from many more southern forests as a result of this disease, which first appeared in North America in the early 1970s. Its origins are unknown, but chances are good that humans–not a vengeful deity–were responsible for its introduction.

Dogwood berries are sought out by many species of birds and mammals, which inadvertently spread the seeds throughout the woods. Rhoads and Black say that spring azure and red-spotted purple butterflies use dogwood as a source of nectar, but those are just two of many species one can fine on the flowers. But when I took my camera for a walk the other day, I found various species of bees, several small flower scarabs, and some kind of hemipteran (true bug), a pale-green creature that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been intent on photographing the bower of joined bracts surrounding it.

This has been the best year for dogwood blossoms in many years. Someday, if and when the anthracnose has reduced our population to a few, widely scattered individuals as botanists predict, I’ll try and remember the spring of 2006, when clouds of dogwood blossoms dotted the hillsides, and each blossom was a revelation, distinct and irreducible.

March 26, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Problems for a short course in divinity

Suppose you wanted to crucify a tree. Would you nail it to the ground?

Suppose you could undo some violent event of your choice. Could you recover the future as it had been before that break in time, so full of promise?

Suppose winter were all you knew. How would you explain the shape of a tree, the arrangements of its limbs, the gestures of its twigs? Would you ever assume such an outlandish thing as a leaf?

Suppose you’d been educated in the darkness, like a druid. How would you explain the effrontery of laurel, holding up its little, waxen effigies of shadow in broad daylight?

Suppose you could change position from one moment to the next, but you couldn’t change where you’d been. How would conversion be possible? If you left your past behind you, what’s to convert?

Suppose you planted each nail with the idea that it might set root…

__________

For more questions – and a few attempts at answers – remember to visit the Progressive Faith Blog Carnival, most recently at Blue Texas and Velveteen Rabbi.

March 2, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Silk road

To live in the woods, even for forty years, is to be outnumbered. You learn a kind of patience. When we first moved here as kids, we started a natural history museum in the shed, but after a while it began to seem redundant. Now, I only collect leaves that have been skeletonized by insects, the remaining veins as delicate as lace.

What do you picture when you hear the word jinx? I see an ordinary tree – an ash, for instance. Something almost human, yet immune to grief & capable of sex only by proxy – through the wind, for instance, or some six-legged go-between. The pioneers went after trees with a fury, felling far more than they needed just to keep the darkness at bay. A century ago, during the Appalachian lumber boom, trees too massive for the sawmills to handle were blown apart by dynamite & left to rot.

Trees were cut down because they were not people. Wolves were shot because they were not dogs.

When the wind rustles in the trees, said the Delaware Indian orator to the governor of Pennsylvania, we fear not. The phrase silk road probably meant nothing to him, yet it had so much to do with how Europeans came to be here, putting their names on the forest. Leave one acre of trees, William Penn had decreed, for every five acres cleared, especially to preserve oak and mulberries, for silk and shipping.

I remember where the bee tree stood, how it hummed when you thumped on it. A big black locust with a few, scruffy branches still living. One summer night, the bears came & climbed it & ripped it open.

I remember bushwhacking to the base of a huge oak on the side of a ravine, a regular pilgrimage in my early teens. You had to pass through a grapevine anteroom, crawling on hands & knees.

I remember when the gypsy moth caterpillars – refugees from a long-ago, failed experiment to breed a more voracious silkworm – first ballooned in on their streamers of silk, following the ridgelines down the Appalachians, killing the oaks.

The catalog for Victoria’s Secret is printed on paper made in part from the mixed mesophytic forest of the southern Appalachians – the richest temperate forest on earth. What the hell is so special about silk, that bare skin isn’t enough?

I can show you a rotting hulk encrusted with lichens, half-hidden in ferns. I still feel the absence of that dark trunk, its portion of silence, that map of open veins against the sky.

__________

Please consider supporting the campaign against Victoria’s Secret: here’s how. You can still shop at VS; simply buy on-line – and send a fax to the CEO. (But remember – organic cotton is way sexier!)

March 1, 2006 by Dave Bonta

At the head of the hollow

I have my camera around my neck because I’m about to go on a walk, but first I have to get out a package of frozen spinach so it will have time to defrost before supper. Descending the steep cellar stairs, I notice the low afternoon sun flooding the window well at the far end of the basement, just beyond the freezer. The whitewashed wall evokes the deep snow we haven’t seen since early December, forming a backdrop for a shadow play of dried grasses, which wave ever so slightly in the wind. I take one, quick picture, then find the spinach and go back upstairs and out.

On the northwest side of the garage, what’s left of the previous night’s inch-thick carpet of snow preserves the tire tracks from the meter reader, who came up around 12:30. This is the head of the hollow – the end of the road. His three-point turn sketched out a storybook version of mountain peaks, or large-winged birds flying in front of the sun.

Up where the field laps against the ridgetop, I study the remains of a wild sweet cherry, a tree that typically rots from the inside out. One limb is an almost vacant tube of bark, against which the dead limb of a much heavier black locust has come to rest. The risk in appearing too substantial is always that others may come to include you in their own, doomed provisions against collapse.

I follow the windy edge of the ridge as far as the porcupine tree. Oaks are good at surviving the loss of their heartwood – that’s why they live so long, and make such great den trees. But many years of nibbling by resident porcupines has left this one with severely pollarded limbs. It doesn’t give much shade, even in the summer, and there are few places for birds to nest, or even perch. When the other trees whisper and creak and sway, this one barely budges. You’d think the empty bottle of its trunk might moan a bit, though, in a high wind.

You’ve seen, I’m sure, how often twigs die and drop out of wild grape tendrils, leaving their missing figures imprinted on the air. What was it about this one, I wonder, that made the growing tendril reverse direction partway up? Does the switch from clockwise to counterclockwise represent the point at which the sun began to decline from the height of noon? I think of Qoheleth, his sun rising and setting and returning, his wind blowing this direction and that, whirling, circling. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and look: all is vapor, a grasping at the wind. (Eccl. 1:14)

February 21, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Bí¤ume lebens

How we waste our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they’re really
our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one
of the seasons of the clandestine year . . .
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow (10th Elegy)

Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.
Ibid. (2nd Elegy)

Nothing
is what it is. O childhood hours,
when behind each shape there was more
than mere past, and before us – not the future.
Ibid. (4th Elegy)

February 11, 2006 by Dave Bonta

High grade

Let’s cut down all the big oaks and make some money! Maybe even enough to pay taxes for a decade or two. They’ll grow back… won’t they?

You’ve heard of clearcutting. But these days, private land in the northeast is much more likely to be subjected to what’s called high-grading, usually defined as “taking the best and leaving the rest.” The results may not look too bad from a distance: the smaller and more deformed trees remain to give the illusion of a healthy forest. Cut-and-run loggers easily convince landowners – most of whom do want to do what’s best for nature, according to surveys – that the forest will come back better than ever, and that wildlife will prosper in the meantime. It isn’t true.

Open up the forest canopy, and whistlewood, a.k.a. striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), springs up quick as a whistle, prolific as the white-tailed deer – which, like most other wildlife species, find it unpalatable. So if the deer are too numerous, as they currently are in most parts of Penn’s Woods, a second high-grading follows the first. Sure, deer are beautiful. So is whistlewood. So are the people filling all the new housing subdivisions…

Given a more balanced deer herd, the land responds to acts of rape by arming itself with thorns: blackberry, raspberry, greenbriar, wild rose, black locust, or – as here – devil’s walking-stick, a.k.a. Hercules’ club (Aralia spinosa). All these species live fast and die young, preparing the way for longer-lived species and beginning to restore the ravaged soil. Most, including the devil’s walking-stick, are a bonanza for wildlife; this is why small openings are a valuable part of the forested landscape. After those openings close, however, it will be decades before their new coterie of trees can equal that initial burst of wildlife food. A poletimber stand can be as barren as a desert.

Tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima) stretches green birds’ feet toward the sky. This Asian native often invades disturbed areas, spreading in clonal mats that crowd out and poison the competition – and poisons are the only real way to get rid of it. Tree-of-heaven snaps easily, giving off a cloying, peanut-brittle odor, and easily re-sprouts. One secret to its success: the huge masses of wind-borne seeds, which, since they don’t need the help of wildlife, don’t provide much nutrition. Its “heaven” is the fundamentalist missionary’s pie in the sky, stealing all the sun from what’s left of those heathen oaks.

January 27, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Snag

Image hosting by Photobucket

In all that snow, the only spot of flame was a white pine snag.

Image hosting by Photobucket

In the white pine’s former life, its sap, trickling down from woodpecker holes, would’ve been the one thing close to white. Now, the woodpeckers can drill all they want – the wells have run dry. Not that that’s what they’re after, of course. And not that the sap has left the wood: that’s why the tree lingers for so many decades, wonderfully well preserved.

Image hosting by Photobucket

A pine knot is like a cross between an eye and a knuckle bone, the last part of the tree to succumb to rot. Pine knots go off in a fireplace like firecrackers – that’s how full of life they still are. This isn’t just hyperbole: dead snags harbor more living things – fungi, molds, bacteria, invertebrates – than a living tree every could. It’s not death they embody, but a different kind of life.

January 24, 2006 by Dave Bonta

When the clouds lift

Image hosting by Photobucket

Photography can demystify vision, which is good. It teaches you that the ability to see, really see, depends on a kind of aesthetic muscle that gets stronger with use. It teaches you about grace: that “chance favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur once put it.

Image hosting by Photobucket

“As I was walking up the stair, I saw a man that wasn’t there.” Well, O.K., I was actually walking down the road, and it was a tree rather than a man, but you get the idea. The sun sets early in a northeast-facing hollow in January. Right around the next bend, I would drop down into the shadow.

Image hosting by Photobucket

When I was younger and more idealistic, I thought that a direct, Zen-like seeing of things as they are in themselves, completely free of the veil of interpretations, was the only worthwhile goal of authentic insight. Now, I feel that the more ordinary kind of defamiliarization – the anthropomorphic, “othering” impulse – might be just as important. Last week, at a public lecture by the preeminent historian of American religion, Martin E. Marty, I learned a new word that incorporates both the process of making the familiar unfamiliar and making the unfamiliar familiar: syntectics, from the Greek syn-, together, and ektos, outside or external. It seems to have been coined by educational theorists interested in trying to find ways to teach creativity back in the 70s, and if it remains obscure – well, I can think of some pretty obvious reasons for that! Learning to see as a poet, artist or scientist sees involves a relentless questioning of every cliché, every assumption, every accustomed view. But how else, barring enlightenment, can we retain a sense of wonder and at-homeness in a universe far more complex than we can ever hope to imagine?

Image hosting by Photobucket

“The sacred is that which repels our advance.” I remember when I first came across this quote in a book by the contemporary philosopher Alphonso Lingis, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself that I had also had this same insight not too many months before. But by now, some four or five years later, I’m afraid this discovery has calcified into another comfortable view. Isn’t the immersion and attempted dissolution of self in other also a sacred thing? Isn’t compassion at least as necessary as syntectics to the perception of holiness? Must the eye or the finger inevitably diminish whatever they touch? Must the mind always grasp in order to understand, or can it learn also to dwell in openness, like an inexhaustible ear?

January 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Under the sign of Janus

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

The way the snow returns to the sky
is far more painstaking than the way it falls.
Near the end, it turns from ground to figure,
from canvas to paint. It scales the ladder
of its own self-effacement.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

So the snow withdrew into a clef-shaped cleft
& waited for its cue. This winter could go
either way.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

The witch hazel measured itself against an oak.
I want to be a tree, it sang, when I grow up –
A bird perch,
An insect metropolis,
A gallery of lichens above,
And below, a husband to fungi.

True, I am all these things already,
But not as a tree.

December 10, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Quest for the Lord God Peckerwood (Part 2)

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Part 1 was here. Two additional photos here.

One of the two most surprising things about the area where Gene Sparling, Bobby Harrison and Tim Gallagher had their first sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker is how close it is to two major highways, Arkansas Rt. 70 and U.S. Interstate 40. “This is about as remote as our mountain in Pennsylvania,” my brother points out as he parks the car at the end of a gravel road at the edge of Bayou DeView in the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area. Yeah, except our road isn’t this nice.

The other surprising thing is how enthusiastically local folks have embraced their source of newfound fame. Yes, Virginia, there is a Lord God Peckerwood. He lives in the hearts and on the shade trees and lampposts of half the inhabitants of Brinkley, Arkansas (see maps here). Since the town’s restaurants and motels have depended on revenue from hunters and fishermen for so long, I guess it didn’t require too great a leap of faith for them to roll out the welcome mat for birders, too.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Brinkley was good to us, and we were good to Brinkley. We spent the night in a cheap-but-decent, unaffiliated motel, after a big supper of fried catfish and barbecued ribs at Gene’s Bar-B-Que, where “the bird is the word.” And we’d return after lunch on Saturday to buy ivorybill merchandise at a local gift shop, including t-shirts, a ball cap, a pair of earrings, a pin and a hand-painted ivorybill Christmas tree ornament. I bought the most tasteful of the hats, which features an embroidered likeness of the bird and the message “another chance.” I could’ve bought a hat that wondered, “Where’s dat der peckerwood?” or another that simply asked, “Got Pecker?”

I wish we’d had more time there. I see that our positive first impressions of the area were shared by Pat Leonard from the Cornell Lab, who posted an engaging travelogue of her own visit to Brinkley in September. I’m envious of her canoe tour of Bayou DeView with local guide and life-long resident Chuck Volner.

Heading back, Chuck sums up some of his philosophy: “Everything in nature is beautiful. God didn’t make nothin’ ugly. You look closely enough, you’ll see everything is beautiful.ï¿½? Oh look, another beautiful cottonmouth. This one is swimming with its head above the water and glides right next to the canoe.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

But we’re on our own, and being somewhat disorganized, we fail to take advantage of either of the two foot-trails or three water trails that have been set up for birders by the good folks at Dagmar. Instead, we park at a likely looking spot near where, as best I can tell, Sparling et. al. had their sightings, and proceed to do some bushwacking (otherwise known as walking in circles).

That’s when Mark spots it. No, not the bird; the tree. In a swamp full of huge baldcypresses, this tree is enormous. I am beside myself. I’ve visited my share of eastern old-growth, but I’ve never seen trees this big east of the Cascades.

Fortunately, as I mentioned in yesterday’s installment, the water level is low: the high-water mark was about five feet off the ground. So when Mark rolled up his pants to wade across to a nearby island for a better picture, I followed suit, continuing on across a wider channel to reach the island of the giant itself. The water was freezing cold, which gave me some confidence that I might not encounter a cottonmouth, though I’m not sure I would’ve desisted had there been snakes on every log.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

I’m six foot one, at least on rare occasions when I stand up straight. This is an undoctored photo. The tree appears to be close to fifteen feet DBH (diameter at breast height – the standard forester’s measurement). Even if you measure it at the point where it stops tapering, it’s still almost as wide as I am tall. Lord God, what a tree!

The sun shines weakly through a scrim of clouds, which creates a pleasing symmetry: murky sky, murky water. A scattering of red maples and other understorey trees gives a splash of late autumn color, but what most attracts the eye is the great diversity of forms – a hallmark of true old growth. Trees get weird when they get old – check out the photo of “the yelling tree” in Pat Leonard’s essay. My brother marvels at a massive tupelo growing adjacent to an even wider rim of rotten wood: a several-hundred-year-old root sprout off a tree that may have begun life half a millennium before that. I know how old black gums can get from reading studies of Pennsylvania old growth. Only the baldcypresses get older here, I imagine. After a certain point, when the so-called heartwood rots out, it’s impossible to date them accurately, but some dendrochronologists feel that baldcypresses can get to be 2000 years old or more.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

I’m happy – I’ve come for the trees – but Mark isn’t so easily satisfied. I struggle to keep up as he strides off along the edge of the bayou. He scares up a few white-tailed deer, but otherwise wildlife seems scarce. As we head back to the car, a pileated woodpecker lets out a peal of its usual insane clown laughter – kind of like howling for wolves and getting barked at by a coyote instead.

We explore Dagmar a little more by car, passing several other stands of impressive old growth on our way to a quiet picnic lunch. Mark subsequently discovers that field trips to Bayou DeView are the featured attraction of this year’s Eastern Old-Growth Conference, scheduled for Little Rock, Arkansas on March 24-25. Check out the aerial photo on its webpage.

The rediscovery of the critically endangered ivory-billed woodpecker in the cypress-tupelo woodlands along Bayou DeView in eastern Arkansas, which still retains remnants of centuries-old baldcypress and tupelo forest in a heavily developed agricultural landscape, confirms the significance of our remaining old-growth forests and justifies the federal, state, and private efforts to conserve and restore the Big Woods ecosystem of the lower Mississippi Valley.

Other draws for this conference include the old-growth post oak woodlands of the Ozarks, which are apparently as underwhelming as the swamp forests of Bayou DeView are overwhelming. Thanks to the pioneering work of the tree-ring lab at the University of Arkansas, we now know that there are many more remnants of ancient forests in the eastern U.S. than previously imagined.

Why have these remnants of ancient forest escaped public notice? Because they don’t look like what we think an ancient forest ought to look like. I’ll bet a dollar against a doughnut that when somebody says “virgin forest,” you conjure up a park-like place with trunks as big around as Volkswagens.

That’s from an article profiling the head of the tree-ring lab, Dave Stahle, who is also my authority for the probable age of the trees we’ve just encountered.

Stahle and [Malcom] Cleaveland have also done extensive tree-ring work with baldcypress, a species especially valuable to dendrochronology because of its ability to live a long time. Stahle has sampled baldcypress stands in North Carolina that are more than 1,600 years old, and he’s found numerous sites in east Arkansas with trees over 500 years old. One site, on Bayou DeView, has more than a few 1,000-year-old trees.”And that’s just their provable age,” Stahle said. “Most of them are hollow.” Judging from the average thickness of the rings and the diameter of the center rot, Stahle is confident some of these graybeards are 1,300 years old.

Think about that–some of the trees growing right now in east Arkansas were already mature before the Crusades began in medieval Europe. By the time DeSoto tramped through them on his way to fame, glory, and an early death, they were already 750 years old.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

We take the scenic route that afternoon on our way back to Mississippi. Mark has heard that the Pine City Natural Area, an isolated, genetically distinct population of loblolly pine, supports “the last remaining colony of the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain of eastern Arkansas.” The presence of the site so close to the ivorybill area, on top of all the more common woodpeckers that occur here, means that the Arkansas Delta has the highest peckerwood biodiversity in North America.

Navigating with the help of a woefully inadequate map – a page torn out of the National Geographic Road Atlas of the United States – Mark manages to find the right road, and soon enough we spot the dark smudge of a pine woods among the plowed fields. Signs on the trees identify it as a state natural area. Had we driven a little farther, we would have seen the official roadside sign, and two larger tracts, but we pull over by the first, narrow fragment of forest and set off on foot.

Mark is in the lead as usual, scanning the treetops for the holes and sap marks that indicate the presence of red-cockadeds. We notice that many of the trees other than pines have been girdled, no doubt by land managers anxious to have the pines out-compete other species. We don’t see any evidence of recent fires, but I’m sure that prescribed burns are or soon will be an important part of the management strategy here. Natural fire regimes in the southern pinelands featured a fire return interval as brief as ten years. And while the South is one of the few parts of the country where whites carried on the pyrophilic practices of the Indians, many forest ecologists feel that the tendency to set fires in the winter, rather than during the growing season, hasn’t helped the southern pinelands, which have of course also been decimated by agriculture (as is the case here) and sprawl. Their value as timber means that few commercially managed pine forests ever get old enough to provide habitat for red-cockadeds, who excavate nest holes only in trees where the heartwood has begun to rot.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

After a quarter mile, we find the main nesting area, easily identifiable by the collars of sheet metal that have been put up to keep nest predators such as raccoons at bay. “Let’s sit down here and be quiet for a little while,” Mark says. “These are very shy birds.” His daughter temporarily lowers her voice by a few decibels.

A couple minutes later, Luz catches up to us. “Didn’t you see me waving back there?” she asks. “I saw one. It just glided silently from the top of a tree, right after you went through.”

Mark seems to accept this. They’ve visited other red-cockaded sites together farther south, so she knows what the birds look like. Earlier in the day, though, he hadn’t been nearly so accepting when she claimed to have seen an ivorybill, right after we went wading off into the swamp at Bayou DeView. Her description was too vague – she’s not a birder – and after all, what are the chances? “Well, it was big,” she had said lamely, holding her hands about eighteen inches apart. “It flew right overhead… I saw some white on its wings.”

I’m sure it was just a duck.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

All photos here are by Mark Bonta except the first, second and last, which are mine.

UPDATE (Nov. 11): Reuters has a new story on this season’s official search.