“…[I]t is a truth of poetical / imagination that the trees are guardians and sponsoring godfathers / of a great part of thought… / Trees imagine life, and our imaginations follow as they may.”
Nine ancient oak trees, some of them spookily twisting live oaks, crowd around our house like a Halloween party. So strong are childhood memories, especially scary ones, that the first time a volt of black turkey vultures invaded our trees and everything turned dark and still, I felt the same jerk of fear I did as a boy when the winged monkeys descended out of the forest of Oz to carry off Dorothy and Toto. As the years have flown by I’ve become more used to these threatening birds (as did Dorothy with the monkeys), but they still make me uneasy. When they descend on a dead squirrel or rabbit they’re called, with good reason, a “wake of vultures.”
It’s complicated, but trees are our friends. The first time we walked up our narrow brick pathway in Driftwood, Jeanne began breathing heavily. At first I thought her hyperventilation was caused by the old house with its casement windows, and imagined, correctly, that our lives were in for a change. Uh-oh, I said. I was right about that, but later she told me it was the trees, leaning like lovers against our house, limbs stretched out over the rooftop, brushing it when the wind blows. It’s cooler inside, under shade instead of the sun, but that’s not for everyone: it’s pretty dark, depressing to some. To us, more bat-like, it feels restful.
Built in the mid-1930s, these aren’t very old houses, but the trees place them in a time long gone. With many of them, the trees are right next to the walls. Across the street, a great oak slowly made a round indentation in our neighbor’s roof. Our own oaks haven’t touched the house yet, though we’ve had to replace the railings on our upstairs porch several times because the children liked to come in that way — up the tree and over the railings to our bedroom door. The point is, these were full-grown trees when Mark Dixon Dodd (the artist/designer) and Archie Parish (the local architect) built the original 19 homes here. Who would build that way today? The first thing they do is clear the land, with the more upscale communities planting young trees after the houses are finished.
We know by now that trees are valuable resources, for both our city’s and our personal health, improving property values and reducing stress. But there’s new research that suggests trees, like flowers, have characteristics that are surprising. Prior studies have shown that they may have feelings, and react to music and light; but it’s possible that plants and trees also react to others like individuals, friends and foes.
Our oaks have a particularly picturesque characteristic: They attract, on their own, dramatically shaped staghorn ferns. We had a single one in 1970, on our side-yard oak when we first moved in, but over the years they’ve mysteriously appeared in our other oaks. Jeanne noticed first that they were spreading, but only to the oaks in our yard, not to our neighbors’ trees or the dozens of oaks in the park across from our house. We now have over 20 separate batches, some of them large colonies, with their long forked tongues panting in the summer heat.
I don’t want to sound too weird, but I occasionally find myself patting one of the trunks and nodding. Good job today, your ferns look happy, I might be thinking, and those two little burrowing owls that hung right outside of Jeanne’s window for a while really liked you…
“As architectural forms reflect their material origins, the first / columns having been trees, so also with the mind. / And so perhaps with its conclusions? ‘I shall be like that tree…’”
—Both quotes from “The Thought of Trees,” in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov.
This article appears in May 11-18, 2017.