Tag Archives: Trees

April 18, 2024 · 10:21 am

Are cherries cheery?

Or do they have a tinge of melancholy?

Perhaps both.

After all, April is the cruellest month, as T.S. Eliot put it so memorably.

He followed: breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire, stirring/dull roots with spring rain.

Didn’t mention cherries. But could’ve.

We took a stroll under the cherry blossoms at New York Botanical Garden.

There is no place you can go in the Garden to not hear the noise of traffic on nearby city roads.

No matter. NYBG is an urban arboretum, after all. With the most fabulous cherry orchard.

City dwellers need flowers!

I thought about a book I’m working on.

It’s a bit of a challenge. Nietzche said, There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

Trying to work it all out is taking mental energy, emotional energy.

Perhaps why I like the weepers. Prunus pendula.

My dreams are full of words and phrases. You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write, said Saul Bellow. My experience is that that is not always true, unfortunately.

You can make mistakes waking at midnight in bed as much as with morning coffee at your desk.

Hemingway said, Write hard and clear about what hurts. You’ve got to muscle past, much like the twisted trunks of a cherry, old and new.

Cherry blossoms are perfect. Always. In this they put our human efforts to shame.

Perhaps better to visit the lilacs. They do smell delicious, after all.

Or the Japanese maples, their early leaves so, so soft.

They’re just coming into themselves, joining the cherries.

I’m hoping my writing will bloom as well.

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Tagged as books, cherry blossoms, Creativity, ideas, New York Botanical Garden, New York City, Trees, Writing

March 10, 2024 · 10:20 am

I wanted to meet the first woman botanist in America

so I adventured to the place where she grew up in the 1700s.

I am about to fly to Minnesota to give a presentation on The Untold History of Women in Arboriculture. Any effort to understand the American forest has to take into account previously overlooked, discounted, disenfranchised or forgotten expressions.

My presentation will treat some of the myriad women not often mentioned in the canon.

Here is part of the story I’m going to tell.

Jane Colden is a tree person who is largely forgotten today. She happens to be my current historical girl crush. Her life is a secret history, buried in timeworn assumptions about what women of their time did or did not do, should or should not do.

Jane lived in upstate New York and rendered groundbreaking examinations of plant species. She shared them with some of the foremost scientists of the day.

One thing to remember here. At that time, it was next to impossible for women to be experts in plants or trees. Women were not encouraged to attend school. They did not learn Latin, the official language of taxonomy. But if a woman did become an amateur scientists, she tended to go toward botany. This was likely due to women’s role as family caretakers. Because so many plants were used for medicine at that time.

Women were also linked symbolically to flowers.

Nature was something of an indulgence for rich gentlemen and ladies like Jane, as suggested in this famous painting, “The Swing,” from exactly the same time, by the French artist Fragonard.

Born in New York City, Jane spent most of her life at Coldengham, a 3,000-acre farm owned by her father in a wilderness area near present day Newburgh.

Cadwallader Colden was a high-ranking official in New York’s colonial government, and he liked plants. He documented the state’s flora using the new Linnean system of classification. He created ornamental gardens near the family’s stone mansion. There was plenty of habitat for wildflowers and woods, which Jane loved to explore. She shared an interest in horticulture with her mother, Alice Chrystie Colden, a keen gardener.

In 1743, Dr. Colden published a treatise which described the plants on his land, with the help of his daughter Jane, who was then 19.

When queries from fellow botanists became too time-consuming, he recruited Jane to help him. She earned her father’s praise. He wrote a colleague, “Jane is more curious & accurate than I could have been…her descriptions are more perfect & I believe few or none exceed them”.

Jane gathered information from Indians and “country people” as she went.

She documented her findings in a manuscript that ultimately contained 340 illustrations with detailed descriptions.

Soon, renowned botanists were writing her rather than her father. Among those who admired her work were Benjamin Franklin and naturalist John Bartram. Jane dedicated her efforts to trees as well as plants.

She drew dogwood. Hickory. Walnut. Black gum. Basswood. Cherry.

White birch. White oak.

In 1757 Jane sent some of her meticulous plant descriptions to Bartram, who pored over her letter and vowed to preserve it in his collection of treasured missives from European botanists. Moreover, he wrote, “I should be extreamly glad to see thee at my house & to shew thee my garden.” It seems Jane never did venture out of New York, instead nurturing botanical exchanges that allowed her to enrich the garden at Coldengham with plants from all over America and the world. A letter to Bartram included a list of seeds she desired from his nursery, some of them indigenous to climates similar to New York’s and some reflecting a more experimental approach.

Jane’s father could not stop singing his favorite daughter’s praises. He wrote in another letter, “As it is not usual for women to take pleasure in Botany as a Science, I shall do what I can to encourage Jane in this amusement. It fills up her idle hours to much better purpose that the usual amusements eagerly pursued by others of her sex.”

It seems Jane was not all that idle.

British merchant and plant dealer Peter Collinson congratulated Jane’s father on his “daughter’s Likeing to Botany,” remarking with polite condescension, “It is a Delightfull amusement & a pretty accomplishment for a young Lady, for after the knowledge of plants, it may Lead her to Discover their Virtues & uses.”

Three years later, having examined “several sheets of plants very Curiously Anatomised”, Collinson was more impressed. He praised the “Scientificall Manner” of her work in a letter to Bartram. He added, “I believe she is the first Lady that has Attempted any thing of this Nature.”

Collinson’s assessment was perfect: “She deserves to be celebrated.”

In 1759, Jane married a physician named William Farquhar. She gave up her botanical explorations in favor of housekeeping. She gave birth to her only child in 1766. Jane died of complications from childbirth along with her baby that same year. She was 42.

We have no knowledge of where Jane’s grave is located.

Two hundred years later, a local garden club published some of her drawings in a bound volume. It’s hard to track down now.

Something else I like about Jane. A visitor wrote a colleague complimenting Jane’s achievements. He added a P.S.

Jane, he said, “makes the best cheese I ever ate in America.”

Some of the great naturalist’s recipes have come down to us in a folio entitled Memorandum of Cheese made in 1757. She records on foolscap the ingredients she used, the milk and the rennet. It seems she sold some 348 pounds of butter as well. She made some mistakes, she says. Finally, she writes, “I made it after my mother’s old manner, and it was a tender good curd and lost very little rich whey.”

Now I really wanted to understand the first woman botanist in America. So I paid my visit to Coldengham.

It was hard to imagine these environs as a place dominated by “bears and other wild beasts,” in the words of Jane’s father when the family first moved in.

Just about any morning, cars and trucks race through the intersection of Stone Castle Road and Route 17K in the Town of Montgomery. They barely notice the ruin there.

Cadwallader’s son, Cadwallader Colden Jr., inherited the property when his father moved to New York City (another story) and built his own mansion here in 1744. It was pretty impressive. A 1959 article from The Newburgh News described the inside: “The house had 17 large rooms, nine open fireplaces with mantels, two bathrooms, a butler’s pantry, three wide halls, and 10 foot ceilings….” The paper went on to note the “grey field stone houses” and interior paneling that had been brought from England, features that represented the height of opulence for the area.

The home fell into disrepair over the years. By the 1940s, all of the windows were broken and missing, the rooms vandalized, anything of value stolen. Some of the parlor’s paneling, however, did wind up displayed in a period room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now I searched for any place haunted by the ghost of Jane Colden.

Warning signs all around only whetted my appetite. I made my way through a tear in the orange snow fencing and waded through a thicket of multiflora rose to see the ruins close up.

Don’t try this at home. I still bear the ankle scars.

I discovered that much of where Jane lived was lost to time.

Where was naturalist Jane amid the brambles and old stones? I kept hunting.

Then I found her.

Three ancient osage orange trees stood together, a then exotic species that might have anchored Jane’s ornamental garden.

And then, there it was, off to the side, the remains of the summer kitchen. Where the greatest cheese maker in America would have prepared her famous cheese.

It wasn’t everything. But it was something.

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Tagged as arboriculture, botany, Jane Colden, Trees, women's history

November 21, 2023 · 10:18 am

Six miles in to Boynton Canyon and out again

is not an easy hike for me.

My typical walks tend to be half that. But sometimes you’ve got to push yourself.

Genius is only the power of making continuous efforts, wrote Elbert Hubbard, the most interesting guy you’ve never heard of.

An anarchist/writer/publisher/philosopher who lived at the turn of the twentieth century, Hubbard went down with the Lusitania when it was torpedoed in 1915. He continued, There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.

I happen upon that quote before I start out on the trail this morning. Something pertinent from the rest of my life, a pithy quote from Maya Angelou: Easy reading is damn hard writing. Both statements speak to me on this sparkling azure-skied morning in Sedona.

I’ve hiked this box canyon many times and have once before made it to the end. I’m determined to achieve the same goal today.

At the beginning of the trail, the lit-up rocks all around are astounding.

Are these sandstone cliffs even real?

Yes.

Going in, the pygmy forest of manzanita rolls out all around.

I have loved this path for years.

Walking a bit further, alligator junipers along the way are like old friends.

Many of them are kissing trees, trees whose stems have grown together over time, my favorites.

I find a carpet of gambel oak leaves underfoot, now, in late autumn.

And I reach a glade of bigtooth maple.

Blush pink and crimson all around.

Ponderosa pines take the stage after a while. One has its delicate lichen party decoration, ready for the holidays.

I lean in, inhale. The scent of butterscotch.

Some minor miracles. How on earth did this happen?

I’m beginning to huff and puff on the slight, continuous incline, trying to make it look easy when people pass me by.

Does the forest speak to you? I promise it would if you hiked through Boynton Canyon and experienced its magic.

Above I can see some black streaked formations, the ruins of ancient cliff dwellings marked by old cook-fire smoke. Or perhaps that is my imagination.

Some people jog past me.

I tend to think it’s better to saunter – John Muir’s preferred word for taking a hike – rather than racing along.

There’s so much to see along the way.

Do you ever think you are the smartest person in the world? The coolest person in the world? The most important? I sometimes do, I admit it. This hike, this climb, will knock that right out of you.

Ego can be good. I know a man who is 102 years old and chipper. He talks about himself pretty much all the time. And I’m fairly certain that his mighty ego is how he’s survived and prospered thus far.

Mine is rather large, too, which can be annoying to some people, I know.

Now, people coming down the trail can see how red-faced and sweaty I am. Keep it up, they say, you’re almost there. Don’t worry.

I notice handholds along the way, stones and roots and trunks, seemingly placed in exactly the right spot to help a person up a jumble of rocks.

Some of them are as smooth and polished as metal from the touch of so many human hands over time.

I am grateful for them.

I usually go too fast, but I can’t do that on this trail.

I nearly trip and fall a couple of times. I so don’t want to take a tumble and break a leg, a rib, wreck my face.

The ponderosa pines and alligator junipers and gambel oaks and bigtooth maples all form a chorus and whisper to me as I go.

Take your time, they say. Stop when you need to. Stay out of other hikers’ way. Grab the handholds that are offered you. Don’t feel ashamed that other people get there at a different pace!

Finally I reach the end of the canyon, the top, which consists of a broad plateau high up in the full sun, with soft air rippling across. The apricity up on the rock is amazing (smarty-pants stuff: apricity just means the warmth of the sun in winter).

Yes, the end of the canyon is nice. Is it nicer than the forest along the trail?

Other folks are here enjoying the view. Or resting after the climb.

I break out my electrolyte-infused water, a cheese sandwich. Or fromage, as I refrain from telling the French hikers seated alongside me.

I do say to another couple, Have you smelled the ponderosas along the way?

Ever the know it all. If you go up close and stick your nose in you’ll get a whiff of butterscotch.

I didn’t know that, says the woman. I think they’re jack pines, says the man. Men! But it irks me a little. I could be mistaken, I say. I often am. All the way back I wonder, are these actually jack pines, or ponderosa pines? Maybe some of both? I’ll have to go online and check when I get back. I always want to be correct. Again, ego.

Taking the trail on the return, I notice things I hadn’t before. Warm breezes. Cool breezes. The intoxicating fragrance all around, drifting up from the brown pine needles scattered on the forest floor.

Critter holes.

Pecking holes.

A dry creek bed. I’d love to hear that stream roar after the rains of springtime.

I almost fall a couple more times on the way down, my feet now feel so tired and klutzy.

But seeing things from a different angle provides an opportunity for reflection. I’ve heard of so many deaths close to me recently. People who passed away in the hospital. Died in bed.

How can I render my life more meaningful? Can I approach the world with less ego?

I hear young people coming towards me on the trail trading quips concerning what they know about trees. Branches? says one. Trunks? says another. Roots? General hilarity. At least I don’t say something smart alecky to them!

I hear other people puzzling things out as they go. Is this boxwood? says a kid. No, says the father. See the red stems? I’m tempted to call out manzanita! but stop myself. I overhear someone else say, Javelina, and his companion says, What is that? And he answers, The wild boar that lives around here.

It sort of surprises me the number of people who don’t greet me on the trail when I say, Hi. But maybe it’s not all that surprising, as the hikers are passing this panting old codger with blue hair. The most important person in the world?

Sort of invisible, actually.

I come out of the woods at a site marked by mysterious to me but no doubt essential markers. I’ve caught my breath, gulped some water. Ready to reenter the unforested world.

Life instructions from the box canyon, in four easy steps. From the smartest, coolest, most important person in the world. The person who almost just fell flat on her face in the forest.

Life is short. Use the handholds. Don’t know it all.

Take your time.

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Tagged as Boynton Canyon, Sedona, Trees, Writing

November 5, 2023 · 6:15 pm

There are many great trees in New York City.

Yes, true. But what about the Great Trees of New York City? This is the brainchild of New York City Parks, which is reviving a project that was last completed in the 1985 with the goal of identifying the most iconic trees in all the five boroughs. Ordinary citizens nominate exceptional trees, as many as they want, as defined by their historic, botanical and cultural significance.

Having been fortunate enough to be appointed a judge for 2023’s Great Tree Search, I am excited to start off on some new adventures. My assigned beat is the Bronx, a great place whose eclectic neighborhoods stretch all the way from the swellegant precincts of Riverdale to the famously underserved South Bronx. It’s also a place I’ve spent considerable time as a consultant on tree preservation for NYC.

This time I go some places I’ve never been before, and discover a fantastic meshing of arboriculture and history. I enlist Gil as a driver, because it’s hard to drive in New York City traffic and spot trees at the same time, even gigantic trees. We have a spreadsheet to guide us that cites peoples’ nominations as well as some of their comments about why a particular specimen is worthy of the distinction.

The first entry on our list is quite civilized. A ginkgo on a small street abutting Webster Avenue.

Ginkgo biloba dates back 270 million years, and was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered by a German scientist in late 1600s Japan. A group of Chinese Buddhist monks made it their mission to save and cultivate the species.

It is one of the few trees useful for food foraging in this urban jungle. Yes, the fruits are slimy, smelly. But each one holds a nut at its core (actually a seed) that is sold in Korea, Japan and China as a “silver apricot nut.” They are usually roasted prior to eating and used in desserts, soups and with meat. Each fall you’ll see many people in the City gathering this ample harvest.

Will I really have to choose among these trees? I’m already asking myself – and I’ve only seen one so far! But let’s continue.

We prowl along to little Perry Avenue in the Bronx and discover a gargantuan willow oak.

What on earth is it doing in this quiet backwater?

Among other things, towering over the houses with health-giving shade, creating a beautiful fall carpet of leaves, and offering shelter for squirrels with a major nest. Oh yes, and uncomplainingly eating carbon and pouring out oxygen for us slackers to breathe.

We find another nominee on a peaceful little street, Thierot Avenue.

A silver maple. Now, these trees get a bad rap among urban foresters. They’re brittle, they rain down branches, yada yada. But look at this beauty. “It is the LARGEST TREE in the community,” reads the comment on the spreadsheet. “Could be a hundred years old.”

Huge (of course), three stems, fantastic shaggy bark, spreading her roots all over the place as is her right. And a perfect place for posing schoolkids. Who shout “Save the Trees!” over their shoulders as they scamper away.

We venture to Corona Park, home to several potential Great Trees, all of them amazing. First, a majestic American elm at the corner entrance.

A photo really cannot do her justice. You have to mosey underneath those sprawling branches, touch the bark. Gaze overhead at the sky through her crown.

Perhaps the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen. (And I’ve seen a few, so maybe just the most beautiful of the day. So far.) Then, we go elsewhere in the same park in quest of two hefty ashes that grow across a path from each other, seemingly competing for the Venus of New York prize. One is a marvel, yes. “This majestic Green Ash with a trunk size of 54″ is a gem and sits in the center of the pathway along passive lawn areas and rolling hills.”

To locate the tree I ask some folks hanging out with their kids in the nearby playground. They do not speak English, so their seven year old translates as they gesture down the way: “Big tree down there, take a turn to the right and you can’t miss it!” An understatement.

Even more impressive, the ash nearby. “Thickest tree in the Bronx, probably NYC too.”

Don’t you mind the fruiting bodies at the base, this one is clearly a survivor.

Wandering out of the park at as the dusk grows all around us I notice a planting that will ensure the health of this urban forest for the future, a baby beech.

Since we’re making these adventures at the end of the workday, we’re lucky enough to visit all these sites at the magic hour, just as the sun is getting ready to set. So we arrive at a spot we’ve heard about but never spent a lot of time, Pelham Bay Park.

We take our nightfall hike on a trail around Hunter Island, 166 acres of wilderness in the heart of the Bronx, right on the Long Island Sound. The person who nominated a post oak here wrote a lengthy treatise on the specimen’s history, saying, in part: “This grove of post oaks dates back to the 1760s. Post Oak is native but rare in NYC. This beautiful specimen is growing right out of bedrock that includes gneiss with stunning seams of quartz, and is right on the Sound. This tree projects the grit and resilience for which the city is renowned.”

Of course, that more than whets my appetite to find this spectacular tree. But it’s not easy. Entering the park, we find massive white oaks and scarlet oaks. This is a mast year, and all around the ground is carpeted with acorns that crunch underfoot.

A trail takes us through groves of sweet birch.

We see almost no one.

I wade ankle deep across a mossy inlet, into the darkening woods under a rising full moon.

It gets dimmer, dimmer.

Wither the post oak? It’s a member of the white oak family, and all the trees in these woods have interbred for so long that I think any of them could be the oak in question. Though I cannot find the exact leaf, with its lobes that remind some of a Maltese cross, there are plenty of similar leaves.

We’ll have to come back again, perhaps by the light of day.

On another afternoon, back in the city proper, we locate a venerable black tupelo.

“At the edge of the forested land on Mosholu Parkway North, facing the apartment buildings.” Sounds mysterious, and I’m afraid we will not find it, especially as the gloaming comes on. We cadge a parking space and I walk directly to the tree as by a homing device.

I think of a couple of lines by poet Jane Hirshfield: “I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart. To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch, and then keep walking, unimaginably further.”

We discover a cottonwood just off Van Cortland Park South in an old schoolyard. It towers over the neighborhood. Once, apparently, during the Revolutionary War, this tree was used for hanging traitors.”

I check the spreadsheet. “Cottonwood trees typically grow in riparian areas, which at first seems odd, given its current location, but makes sense once you realize that the Tibbets Brook runs underneath.” I’ve heard that Tibbetts Brook is soon to be daylighted, and I wonder what will happen to the cottonwood when that happens. Will they retain it and will it continue to provide shade and beauty of local residents?

Moshulu Parkway and Gun Hill Road are sites for some other old-old trees that also date back to the Revolution. We visit “the oldest sassafras tree in the Bronx, an amazing holdover from when the land was converted from farm to parkland.”

It is said to be larger than the state champion in Green-Wood Cemetery. And that’s saying something. “However, its true age will never be known because it is mostly hollow.”

No matter, it is magnificent. Nearby, a white oak stands tall above a wall on Gun Hill Road.

Beneath the tree’s enormous canopy runs the Old Aqueduct Trail, another landmark, an engineering marvel from from the time when clean water was piped in from the Croton Reservoir in northern Westchester County. “Assuming was planted along Gun Hill as historical marker.” Makes total sense.

All Gil can say for hours afterward is: That white oak. That white oak was amazing. The wonders of this city’s urban forest are manifold. I’m starting to dream about Bronx trees. We’ve been going out to find them every day.

Now we venture to Ewen Park. I’ve never heard of the place, but I know there is a nominated cherry tree here “south of the dog run.” Tramping all over and unable to find it, we see some of the substantial rock formations that never got blasted away when much of New York City was originally leveled for development.

We ask a dog walker to direct us.

Poseidon, a proud Cane Corso, would not be caught dead in a dog run. But Poseidon’s helpful person directs us down the hill and up the “unmarked trail” to the spot. She has me at “unmarked trail,” my favorite kind of path. We locate the huge old cherry.

“This is one of the biggest, oldest trees in the park,” reads the nomination. “It provides habitat and food for our migratory and resident birds.” Its once-delicate lenticels have gone crusty with age.

It nestles a young’un in its crook.

On the way out of the park, I find a microforest of sweetgums. What’s not to love about a sweetgum?

Their prickly seedballs are a marvel of the season.

Two conjoined trunks seemed to be pouring their hearts out.

I admire a small maple, sporting the usual colorful frou frou of the season. Watch me turn colors! I’m a maple! Sure, m’am, but you clearly haven’t met the other contenders, the sassafras or the black tupelo.

Everywhere I go I stumble upon fantastic trees that were not nominated as Great Trees. Yes, the pin oak in Crotona is spectacular. The zelkovas on Webster, definitely worth noting officially. But what about this particular sweetgum?

Ewen Park, which I’d never before heard of, dates back to when Frederick Van Cortland owned the land. It has a long stone staircase that serves as a conduit between the neighborhoods of Kingsbridge and Riverdale. At the base of the steps I find a marker that establishes the place’s bona fides. It states the number of stairs. In Latin.

History is everywhere. You can read the past in the trunks and branches, leaves and fruits of the trees in the Bronx. Some of them Great Trees. But also, trees that might not necessarily be identified as such. Not necessarily winners, but trees that are nonetheless special.

And that is pretty great.

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Tagged as Bronx, Cherry, Great Trees NYC, New York City, Post oak, Sassafras, Trees, Van Cortlandt Park, white oak

October 12, 2023 · 8:07 am

“Purple and gold season”

is how Cornell Botanic Gardens’s docent Dana describes the end of summer and the first days of fall.

She professes herself to find it a bit boring. I look out the window when we’re driving in the car and that’s all I see, purple and gold, purple and gold.

Dana shows us the native aster blooming in a border of the Cultivated Plant Collection. The goldenrod.

Her exuberant, erudite and irreverent approach to the botanical world and her enthusiasm in sharing it with people are all on display first day of autumn in the Finger Lakes.

A Buddhist might call it the Eternal Now — this burnished morning, already warm yet crisscrossed with cool breezes. We walk together through the specialty gardens, the perennial beds, the tropical plants and grasses and herbs. These flowers, these trees are all that exist.

Dana raises horses, has about the longest braid I’ve ever seen down her back, and is one of the most quick-witted garden guides I’ve ever come across.

She shares some wisdom on making a mistake: You never say you’re wrong. Just, “actually”… to which a gentleman in the crowd adds enthusiastically, Truth challenged!

Now that we’ve got that straightened out.

We see a display of gourds, part of the Garden’s Seeds of Survival and Celebration installation. She explains their significance, You know that thing in the celestial heavens that we call the Big Dipper? In North Africa it’s called the Drinking Gourd. So the message to enslaved people in America was, “follow the drinking gourd.“

She shows us millet.

On a pathway she shows us pots that were originally planted out for the opening of the Nevin Welcome Center in 2010 and now need to be moved inside every cold season and outdoors again in the spring. Be careful what you do because if you do it exceptionally well they’re going to ask you to do it over and over.

The tropical Princess flower, she tells us, is her favorite. She’s very soft, and has silver glitter on the leaves and flower.

Then, a relative of the tomato.

But it’s seriously saying, Don’t bite me. No grazing, please. Also, It has a fruit that can be brewed into a very potent alcohol.

Dana does a special symbiosis tour once a month in which she talks about the relationship between plants. She calls it secrets of the garden.

Lest you think this tour is all about flowers and fruits, it is not. There is art.

And plenty of trees. She shows us the tulip poplar.

It is neither tulip nor poplar. But it is the tallest tree native to this region. Liriodendron tulipifera, she tells us, has musical instrument-shaped leaves and tulip-shaped flowers. This particular specimen is equipped with lightning rods that don’t happen to be attached to its ground rod.

It’s probably eighty to one hundred years old.

Dana explains the difference between and annual and a perennial plant. It’s pretty basic, she says. She explains the meaning of the word cultivar.

She shows us an aluminum tag.

Students come In and randomize these tags. It’s not funny!

These just keep spreading.

I’m touching everything. I can’t help it. I want to learn about everything here. I’m reminded of the lines from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

We see a mammoth zelkova.

Dana shows us an Eastern white pine.

It’s the tallest conifer native to this region, she tells the group. It was tremendously important to the Indigenous people here. The Five Tribes were warring, and they met beneath a white pine. And a leader said they’d be more successful if they worked together than if they fought. That was Hiawatha. We lifted their agreement for our constitution. We stole it. The Five Nations came together as the Haudenosaunee. Their symbol shows a white pine with all the weapons buried at the base and at the top an eagle overseeing the whole thing.

She shows us the needles that grow in fascicles.

There are five needles in each fascicle of an Eastern white pine. That’s how you can always identify the species.

Also, Dana says, you can brew the needles to make a tea that has more vitamin C than a lemon by squishing them and boiling them. It’s pale gold and slightly sweet, a treat you can make for your friends.

We stop by a Cornelian cherry dogwood.

Cornus mas, she says, giving us the scientific name. Mas means male in Greek. The Greeks used the wood to build their weapons of war. Since it was the wood used to make the boy stuff it was termed mas – male.

This tree probably predated the adjoining building. Oh, just a boring begonia.

Dana brings us to the herb garden. An herb simply means the plant’s not woody, she explains. In the herb garden you’ll find things that are significant to humanity that are not food-based. She tells us that in the garden we’ll find a bed of herbs related to literature: You can find rue, shake its little hand.

We enter. Bruise a few leaves, inhale the scent of sage.

She says, I want you to scratch and sniff. First, touch this plant.

Then, run fast over to this other flower and inhale.

Peppermint patty! And she is absolutely correct, as always. The first plant is mint, the second has the distinctive aroma of chocolate.

She relates the origin of the term nosegay. I didn’t know I’d ever wondered about that, but now I find myself getting curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice would have it.

A nosegay was a bunch of herbs you’d carry against the stench of the world back in the Victorian era, it turns out. And you’d need a tussie mussie to hold it. Horse-drawn carriages actually have mounts to put these tussie mussies in.

Conveniently, Dana has a tussie mussie on hand to show us.

I peel off from the group, meet an energetic hound named Texie who seems to be inordinately stimulated by the herb garden’s scents.

I spy a Thai super-hot pepper.

Grain amaranth.

Cockscomb.

Lean in. Perfection in pink. I feel hypnotized by its fuschia.

I see the rue, shake its little hand.

Little purple flower. So boring!

Just when I think life could not get any better, I come to a tree.

I hear a kid say, It’s still living and they cut right through it! Within its massive trunk hangs a gong. The kid says to his mother, brother and grandmother, Let me show you the best thing!

We all observe the fish he points to in a small nearby pool.

They look happy there, says grandma. The kid’s brother rings the gong. Now we can have a mindful moment, says the kid. Such a super sound! says the mom.

I offer to take their picture. They offer to take mine, and I pose looking even more supercilious than usual, and quite a bit content.

I tear myself away from the happy family to see the Bird’s Eye Pepper, which has grown in Africa for centuries. One last picture before my phone runs out of juice!

No, one more! Hibiscus.

Inside the Welcome Center, I inspect a display of tree rings. Even my toe is lucky.

A lucky day all around. Fortune smiles on those of us who happen to be on Dana’s tour of Cornell Gardens this perfect first day of Fall.

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September 29, 2023 · 7:53 pm

Poking around where I am not supposed to be

is a favorite pastime of mine.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream, said Edgar Allan Poe. Thinking about some writers who have opined on the dark side of life as I spend some time in in a dream within a dream – the abandoned Contagious Disease Hospital at Ellis, taking around a group of photographers for a day of shooting poetic spaces.

On this stormy morning in the tristate, almost everything is so beautifully dark.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night, wrote Poe. We visit hushed stairwells.

The simplest things have a surprising potency.

Heat.

Even a doorknob seems to have a story to tell.

Textures are always amazing here at the Hospital.

But today especially, in low light, they seem to whisper. Loudly.

A view.

I see some of the things I’ve seen many times before, old favorites. Simple things.

The bird’s nest in a light fixture.

A legend.

Always loved how that sentiment might apply to everyday emotional challenges.

This unlikely chair.

Cracked windows open to wild courtyards. I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real, wrote Oscar Wilde in Dorian Gray.

The trees are both hideous and beautiful.

Mary Shelley wrote in Frankenstein, The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.

There is golden light.

We’re open to the cold, storm-tossed waters of the Bay.

Everything more beautiful in the wet.

And I make some new discoveries. A bottle, miraculously untouched after a century.

Glass littering a floor

I feel both a little frightened and exhilarated. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. Again, Shelley. She should know; she had the courage to write a novel that would revolutionize literature when she was just nineteen years old. (Her mother was famous women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.)

So fortunate to be able to spend time in this iconic, moody place.

I see mysteries.

A ladder to nowhere.

More mysteries.

Some were healed here. Blue paint was thought to be calming, hence its use in the open bay psychiatric wards.

Things were clean, sanitary back in the day.

Some suffered. We know that people heaved themselves out the windows on the upper floors, hence the heavy-duty metal grates. Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Shelley.

Nurses bunked near the psych wards. Each of their dorm rooms has a screen door against the mosquitos that would have been hell in pre-air-conditioning, pre-Deet New York Harbor.

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched, wrote Edgar Allan Poe.

There is a lot to touch your heart here.

If you only let it in.

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Tagged as Contagious Disease Hospital, ellis island, nurses, Poe, Shelley, Trees, Writing

September 1, 2023 · 5:22 pm

Late summer privacy.

I see no one on my walk to Lyndhurst, not a soul. My only company, late-season thistles along the path.

A weathered sign by the open-air entrance to the old estate tells the story of my day in a word. Private.

The Old Croton Aqueduct trail runs right through the grounds. Apparently the first owner of the property was proud, ecstatic to have the water run underground here when the water pipe was first installed, carrying water miraculously down from upstate to New York City.

You can stay on the trail. Or follow mysterious mysterious arrows. I choose not to follow.

The lawns and old, old trees beckon. Robert Graves wrote, Tranquility is of no poetic use. I beg to disagree. This morning is sheer poetry. The calming late-summer scents of grass and trees, the hum of insects, the perfect glaze of sky.

I have wondered recently, Why is the sky blue? Such a silly question. The science has long been in. But still – blue? Perfect azure? Really? Could the universe really be this kind? I visit a grove of tulip trees.

They stand poker-straight and are probably two hundred years old. Come close and touch the grooves.

Geese feed themselves on grass. Quietly, unhurried, unworried.

I feed myself too. I am hungry, having not eaten yet today. Now I feed my soul. I go to my favorite linden, the huge specimen with multiple stems and an enclosed space like a private drawing room.

There are many lindens here, some still holding onto their magical lemony bracts.

Octavio Paz wrote:

Perhaps to love is to learn

to walk through this world.

To learn to be silent

like the oak and the linden of the fable.

To learn to see.

Your glance scattered seeds.

It planted a tree.

I talk

because you shake its leaves.

Seeking even greater privacy, greater tranquility, I visit one of the gargantuan, ancient weeping beeches on the grounds,

I push aside the branches and enter, finding myself inside a place so silvery dark and still and mysterious that no photo can really do it justice.

Others have been here before. Hello Bob, who did you love?

The branches twist together, sinuous. So quiet, yet so alive.

I run my hand along a smooth, muscular bough.

I stand there. I do nothing. It takes a lot of time to be a genius, wrote Gertrude Stein. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. I’m no genius, but I know that doing nothing can be an art as great as any other.

The rose garden at Lyndhurst is also antique, designed by ladies a hundred years ago in concentric circles. Just outside its perimeter, late-season sage.

Hydrangea and its perfect clusters. I clearly need to find another word for perfect.

Only me here and the bees and the butterflies. No other human soul. I brush the sage with my hand and the scent wafts up. Here are September roses, flowers like no other.

Everything is perfectly still, lush, quiet. Perfectly private.

Spent rosebushes climbing a trellis have a beauty almost as exquisite as the blooms all around.

Rose hips hide themselves among the greenery.

Bees prowl the blossoms.

Hide inside, sip nectar.

Catbirds come calling. Lovely fragrances lift themselves, waft under my nose.

I wipe sweat from my brow and smell the sage I touched before. Lock the gate and leave. Just outside, some ancient spruces, one with the conjoined stems I love.

Cones litter the ground, brown on brown.

Wander, wander some more. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley told us, The beginning is always today. Under my feet, clover. I know that if I were to hunt hard enough, go down on my knees for long enough, I’d find one with four leaves. I feel that fortunate.

Then a lucky mushroom, the only one, a lucky one.

The tiny fuzz of a magnolia after it has had its spectacular blooms. A secret you need to really look to see.

A weeping cherry.

So mature its trunk is gnarled and crusty.

Near it a young’un with clearly demarcated lenticels, the stitch-like pores that form a cherry’s instantly recognizable embroidery.

And another ancient specimen, a red pine, all burls and character.

But still offering its miniature baby seedcases.

A horse chestnut with a gaping critter hole at its base. Anybody home?

Childhood memories of collecting chestnuts on my way to school.

The Lyndhurst faux castle looms ahead.

More compelling, the little children’s elf cottage nearby.

I check the door, locked. Peer into a window.

It’s as if the room is holding its breath, waiting for a child to come in and love it.

Outside, the emerald glow of a red maple canopy.

More lindens. A hush of lindens. All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. So said Andre Breton. He had my number, that’s for sure.

Departing, I step across the old cobble gutter from one hundred years ago, when the estate was new. I’m sure that at its beginning the place was marvelous.

Now, in its dotage, all its trees mature, rough, tried by time and weather. A sweet birch with time-scaled bark.

Today, personal, completely private. Old, yet new.

All the more precious.

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July 28, 2023 · 7:08 pm

Why fry by the ocean when you can scorch on the NYC sidewalks?

I hadn’t been to Manhattan in quite some time. Returning, I see all its contrasts as poetry.

The old side by side with the new. Burned out church, new construction.

Antiquated evidence of New York’s beaver-rich past in the Astor Place subway stop.

A million year old hotel, updated several times.

The struggles of nature.

Pity the poor oak that hits its head against the shed scaffolding for years.

Or the struggling ginkgo.

Still, its rugged New York bark survives, as tough as any New Yorker.

You wouldn’t think it, but in addition to the dead and the wrecked and the unpruned, some trees flourish. As we walk, we look up to see the honey locust offering up its elegant chartreuse pods right on schedule.

Pagoda tree lets down its perfect profuse blossoms.

A Chinese elm appears to be strutting its stuff with that glorious bark.

Yes, we know you’re beautiful.

There’s even an allee of London planes by a Christie Street playground. Take that, Central Park!

Don’t say that New Yorkers aren’t fond of nature. If it’s possible to buy it, they like it.

Nature is everywhere in Manhattan if you’re looking for it. Never know when you might trip over a critter of carved driftwood.

Or an ancient stone lion guarding a tenement stoop.

The East Village does change, but somehow remains as gritty and vibrant as ever. An old signpost at Astor Place.

Highlighting old haunts: Remember that crazy place CBGB? Most in the East Village do.

St. Marks Place is a good location to get fitted out with a new wig, as it always has been.

Art thrives alongside commerce. Historic drug store.

Magic garb.

Throwback clothing.

We don’t go in though the window display beckons.

Signage, in New York ever brilliant. Jerk, stewed, vegan. Something for everyone.

A sign for something or other.

Or something else.

A place to go rogue. Aren’t you glad there is one? People move here from their tiny towns to be just that.

Butter above.

Encouragement below.

Further encouragement.

Also admonitions.

And observations.

Does this restaurant entice you?

How about a choice hamburger?

There is a new place I’ve been to that specializes in stewed frog and baked cow lung.

Is it just me or is absolutely every surface in the East Village tagged now?

Need wheels? Got ’em.

Some things never seem to change. Need sustenance?

You can still go to B and H Dairy and sit at the counter and delight in cold borscht. No cell phones allowed, however. What a relief.

In this case followed by the best chocolate milkshake I ever have drunk and a conversation with a witty and wise waitress.

Weed is old. New York’s storefronts have been selling the stuff for ages. Now that it’s legal, some of the cooler mom-and-pops are going under.

While others have been elevated to posh pot palaces. To which would you rather bring your business?

The Lower East Side still has a great bong selection for those who need one.

Coffee, coffee, coffee. Please!

After straggling in to an East Village café it seems there is something new to do with iced coffee. Serve it in a bag, as they do at 787 Coffee on East 7th near A.

The counter guy Diego seems surprised and bemused that we are surprised and bemused by this technological innovation.

The store opens up its wonders as we began to sweat slightly less.

Again, we are flummoxed with the heat. But it seems the store is owned by a branding genius.

Good place if you’d like an orgasm ball cap.

Or to sip your java on a swing in front of the plate glass. If you are a creative, that is.

I might be one. Not sure. Too hot to decide. We thumb through the owner’s book of aphorisms and while later they will seem a bit corny, at the time they are brilliant.

Wit and wisdom.

Reassurance.

Even the bathroom elevates the mood.

Since when did NYC get so nice? Actually it’s always been nice. In its own crochety way. We New Yorkers know that.

Diego comes over with welcome H2O.

Andy Warhol is both old and new at Brant Museum on 7^th Street, housed in a vintage Con Edison substation.

Warhol’s work ever fresh.

Yes. I’m with you, perspicacious Andy.

Who knew that as a young artist he produced a pin the tail on the donkey set up?

I think he’d like the fact that his self portrait graces a 65-dollar tote bag in the gift shop..

Jeff Koons wannabe balloon piggy banks are not produced by Jeff Koons, the salesperson corrects me rather haughtily, but by an independent manufacturer. Yes, visitors do have questions. Okay Miss Lonely but you’re gonna have to get used to it, as Dylan wrote in his most famous song, you know the one.

Still, you can get yourself a Keith Haring votive for those special moments. I hope it’s scented.

Meet up with my friend Nora, herself an artist.

She’s in the middle of finishing a drawing to hang in a show inspired by New York’s venerable community gardens.

The subway hosts some lovely youngsters with their lovely comfort pooch.

And a lovely poem.

We take the train north to home along the Hudson through sheets of cooling rain.

Already nostalgic for the cafe earlier.

One thing’s for sure, New York will always be there for you.

And me. Hot. And cool.

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July 2, 2023 · 5:48 pm

What’s your favorite tree?

A simple question. One I get asked a lot. It has no simple answer.

It depends upon the day and on the season, on my mood and also where I happen to be roving at the time. Also on the specimen’s growth habit – for me, I tend to value the concept of curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

Those who know me may find no surprises here, so please go talk amongst yourselves while I prattle on about the pawpaw, Creamsicle in a skin.

I do like the trees that cause me to slow down, take notice.

London planes are sort of my totem trees, with their sags and bags. Late last winter I introduced you to Gertrude, a statuesque character I met doing tree preservation on a street in Queens.

L.p.’s resemble nothing so much as Venus figurines, some dating back 35,000 years. Pure poetry.

Yesterday I made the acquaintance of Jake at Ellis Island. These trees were designated Ellis Island Sycamores in 1987. Honestly, I think they more resemble the sycamore’s kissing (homelier) cousin the London plane, but who am I to make a fuss?

Yes, I’m just a dumb old galoot with a belly sag, prickly balls and bad skin, doing my ho-hum job of cleaning your air for free and eating your carbon. Belch! You’re excused.

These guys are serious survivors, even thrivers, in difficult conditions, whether drought or flood or smog, and I want to learn from them.

European beech, Fagus sylvatica, especially the copper ones and especially the weepers.

Where I grew up, we had a copper beech in a meadow which drew kids of all ages to congregate beneath its swarthy branches, make hay, make trouble, make out, whatever.

I may be the only arborist around who likes carvings on beech bark.

But I find I like the history and culture of trees as much as their biology, the way they interface with humans. And I like it a person connects with a tree so much as to leave an indelible statement on its trunk.

Do these autographs really disturb the phloem all that much? Prove it.

Moving on to cherries, every one of the hundreds of varieties.

For their beautiful lenticel stitches.

Especially, natch, the weeping cultivars.

Why do I like weeping so much? Willows, too. Those who do not weep, do not see. Victor Hugo wrote that.

I also adore pin oaks with their deeply carved sinuses.

Deodar cedars for their gi-normous cones.

Message trees.

Trees that eat things.

Trees that are just an excuse for moss.

Trees that frame both tracks and river, in this case the mighty Hudson.

Trees that frame clouds, in this case over the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

I also love those dead trees you see along the highway. They’re not Sierra-Club-perfect but they make great roosting spots for raptors. Of course I’m going too fast at 70 mph to get a proper picture, but you get what I mean.

Okay, any Christmas tree. But especially mine.

The shagbark hickory. Its name a perfect example of iconicity, in which the name embodies the way a thing looks.

I like any hickory, including the canopy aglow of the one I strolled beneath with a friend on Bainbridge Island off the coast of Seattle.

Speaking of bark, here’s white ash in Catskill, New York. What’s not to love?

The pegs of the early spring Ginkgo biloba are awesome, especially saluting the flag in Concord, Mass.

Any tree with a critter lair, the more the merrier. Welcome home!

Lindens for their lemony bracts.

And for the perfume of their blossoms. What is that smell? effused a tourist at Ellis Island the other day, looking all around her, perplexed. Well, ma’am, that is the living marvel you see right in front of your eyes. Oh, somehow I missed it. That’s okay, the bumblebee found it.

Speaking of fragrance, the butterscotch scent of a ponderosa in a spot like Yosemite could knock you over when you press your nose up close to its crevasses.

Redbud, Eastern, Western, what have you.

Its flowers, so delectable in a salad.

I love cauliflory, the magical way redbud blossoms open on branches and trunks

Alligator juniper with its often conjoined stems, to which I’ve often paid homage in Sedona’s Boynton Canyon. Husband-and-wife trees.

Am I forgetting anyone? Malus domestica, so common but never unimportant – often the favorite even for arborists with granular knowledge of dendrology, because many grew up with one in their back yard. Where would civilization be without apple trees? Nowhere. Ask Eve.

And let me put in a word for the palms and saguaros of the world. Not strictly trees, I know. But they present as trees, they are tree wannabes, and they make a good substitute for those who have to make do without pin oaks or lindens or hickories.

Tell me your favorite tree, and I will comp you on a tour to see the venerable Ellis Island London planes — errrr, I mean, sycamores. It’s an honorific, not a cultivar.

Every tree deserves an honorific, if you ask me.

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Tagged as Bronx Botanical Garden, ellis island, Hudson River, Queens, Sedona, Trees

June 27, 2023 · 3:55 pm

Wildflowers thrive in forests.

Did you know that? I have to admit I did not.

That is, until I took a walk in the woods with forest ecologist Sara Webb. Sara, a professor emerita at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, has dedicated herself in her retirement to opposing government agencies that would reap the local woodlands of their lumber to the detriment of the woods themselves. She recently received Morris Park Alliance’s Individual Environment/Conservation Award.

Sara originally fell in love with ancient trees when she did research at Itaska State Park in Minnesota. Certain stands of virgin timber there, she told me, have been saved, largely because the place contains the headwaters of the Mississippi, where the river starts its journey down 2,552 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

Day trippers like myself and my family thus get the uniquely wondrous experience of hopping over the mighty river as it trickles initially out of Lake Itasca. This primal encounter was in our case fortified by the five-layer butterscotch cream masterpiece at Betty’s Pies in Two Harbors, on the north shore of Lake Superior (Nationwide Shipping Powered by Gold Belly!) and, farther west, a dip in to Bob Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing (whose residents it seems would rather forget he grew up there – don’t ask).

I was inspired, naturally, by Sara’s championing of old forests. What really rocked my arborist world, though, was learning from her about the blossoms in the shade of big old trees.

I walked with Sara through the Drew Forest – they always call it that, the Drew Forest – to find out how she and the three-year old nonprofit Friends of the Drew Forest are beginning to achieve the previously unimaginable – to breathe new life into an old tract of woodland in the heart of logged-out New Jersey. If Sara and her equally impassioned cohort have their way, this will be one of the most vibrant ecosystems imaginable, comparable to any thriving forest ever – a new imagining of an ancient woodland.

We began to walk into Drew, but the moment we reached the trailhead we had to halt, as Sara stooped to yank up some invasive garlic mustard from the edge of a black, galvanized chain-link fence then walked over to deposit the uprooted plants in an opaque garbage bag to the side of a nearby trash bin.

Sara believes as passionately in the hands-on eradication of noxious weeds as she does in the necessity of preserving what is of the forest and planting what isn’t already there.

Settling ourselves on a bench, we talked about the chain-link fence I saw when we began, a structure called a deer exclosure, which has been fundamental to Sara’s efforts.

Around the northeastern United States, where the deer population has exploded in recent years, many communities have attempted to control the impact of their browsing with such fences. They are specially designed to keep the animals out of the forest. In my hometown of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, for example, an ecological consultant assessed our 100-acre Hillside Woods and concluded that the only way to stop its degradation would be to build a similar fence around its perimeter.

At the same time, in another blow to the Hillside ecosystem, the non-native earthworm population known as “Asian jumping worms” ratcheted up. These creatures are full-out, undeniably evil. Amynthis can reach eight inches long and is easily distinguished from helpful garden earthworms by its iridescent hue and a discernably different clitellum, that pale band that circles the creature’s body.

By consuming the top layer of leaf litter and replacing it with their chemically destructive fecal matter, the species alters the composition of the earth, stripping it of nutrients.

The deer exclosure proposal in Hastings caused controversy, earning criticism from folks who saw it as artificial, a pain in the neck, even ridiculous. But an alternative approach, culling the herd, undertaken successfully in other local tracts, horrified some Bambi-doting residents. When the municipal government revealed the plan to kill deer in order to save Hillside Woods, our mayor received death threats.

At the Drew Forest, building a deer exclosure has proved less controversial.

The first, experimental fence, a 65′-65’ square, went up in 1999. Now Drew’s understory had a fighting chance. “All of a sudden,” Sara told me, “the beech trees began sending up sprouts all over the place, so that stimulated my desire to make a bigger exclosure.” The fence currently surrounds twenty-two acres– not Drew’s whole fifty, but enough to see nature’s thriving resume.

Over one hundred twenty bird species have recently been tallied, including the great blue heron and egrets which gratefully spear carp, catfish and goldfish in two ponds with their razor-sharp beaks. Seated on a bench by Round Pond in early spring, Sara and I watched turtles slide off mossy log perches into the water as ducks dunked themselves. We listened to the deep bellow of male bull frogs announcing their presence to quieter but assumingly very discerning females in their domain.

I told Sara I had not realized that wildflowers grew in forests in such abundance.

“That’s because all the wildflowers usually have been eaten by the deer!” Sara said. It turns out that in a healthy forest blossoming plants are everywhere underfoot. Sara and her team have installed fully three thousand here, including seventy-four wildflower species, as well as twenty-six kinds of tree and eighteen varieties of shrub. “In 2010, we got the larger deer fence,” Sara said. “And that’s when we started planting and restoring. Because I wasn’t going to do that till the deer were gone.”

Finding blooms in the shade of the mature white oaks and red oaks and pin oaks, black gum tupelos and soaring tulip trees was a revelation.

We turned our attention to the ground and its crumbly mulch, its fragrance the forest equivalent of just-baked bread. Many of the flowers here are known as spring ephemerals, which hide under the surface for up to eleven months out of the year. They bloom and photosynthesize for only a few weeks every spring, before the trees high above leaf out, while the sun still reaches the forest floor.

“You can imagine no one’s planting some of these flowers in their gardens, because they aren’t showy,” Sara said. “This is one of the coolest ones. It’s called wild ginger. Here is its flower, down here on the ground. It’s in full bloom.” The flower she displayed in her hand was purplish black and almost completely hidden by its foliage.

“That’s not showy, right?” she said. “They’re able to grow in that very small amount of light, and after they bloom they don’t bother to invest in leaves when it gets really shady because they’re just going to lose water and they’re not going to get much energy.”

Not understanding, I asked stupidly, “They’re not going to invest in leaves?” She nodded. “It’s an adaptive strategy.”

She showed me the delicate leaves of meadow rue – “It’s just finished blooming, I’m afraid” – as well as the spear-shaped growth habit of yellow trout lily.

We examined the upright stalks and tiny dangling white-green flowers of Solomon’s seal, and then a specimen called bloodroot, whose broken stem revealed bright yellow sap, another that would be completely invisible in a few weeks. Wild blue phlox appeared on one side of the path, carefully labeled with an aluminum-plate marker.

We saw a patch of purple wild geranium.

She showed me columbine with its crimson “funny spurs that are pollinated by hummingbirds, storing nectar where things without long tongues can’t get it.”

And then May apple, its flower completely hidden under huge umbrella leaves.

“They’re not designed for House Beautiful!” Sara commented.

But they were in fact lovely, visible to those who would take the time to look, six snow-white petals framing pronged lemon-yellow stamens.

Forest flowers make their brief appearance, but they do not die, Sara emphasized – most live for hundreds of years, their roots gradually spreading by rhizomes underneath the ground. Many depend upon ants to disperse their seeds – thirty to forty percent of woodland spring wildflower seeds are “planted” by ants. The insects only thrive in decomposing leaves, which takes us back to jumping worms. When those lethal snake wannabe’s consume the leaf litter there is no place for ants to live, and where there are no ants, no way of disseminating those wildflower seeds. The natural circle of life today needs some hands-on protection, and it gets it in Sara’s Drew Forest.

Sara said she wanted to show me something. I channeled writer Annie Lamott: I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.

Well, I did keep my eyes open. We circled back. She pointed to a vine that looked almost exactly like the morning glory that entwines itself around the tomato plants in my raised vegetable bed.

“This is Dutchman’s pipevine, a native plant which has pretty much disappeared from the world,” she told me. Why does the plant matter? “This is a vine that can house whole populations of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly, which is really endangered. So we are hoping that this will become a home for them.”

I asked if Sara hates the deer. “No,” she said firmly. “You know, they’re beautiful animals. But if you want to have a future forest, you have to somehow keep them away from the land.”

What about the garlic mustard she kept pulling up wherever we went, I asked. What’s the deal with it? It looked so harmless. She corrected me.

“It’s actually one of our worst invasive species. It only lives two years. It has these beautiful little white flowers. And then the seed pods get in the soil if you let it stay around, and they’re there for decades. The problem is, it’s got a chemistry that changes the soil so that the beneficial fungi that our baby trees need are killed off. So this little plant suppresses the regeneration of our maples and oaks and other trees. This mild-mannered little plant is one of our most egregious wildflowers.”

Sara is not averse to non-native flowers. At home, she told me, she treasures foreigners such as perky daffodils or the sumptuous peonies I love to bring inside.

When I told her that a horticulturalist I know disdains “invasive forsythia,” calling it “the yellow vomit of spring,” she laughed.

“I’m not a purist,” she said. “I’m not gonna completely get rid of the lawn. I’m pragmatic. I think we have to have triage. The most important thing is to get rid of the garlic mustard. The Norway maple.”

Ah yes, the Norway maple. The tree tree-lovers love to hate. “We compared what’s growing in the forest under a Norway maple and under a sugar maple,” Sara said. “Under a Norway maple there is a dead zone. There are no shrubs, there are no wildflowers that are native. They change the soil and make it inhospitable for the plants that should be there.”

Also, because it is a non-native species it does not feed the insects that our birds need. “They prevent a future forest,” she told me.

That future forest idea, once again. I would not forget it.

Currently endangering the Drew Forest is not just the deer, or the seemingly unstoppable garlic mustard. Perhaps surprisingly, the University leadership wants to sell off the whole parcel to housing developers in order to fund student scholarships. “It’s a wonderful university, and it’s suffering like all nonprofit universities,” Sara said. “I love Drew, I spent my career here, and it needs to survive. To sell this land would give them some capital that they need. But it’s at such an environmental cost.”

Madison’s mayor and town council would like to develop a public land conservation purchase so that Drew becomes public land. A petition to that effect has so far garnered 15,000 names.

The name for Sara’s own beloved old-growth forest, Itasca, originates with an early Minnesota settler who learned of the woods at the Mississippi’s source from an Indigenous guide in around 1800. It’s an unusual word. In it the Latin terms for “truth” and “head” are linked, producing the adjoining syllables: verITAS CAput, meaning true head. A little complicated?

Perhaps. Sara would probably think we can handle it.

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June 16, 2023 · 12:29 pm

I recently went for a saunter

(taking a cue from John Muir, who preferred the word saunter to hike) in the largest old-growth tract in Dutchess County New York, the South Woods at Montgomery place in Annandale.

It was called the Spirit Wood by the Indigenous people who occupied the land before the Livingston family bought it in 1802, with its never being touched a stipulation of the sale.

Montgomery Place is famous for the locust trees which grace its arboretum grounds, massive, hundreds of years old.

They are stalwart, magnificent. The gardens could almost knock a person over with their fragrance.

But I found myself more knocked out by the South Woods trail. All around me I saw waves of emerald fern.

Moosewood.

Sweet birch.

And the tangled lace of dead tree blowdowns.

The air smelled like cinnamon. I heard nothing at all but mad birdsong in the branches seventy-five and one hundred feet overhead. There were baby oak groves.

I saw plenty of critter lairs.

A wise old locust stood by the path.

The experience further fueled my excitement in writing about American woodlands.

Researching my book, spending time with arborists and learning as I go, I have asked myself: Why does it matter if a person can identify a tree by name? Does that knowledge make the tree any more beautiful? The South Woods could amaze anyone who follows the trail down to the Hudson.

Steps still exist from when the Livingston family built them. I imagined Janet Livingston lifting the hem of her long skirts to dip her privileged toes in the cold river water.

When you hear bird song you need have no compunction to determine whether the call is that of a blue jay or a redwing. As Shakespeare has Juliet say, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” That is true. He was, after all, Shakespeare.

But still, I think it matters a great deal. I recently walked with a couple of urban foresters, Aaron and Russell, in the thick woods of New York City’s Van Cortlandt Park. The Park contains a surprisingly dense 800-acre patch of mature forest that has been deemed “forever wild” and which lies untouched at the very northern tip of the Bronx. Yes, this is New York City.

We were nearby as part of a tree symposium in neighboring Yonkers. We snuck off through a chain link fence that bordered the park during one break in the proceedings to saunter along a shady trail.

Russell said, “Fantastic pignut hickories here!”

I was jealous of his knowledge. And elated when I came to know Carya glabra’s smooth, compound leaves, its tapering trunk, its narrow crown, even more so when I learned some context. The tree’s savory fruits are irresistible to squirrels, who share these urban woodlands with owls and woodchucks, snakes and coyotes and opossums. Also that the tough yet flexible wood made it invaluable to early American settlers who used it for wagon wheels and sulkies. Pignut hickory is stronger, it turns out, than steel.

Sound nerdy? Heard. Perhaps a shade of what in my writerly household we call “rapture of the deep.” Literally, the phrase refers to the effects of inert gas narcosis, when scuba divers breathing compressed air exhibit symptoms of intoxication. Such euphoria compromises the ability to think straight.

I want my book to offer readers a personal, primal, history-nuanced connection to trees and, in a larger sense, to forests. Let’s develop a new, intimate, vital relationship with the specimens that we see all around us every day and yet that we sometimes take for granted.

These days, spending time writing at the artists’ retreat in the Hudson Valley called Catwalk, it has struck me as simple: People might not be getting all they need to understand, all they’d love to know about our woodlands.

I work in a garden shed, a little spot filled with dusty, magical old objects.

Farm implements from when this estate had a different life.

There is perfect light here.

And a lawn outside planted with gracious trees. Other Fellows have dropped in to visit. I toured filmmaker Charlotte around the property that is visible to all every day but has secrets as yet unplumbed.

We talked as we walked. Charlotte observed details. The shaggy bark of the shagbark hickory, a perfect example of iconicity.

New leaves of a white oak, each fresher than the next.

The heavy hanging catkins of a black walnut – did you know that its roots produce a chemical which caused the failure of that ruined old vegetable whose remains you see here?

The so delicate flower of the Chinese fringe tree.

A weeping beech, its silvery bark glowing under a fall of branches.

Charlotte said, The branches of the trees look like an old man’s limbs.

We saw the elegant stitches on a cherry’s trunk called lenticels; no other tree has them. We examined the stone wall that borders it all.

They remain intact from the nineteenth century, when farmers cleared the trees and removed the rocks from fields and pastures, and expert masons assembled them without mortar.

Being here I have been inspired by commonplace things: chipmunks that scurry into a hidden corner of the shed to store nuts, a robin that hunts for inchworms just outside, the hummingbird hovering over the salvia, dipping its beak quickly but with religious fervor.

Down the way in the catfish pond, a school of whiskered fry bent on survival spook when I come close, and dive down into the drink below the dock.

The head of a cattail… there are, I believe as I write this, no words to describe it.

A mama turtle diligently digs out a hole using her tough hind legs. Later she’ll drop in the white jelly bean eggs.

The spider’s intricate web fascinates me.

She enlarges and repairs its concentric circles every day. In the afternoon I see the tiny gnats she’s trapped, and in the morning they’re gone – she’s consumed them all.

Is there anything more pristine than bracts of dogwood? Perhaps I do have rapture of the deep. But it is rapture nonetheless.

And that’s always a good thing, it seems to me.

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June 7, 2023 · 9:33 am

I greet the trees

on my regular saunter around the Catwalk estate.

John Muir preferred the word saunter to hike.

Guess what? Have you ever had a wonderful dream, then woken up, then fallen back asleep and had the same wonderful dream continue?

That’s what I feel like. Catwalk called and said someone had canceled for the next session. Would I come back?

What do you think I said? I’m back in paradise for another two weeks.

I must have done something good at some point to deserve being in the presence of this fresh young white oak.

So I amble around, revisit my favorite sights.

The monster red oak poses for me.

The trees always look the same, I can rely upon them. Yet somehow different. Even the grass here pops, holding its cup of dew.

The beech’s silvery trunk more elegant each time.

Chipmunks scurry. Hummingbirds – too fast for a picture! The meadow. The air smells like cinnamon.

The meadow grasses.

Ever lush.

Each flower has a name.

Must I know them all?

I identify them.

Then forget the name.

Does it matter? Everyone knows a daisy, if they know anything at all.

Perfect wet rolls off the leaves. They don’t know how beautiful they are.

The ponds. First the catfish pond.

Then the frog pond.

A cattail, ready for her close-up.

A redwing blackbird calls. I meet up with a painted lady after she dug a hole for her eggs but before she laid them.

I tiptoe away so as not to disturb her further.

I see x’s and o’s. The x’s roots on the ground.

The o’s happy critter habitats all around.

Lichen on trunks.

Mossy, venerable stone walls, built at two hundred years ago to last.

More trees, characters like this leaning sweet birch, I have to stop for it each time I pass.

Mysterious sculpture made by someone I don’t know, sometime in the past.

Statuary. This strange creature.

Look a little closer.

Closer still.

Dogwood, its new bract spangles.

I wind up at my garden shed, my sanctuary. Filled with dusty, magical old objects, perfect light.

And the lawn outside with its gracious trees and a spooky circle of chairs.

The spider web, still here.

Recently I had some guests over for sugar cookies and oak leaf favors, good for book marks.

Introduced them around to some of the trees. Bur oak, I think? Or shagbark hickory? This is a good place because it reminds me I don’t know everything. I want to lose my arrogance.

The heavy hanging catkins of a black walnut. That I know.

Come back to my living quarters, stick some peonies in a glass. Glad to be back.

Time to write.

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May 25, 2023 · 7:03 pm

Trouble, trouble, trouble. Trouble.

Really?

How can you complain when you find yourself in the most beautiful place on earth? Can there really be trouble in paradise?

It’s like this.

I got some feedback on a just-drafted chapter from someone I trust. He said what I wrote was not perfect. It’s hard to write about nature when you’re in the presence of natural perfection. And manmade perfection, in the form of a perfectly built old stone wall. Can I produce anything that good, that lasts that long? Probably not.

I take my seat in my writing garden shed.

Inspire myself with some of the flowers that grow just outside.

Say a few words to my shed-mate Giselle.

Woe is me. Write a while. Dreck. Go outside.

Admire a few simple flowers.

Visit with some trees. The shagbark hickory. Its new leaves are the most incredible shade of green.

Look up at the black cherry. How tall is that thing anyway?

Marvel at a tangled fall of shattered silver maple against a bewildered black gum. Human-produced sculpture doesn’t get that good.

Something amazing. A seemingly robust old white oak.

Around the back, it’s clearly had a lot of problems, but fixed itself. The way trees do.

Down the path, the crazed contours of bark, this one a white ash.

Everyone has problems. Knee problems. Heart problems. Cash flow problems. I can put a check in all those boxes at least some of the time. There aren’t too many people to tell my troubles to.

But how can I complain, really?

Trying to learn from the persevering robin who hops by over and over again outside my writing garden shed and is rewarded with money-green inchworms. I mean, over and over again. All day.

Then I go, rock myself in the hammock.

Within a few paces of the just-blooming lilac.

Olfactory bliss.

So really, can I complain?

I can complain. Watch me.

I sweat my way down to the river. Think. Pick up a few what I seem to remember are water chestnuts. They might not be. They might be magic.

Think some more. All of this thinking is making my head hurt. So I stop thinking.

Pass by the cherub floating above some ripening rhododendron at the wooden loveseat.

Sometimes a thing is almost more beautiful before it’s blossomed.

When I get back to the caretaker’s cottage I find a bright green inchworm crawling on my leg. I set it outside, gently. I don’t need it.

The lawn is filled with dandelion wishes for the taking.

What the heck.

I’ll get a bigger bouquet.

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April 10, 2023 · 9:50 am

I heard about a couple of heiresses who saved woodlands

in upstate New York a good century ago, so I go to check out the story. I come home weighed down with paradoxes.

Two sisters, Maria and Rachel Williams, grew up fabulously wealthy in turn-of-the-century Utica, a town that became so rich from textile manufacturing it came to be known as the Knit Goods Capital of the World. The girls’ grandfather amassed his fortune in burrstones (used for grinding grain) as well as Pennsylvania coal fields, steamships and railroads in addition to the aforesaid textiles. Their mother Helen and her brother Samuel added to the wealth by investing in iron manufacturing, with an ultimate portfolio of probably half a billion dollars in today’s terms, and put up a mansion called Fountain Elms on fashionable Genessee Street.

Now more known for its tomato pies and Utica greens, the town was then the family’s oyster. Sisters Maria and Rachel came of age and married two brothers, Thomas and Frederick Proctor. Neither couple had children. The Proctor men, Vermont natives, made their living as hoteliers and bankers and dabbled in politics, hobnobbing with some of the most powerful elected officials of the time.

So, while their husbands furnished respectability, their wives brought the cash. They gifted the city with farmland purchased to make parks, many of them designed by leading landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. — scion of the great one — starting with 7 acres that eventually became 700.

Wanting to see the lands Maria and Rachel endowed, I go to find the Switchbacks at South Woods in Roscoe Conkling Park, created in 1909. This being Good Friday, the gate admitting entrance at Master Garden Road is locked.

I manage to sneak in behind a park garage. I search out the trailhead.

I’m too nervous about my parked car getting a ticket to venture far into the woods. Dipping in, I notice first of all that this urban forest is filled with a surprising amount of noise from the wind circulating through the treetops beneath a scalloped swirl of clouds. Secondly I see some beautiful old specimens. There is a grove of white pines standing on their tippytoes.

Many trees by the trailside have ancient silver tags, a sign of the care taken long ago to inventory them for posterity. One beech is nicely autographed.

It just feels good to linger a little among these trees, some of them fully three hundred years old, including bitternut hickory and basswood, green ash and hophornbeam. To quote Thoreau, the nineteenth-century bard of sauntering: In my walks I would fain return to my senses. Black bear once roamed this forest. The place is still rife with habitat. Home sweet home.

A stream flows through. I’d heard about another brook in the vicinity, Starch Factory Creek, named for an 1807 industry on its shores, whose waters flow into the Mohawk river. This brook looks pristine in the early springtime sunlight.

How were Maria and Rachel so prescient as to know in 1909 how important it would be to secure this scrap of local forest against a future Utica that they had no idea would be swallowed up by fast food strips, tract housing and pizza joints, where fully a quarter of the population live in poverty? True, some people knew then that the urban poor needed outdoor spaces. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. told the City of New York in 1872 that the midtown Manhattan park he was building would serve as the “lungs of the city.” It still seems amazing that the sisters were aware of just how critical it would be in the future to have a greenspace such as this one preserved.

Thinking to get some answers, I visit their house, a grand Italianate home now owned by the Munson, a Philip Johnson-designed museum originally called the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute. You can access the house through a connecting light-filled corridor.

Its plashing fountain has been preserved.

Retirees crowd the lobby of the museum to see an afternoon screening of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I have the creaky old mansion all to myself. Some of the early furnishings still haunt the place, giving a sense of Maria and Rachel’s pampered upbringing.

Most of their home now contains perfect period rooms, the same as you would find at historic house museums anyplace in America. Some of the wallpaper might be original.

The girls’ mother, Helen preferred the more traditional landscape artists over the Impressionists then coming into vogue.

Hoping for more intimate knowledge of Maria and Rachel, I enter the hallowed precincts of the Founders Rooms. Here the girls’ early lives are plumbed in photos and placards.

You can see the juvenile versions of them in an 1857 painting.

Their intricate dollhouse welcomes viewers.

Its legend tells me that the miniature world was considered by their mother to be not only for pleasure but also, perhaps primarily, for instruction in proper household organization. Her decrees to dismantle the rooms after playtime (not accepted agreeably by her daughters) forced them to place the objects in their proper locations each time they played with them.

I can imagine Maria and Rachel putting their dollies to bed the same way I had as a child. But what about the two sisters as adults, ladies with the foresight to preserve trees?

There is no placard, no legend, no mention. Not one word.

I see their silver souvenir spoon collection and their thimble collection proudly on display here—Maria acquired 125 thimbles from all over the world.

I also see the timepieces collected by their gentleman husbands.

A series of personal belongings are layed out along with faded labels in Maria’s handwritten cursive, including a funny old fake flower corsage with the legend: Worn on tenth anniversary April 9th, 1906.

I see pictures that show the women to be aristocrats of their age, including one of Maria along with Thomas and Frederick, photographed by Rachel, posed in the Adirondacks in 1910. At that time, the most affluent Americans had begun to flee cities and rusticate in the wild in deluxe wall tents with picnic baskets organized by the cooks and maids imported to service them on their vacations.

That is as close as the Founders Rooms get to the sisters’ passion for the outdoors.

Taking my leave, I ask the friendly blue-fleece-attired docent, Why is there nothing in the Founders Rooms about the sisters’ funding of the Utica park system?

I guess they didn’t really feel it was significant enough, it didn’t rise to the level of their art collections, he tells me.

I drop by the Education Department. Knock, knock. I interrupt an Educator busy at her computer. Barb takes issue with my wording, correcting me: Well, I don’t think they ”bankrolled” the preservation of the woods. I believe it was their husbands who were instrumental. That line, I know, is not strictly true. Barb brings in her colleague from the next-door cubicle. She advises me that the two girls were taught from a young age to donate part of their weekly allowance to charity.

In formal photos of grownup Maria she looks to be a woman with presence of mind, even when wearing an artificial flower corsage.

The Educators send me off to the museum library. There, a knowledgable person helps me exhume folders of yellowed clippings and catalogs from a file cabinet.

Always a thrill for a researcher to find herself elbow deep in original documents. Some experts say that Maria’s husband Thomas spearheaded the parks project, that he even rolled up his sleeves to collaborate with Olmsted, Jr. on some of the design work. That may be so. But the sisters were the ones who endowed the parks with their gigantic inheritance, and without them we would not be hiking in Utica today.

When most people think of nineteenth-century naturalist influencers, they might conjure up John Muir, Thoreau, perhaps John James Audubon or John Bartram – rather than two urban heiresses who could have put their money towards pretty much anything they wanted and chose to safeguard woodlands. Theirs is a secret history, buried in timeworn assumptions about what women of their time did or did not do, should or should not do. Saving trees is not part of that construct.

You have only to track down the grand, over-a-century-old northern catalpas lining the lane to their South Woods to grasp the truth.

I have circled back and reentered the Switchbacks. This time I am unafraid, and go farther into the woods. A pair of kindred soul hikers suggest that my car will in all likelihood not be towed. So I walk.

When we walk, said Thoreau, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? I now see details I missed the first time around. Some tree drama.

Also a conjoined black cherry with character to spare.

Again, Thoreau: My walks are full of incidents.

Thank you, Maria and Rachel, for making it possible for me to return to my senses in your woods.

I wouldn’t have missed this walk in the park for all the pizza in Utica.

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March 3, 2023 · 1:38 pm

There is really no such thing as nondescript

in any borough of New York City.

Here I am in an ordinary neighborhood of Brooklyn, rather humdrum, really, inspecting and preserving trees, and so many things have a hint of the marvelous.

The human impulse toward landscape adornment reigns supreme.

People here love their cherries.

Doctor Seuss ornamentals.

Their pipsqueak lawns.

Their rose bushes, now hesitantly broaching the subject of spring.

But why wait if an artificial bloom looks just about as lovely on a late winter day?

Their Himalayan cedars, for goodness sake! Who woulda thunk it, on Brooklyn’s 58^th Street? Yes, I know, a tree grows in Brooklyn.

I ponder the idea a friend shared today that there may be more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way. Not all that many trees here, but the ones that do exist are clearly treasured. I’m looking after some young London plane trees today. Someone has to protect them, and at this moment that someone happens to be me. A privilege. Thank you.

Barbara Kingsolver once said something cool. She talked about how important it is “to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And then another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learn to be in love with my life again.” Yes.

Brooklynites love their orthodoxies.

Of all kinds.

The abbreviation INRI stands for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, which translates to Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews. The reason for this, if you want the abridged version, is because the first complete combined bible was translated by St. Jerome into Vulgate Latin. People became used to the Latin and continued to use INRI. Such an ancient concept in our awfully contemporary age.

I’ve always found the mysticism of the boroughs fascinating. The abundance of shrines.

Might this placid gentleman be some saint or other? I’ve never been good at keeping them straight. They’re all important, though.

The people I meet have a kindliness that I think might surprise folks elsewhere in the country. The foreman at the gigantic construction project down the street pointed me in the direction of the Mobil station down the road where “they have gas! Restrooms! Food! Everything!” And the Rite-Aid clerk proved equally hospitable, glancing once at my reflective vest and waving me on to the employee bathroom.

The belief systems here are deeply ingrained.

Driving down to the Mobil station along Bay Parkway takes you right through the middle of Washington Cemetery. As if on cue, Lucinda Williams comes on the radio: You’ve got to get right with God.

Gigantic, and plunked down right in the middle of this residential neighborhood, the cemetery was founded in Kings County in 1850, outside the independent city of Brooklyn, and from the first served primarily German Jewish immigrants. I feel like I might stumble upon some long-lost relative here.

You can wend your way through the grave plots on paths called Rose, Hyacinth, Jasmine, Aster, Lotus, Evergreen, Cedar, Maple, Cypress, Orange, Sycamore, Spruce, Aspen, Balsam, Oak, Magnolia, Arcadia and Birch. The burial ground has its share of both Yiddish theater stars and gangsters.

Never pass up an opportunity to walk through a cool cemetery. Especially when there are tombstones with photographs, the latest style in death, which has always got something new going on.