Indeed, whatever the splendor, wisdom, and heroism of trees may be, it stems from the individual’s orientation to the whole — not only as an existential metaphor, but as a biological reality as science is uncovering the remarkable communication system via which trees feel and communicate with one another. Biologist David George Haskell recognized this in his poetic expedition to a dozen of the world’s most unusual trees: “The forest is not a collection of entities [but] a place entirely made from strands of relationship.”
A beautiful illustrated celebration of the forest.“When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his lyrical love letter to our arboreal companions, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.” When Walt Whitman beheld the singular wisdom of trees, he saw in them qualities “almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic.” Philosopher Martin Buber insisted that trees can teach us to see others as they truly are.
Indeed, whatever the splendor, wisdom, and heroism of trees may be, it stems from the individual’s orientation to the whole — not only as an existential metaphor, but as a biological reality as science is uncovering the remarkable communication system via which trees feel and communicate with one another. Biologist David George Haskell recognized this in his poetic expedition to a dozen of the world’s most unusual trees: “The forest is not a collection of entities [but] a place entirely made from strands of relationship.”
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French photographer Cedric Pollet’s beautiful photographs of tree bark from around the world.
Tree bark may not sound like the most exciting or relatable of subjects but, in fact, it is both. Not only do we come in contact with it constantly in our daily lives, from cinnamon to cork to chewing gum to rubber, but it’s also a hauntingly beautiful, textured piece of living matter that looks like the skin of some magnificent mythical dragon. French photographer Cedric Pollet travels the world to capture this beauty and has documented it in his gorgeous new book, Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees (public library). Visiting the National Museum of Natural History’s Objects of Wonder exhibition, a splendid embodiment of Walt Whitman’s admiration of the character of trees stopped me up short: a display of slides revealing the cellular structure of trees and shrubs seen under a microscope — stunning images that occupy the lacuna between art and science, resembling ancient tapestries and Klimt paintings and galactic constellations.
Beyond their aesthetic rapture, these specimens have taken on a wonderfully hope-giving new role in advancing science and the law. Half a century after Wilson’s death, they have become part of a vast database documenting the chemical fingerprints of wood, known as the Forensic Spectra of Trees — or, because scientists do delight in acronymic puns, ForeST. Much like artist Ryota Kajita’s stunning photomicroscopy of Alaskan ice formation are being used to understand climate change, scientists are using Wilson’s samples for vital wood identification, not only in advancing botany, but in combatting the worldwide epidemic of illegal logging and timber trafficking, which has swelled to about a third of the world’s wood trade — ecologically exploitive contraband estimated to be costing the global economy up to $152 billion per year, with unfathomed environmental costs as entire ecosystems are being decimated. (Trees, lest we forget, are the relational infrastructure of the living world.) The rackety magpie family has moved home, from the ivy bush to a tall cypress with a dying ash tree beside it. I can see the convenience of this. The ash branches are perfect lookout posts to all quarters. The gloomy depths of the cypress provide suitable roosts for the entire magpie clan. But its established occupants are none too pleased. Collared doves grumble out their grievances daylong. The far more startling protests of the jays reach my ears from wherever my feet have taken me around the village.
Is there any more startling British birdcall than that of the jay? Its name in Welsh sums it up: sgrech y coed (screecher of the woods), though there is far more to this smallest and most beautiful of Britain’s native crows than its raucous voice of protest, which used to rouse my little terrier to paroxysms of indignation and fruitless pursuit. The colour scheme of jays’ plumage – cinnamon and celestial azure – is exquisite, set off to perfection by velvet-black and pure white secondaries, a speckled crest, and the bright blue iris of the eye. This is a gorgeous bird. Its character too is distinctive: “tireless energy, and a liveliness of disposition and alertness almost without parallel among British birds” is how WH Hudson (1841-1922) described it. You more often hear it than see it, though. Centuries of persecution have left this vital, intelligent creature intensely wary of humankind. Its tireless energy in collecting and hiding acorns is surely responsible for great tracts of oakwood throughout Britain. The jay is truly, to adapt the title of Jean Giono’s haunting 1953 eco-fable, l’oiseau qui plantait des arbres, the bird that planted trees. Adaptation has a Darwinian relevance here too. The jay’s gullet relative to that of other corvids is enlarged, and copiously supplied with saliva to make regurgitation into the cache easier. Acorns – they can carry up to nine at a time– are at present off the menu. I catch the visionary flash of these sky-jewels dipping across low westering sunrays, heading out to estuarine fields for insects and worms before returning, lapidary in the last light, to roost. From Edinburgh here’s Harmony Bury’s mesmerising work ‘Materiality in the Scottish Landscape’ from the Art, Space and Nature MFA (see her own site here):
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