The Icon Tree

Have you ever read Stanley Kunitz's The Wild Braid?  If you haven't, you should.  It's a marvelous meditation on the intersection between gardening and poetry, one of those books I like to pull out and dip into every so often.  Each time I reread it, I find something new that stands out.

Several months ago, looking (I think) for references to winter solstice, I pulled The Wild Braid back off my shelf and revisited it.  While I didn't find anything that spoke to me about winter solstice, I did find a passage about an old tree in his Provincetown garden that resonated, so I marked the passage to blog about.  As I've thought back to that passage over the intervening time, I've remembered his old tree as an aging eyesore that became an "icon tree" in his garden.

Speaking of aging eyesores, smack dab in the center of our view of the lake, there's a dying laurel oak down by our dock. 

As I went about daily life this winter and spring, occasionally I'd think about the blog post waiting to be written.  Somehow our gaunt and decrepit laurel oak merged in my mind with that dying cherry, tended by Kunitz in his long ago Provincetown garden.  I came to think of this laurel oak as our garden's "icon tree".

Well, 6 months later I'm finally getting around to writing that blog post.  I pulled The Wild Braid out of the stack of books by the recliner to refresh my memory by rereading the passage before beginning.  Scanning the passages I'd marked, I could find no reference to an "icon tree".

Puzzled, I went back and looked harder.  I'd marked a section about a tree that Kunitz called the lamentation tree (p. 58-61).  Could that be the tree I was remembering as the "icon tree"?  As I reread the section closely, I decided that it was.  Funny how our minds play tricks on us!

"When we first moved in, there was a wild cherry tree, rather nondescript, growing there in a bed of ivy by the cellar door in front of the house.  It was the only tree in the garden areas, and, like most wild cherry trees, it was infested with gypsy moths and all sorts of destructive creatures.   ...[T]he tree showed no signs of recovering....  ...[T]he roots were being devoured by root borers...and meanwhile the wild ivy kept growing.  ...[S]oon the ivy covered the whole tree and began dangling from it.  In time the tree assumed the character of a woman locked in mourning."

Kunitz goes on to recall Martha Graham and a famous dance she performed called "Lamentation," where the postures of the body contracted and bent to visually personify grief.  "Gradually my ivy-burdened cherry tree seemed to take on the exact same posture.  It was so bent over with the weight of its grief that it no longer reached toward the sky but toward the earth, and so I named it "The Lamentation Tree."

After several years, the tree eventually succumbed to the weight of the ivy combined with the force of storm winds.  Kunitz wrote, "The lamentation tree was the most conspicuous eccentricity in the garden during those early years.  I've always regarded it as an allegory of the capacity for change in nature.  That tree changed its character and took on a life of its own, transforming from a wild diseased cherry tree into something else, no longer a tree really, but something emblematic, mythological.

"Part of the fascination of gardening is that it is, on the one hand, a practical exercise of the human body and, on the other, a direct participation in the ritual of birth and life and death."

The ritual of birth and life and death.....  Something emblematic, mythological....  An eccentricity.

While I'm not trying to be sacrilegious, there's something in the shape of my gaunt laurel oak that reminds me of a cross...or a scarecrow...or the burning man.

In April of 2015, before we even bought our house, this was the icon tree.

About a year later, the top 4-5' or so broke off.

I kept the broken wood and have it nestled in a bed just a few feet  away from the base of the tree.

There are holes in the remaining snag at the top, one of which I think woodpeckers used to nest in last summer.

There's no ivy climbing up my icon tree, only a little bit of Spanish moss draping from the few remaining branches.  The shape is not bent, but starkly upright, courageously tall despite the continual erosion of its body parts.
  
We moved here to celebrate new life - the birth of our first grandchild - and have since also welcomed his brother into our lives.  Birth and new life, while this stark tree reminds us of death.

While our icon tree can't actually talk, we've (coincidentally) mounted a sonorous wind chime on it which only sounds in relatively strong breezes, accompanied by clanks of its clapper chain that call to mind Ebenezer Scrooge's chains.  Describing it makes it sound lugubrious, but listening to it is peaceful and reassuring.

Obviously, I've never known this tree as anything but half dead.  Truthfully I find it amazing that the tree has survived at all:  about 10 years ago, when the seawall and deck were put in along the back of our property, almost half of this poor plant's root system was stripped away when the hill it grew on was sheared off.  Then, adding insult to injury, bringing the water line from the house to the deck required trenching through another quarter of its roots down to at least 2'.  So our icon tree has lost at least 60-75% of its root system.  Any wonder that it's not looking too healthy these days?

Recently I noticed that there seem to be streaks on the lower bark that look discolored.  A fungal disease attacking?  How much longer can this survivor hang on?

Tragically, no matter how much care it receives one way or another, this tree will never again be totally healthy...which makes me think about humans whose support systems are removed from them.  How can they be expected to fulfill their potential - ever - if they've been dealt devastating blows or been denied significant support, removing their very roots and the (human psychological) nutrients those roots provide in their lives?

However compromised this tree is, though, it still hangs tenaciously on to its spot on the side of our hill - and it still provides shelter for other forms of life, like the woodpeckers who have used its dead wood to bring new life of their own into the world.  I've known quite a few humans like that, too, and my hat is off to them as they take circumstances that would cripple others and continue to make the world a better place through their presence and their lives.  I hope I, too, can take heart and learn life lessons from this gaunt old individual, enduring through adversity. 

A Good Book And Some Humble (Oak) Pie

It's such a rookie mistake!  I knew there were several species of evergreen oaks down here.

But let me start again.... 

A while back, I discovered a promising book on Amazon.com, Finding Home in the Sandy Lands of the South: A Naturalist's Journey in Florida, by Francis E. "Jack" Putz.  Despite having absolutely no extra room for books in the house, I convinced myself that I truly needed this addition to my library. After all, we were talking about an author from the north (who was a naturalist!), living in the same general ecosystem we've just moved to, writing about what he's discovered about the plants and animals of the area since he moved here.  Of course I bought it.

Then, equally "logically", Sandy Lands stayed on my bedside bookshelf "maturing" for a while until the time seemed right to read it.  That time came a few days ago, as the weather and my schedule started to coalesce, making gardening seem more possible after our move.

As I delved into the book, I enjoyed Dr. Putz's tales of botanical and other adventures immensely, reading some of them aloud to Greg so that he could share them too.  Both of us decided that we would love to live in an environmentally focused, land trust based, community neighborhood like Flamingo Hammock, the spot near Gainesville that Dr. Putz has called home for many years now.  I know many of the species that were mentioned in his vignettes, so I could accurately picture them as I read, but I learned all sorts of additional, interesting bits and pieces, creating a much fuller understanding of our new habitat.

If you live in the southeastern coastal plain region, this is an enjoyable and informative read - I highly recommend it.  Actually, it's an enjoyable and informative read even if you don't live in this region!

Getting back on topic, I highly recommend this book, in fact, despite the fact that it has made me feel like a total dunce about my basic plant identification skills.  

The problem started when I read the chapter on "Liberating Live Oaks".  Our neighborhood is lucky in having many, many live oak (Quercus virginiana) and sand live oak (Q. geminata) trees, draped with Spanish moss, defining the landscape.  The original developer's daughter apparently loved the trees and convinced her father to save as many as he possibly could when he was building the homes.  Truthfully, the live oak trees were what drew our daughter to the neighborhood, when she moved to Ft. Walton Beach almost 5 years ago.  (She and our grandson were what drew us to the neighborhood...but the live oaks certainly helped clinch the deal.)

Putz, however, was talking about the decline of these beautiful old live oaks due to the encroachment of other hardwood trees, and he listed several species of particular concern that tend to grow fast and tall, overtopping established live oaks and causing their decline.  The problematic trees he mentioned specifically were laurel oak (Q. hemisphaerica), water oak (Q. nigra), and sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua).

Suddenly I remembered an earlier essay where he had mentioned that laurel oaks and live oaks could be difficult to tell apart, with similarly sized and shaped leaves.  And he was constantly, constantly talking about having to cut out laurel oaks that freely seeded and grew - fast - to crowd out all sorts of other plants.

Oh, no!  I had thought that the reason the live oaks in our back yard - left, center and right - were dying was because of the construction of the seawall back there, 8 years ago...but what if they weren't actually live oaks at all? With fear and trembling in my heart - but really knowing the answer already - I went outside and looked specifically at the back sides of the leaves of my trees:  shiny and bright green, not dull and whitish from tiny hairs.  Horrors!  Not only were all the "live oak" trees in the back yard actually laurel oaks, but even the big "live oak" in the front yard was a laurel oak!  No wonder they were all beginning to decline.

To add insult to injury, I've been flagging seedling oak trees in the yard, thinking to save a few of the best placed ones but, when I looked, all of the seedlings - every single one - was a laurel oak as well.

I guess the best lesson to take away from this humbling experience is to keep learning and to keep questioning my own assumptions.  I am truly glad that I realized my mistake now, and not 5 years from now, when the young laurel oak seedlings were well established and hard to pull out.  Now I need to decide whether to find tiny live oak seedlings to transplant from neighbors' yards, keeping the local ecotype going, or whether to buy commercially grown young trees for planting.  I want to use live oaks for their longevity and wind resistance, even though we'll be long gone before they mature.

One thing's for sure:  I'm glad I read Jack Putz's book and I'm glad I questioned my original identification.  I'd much rather know the truth than believe in a comfortable lie.  In the long run, as my son says, "It's all good."