Do you have a special tree in your life? I do. It’s an old, gnarled maple, once shorn by a lightning strike, with the charred limbs decomposing on the ground below. At first glance the tree looks dead, but when you look closer, you see leaves in the upper branches, reaching out to the sun. The main limbs have been ripped off, and there are large hollows in the trunk where animals have taken up residence. Still, against all odds, the tree carries on.
Over the past two years, I’ve lived for months at a time on the side of a small mountain in Vermont, where my favorite hike takes me up a steep, wooded hill, past this remarkable tree. Most of the trail winds below tall trees, so it’s always a surprise to find one sunny glade in the midst of all this shadow, and that’s where “my” maple is. The tree’s craggy shape gives it a distinctive character, and since it’s probably hundreds of years old, this maple has undoubtedly presided over hundreds of younger trees nearby. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard talks about “mother trees” - old-growth matriarchs that become repositories for nutrients shared by the surrounding trees, bound together by a vast underground fungal network. To me, this maple feels like the mother of the entire hillside, and I wonder what it has witnessed over so many seasons. By comparison, my own life barely registers on this time scale.
In this weekend’s show “Plants as Persons,” ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how we might learn to see trees as teachers, which makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t really know what this old maple tree is offering to teach me, and that may be one reason why I keep coming back to stand in its presence.
—Steve