At the bookshop of the Cradle of Forestry in America, which we visited Sunday, I happened on a lovely little book by old-growth forest advocate Joan Maloof. Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest is from 2005, the first of several popular books by this biologist. The essays are short and personal, most rhapsodizing on a familiar Eastern tree and some of the animals which live in and with it, but I was especially captivated by the way Maloof made use of images and poetry to demonstrate the mutuality of species which is the heart of ecology.
The images, starting with the one on the cover, are taken from am opulently illustrated work published in London by one John Abbot in 1798, The Natural History of the Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia. (A digitized version, with subtly different watercolors than the one Maloof consulted, is available here.) No plant appears without caterpillars, pupae, and the moths or butterflies they become. It was fun to find trees I'm seeing budding into leaf - and some already being chewed by caterpillars - here! Hello tulip polar, hello black oak!
Weaving Abbot's insect-focused images of trees into her text lets Maloof suggest a lineage of citizen ecologists - and images more than two centuries old are the age of "grandfather trees," so endangered in our forests and parks of juveniles rarely older than 100 years.
A few lines near the end could serve as an epigraph for my time here:
Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise
in us invisible - Isn't your dream
one day to be invisible? - Earth! invisible!
What if not transformation is your urgent commission?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, no more
of your springtimes are needed to win me over -, one
oh, a single one, is already too much for my blood.
Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar
in uns erstehn? - Ist es dein Traum nicht,
einmal unsichtbar zu sein? - Erde! unsichtbar!
Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drängender Auftrag
Erde, du liebe, ich will. Oh glaub, es bedürfte
nicht deiner Frühlinge mehr, mich dir zu gewinnen -, einer,
ach, ein einziger ist schon dem Blute zu viel. (68-74)
Meanwhile, I'm particularly struck by a passage where Maloof describes the frantic efforts of the owners of a new subdivision, built on old corn and soybean fields, to plant trees.
Do they know that here in the East we can have trees for free? All we have to do is: nothing. Stop mowing. Forest is our land’s natural calling, and if you leave just about any spot here alone for long enough it will become forest, thanks to the birds and the wind. (82)
That "forest is our land's natural calling" is precisely what I, a desert westerner, don't know! Or am only slowly coming to know...
