Festival of the Trees #13: Putting Down Roots

Welcome to Festival of the Trees for July 2007

Trees are inextricably linked to places, perhaps because it takes them so long to reach maturity and majesty. When we become very attached to a place, we liken ourselves to the trees, and say that we have put down roots. This month's Festival of the Trees looks at places where trees have taken hold, including places in our hearts. Where, then, are the places we find trees?

I've found them at all four points of the compass:



West, on the edge of the Grand Canyon

The last tree North

A tree at my former home, back East


A magnolia, the epitome of Southerness



Windywillow finds them nearby, in a farmer's field



Jade, at Arboreality, finds them everywhere. From a Horse Chestnut at her parents' home to a mulberry tree next to her cottage, Jade shares her love of trees and her understanding of their place in the world.

We don't usually look for trees in the desert. However, the Palm Springs Savant (aka Rick Rockhill) finds date palms thriving there, as he illustrates with pictures from Sheild's Date Farm. (Unsolicited and uncompensated endorsement: I've been there. I highly recommend the date shakes.)

Mary shares palm trees seen at the Palo Alto Baylands, filled with egrets.

Jayne, of Journey through Grace, finds a tree in a nearby cow pasture, filled with vultures.

And Florida Cracker, at Pure Florida, shares his love of the Florida Keys in a post filled with pictures of trees found there, many filled with frigate birds.

Cate ("Kerrdelune") at Beyond the Fields we know shares pictures of trees at Dalhousie Lake and Bitterroot and Bergamot shows a picture of trees by the Missouri River.

Paul Lester celebrates his love of Seabrook Island with a series of posts and photos, including this one of trees and Spanish moss.



Pablo has put down deep roots at Roundrock, as we all do in places we love. Not only his own roots, but those of cypress and maple trees as part of his effort to restore the land.



Dave celebrates the trees of the Snyder Middleswarth Natural Area even as he mourns the dying hemlocks.

Chet celebrates a copper beech in Ireland, with words and pictures.

Also across the big pond, the Crafty Green Poet shares a link to the Edinburgh Tree Festival, a gathering not of trees but of tree lovers.

Down under, we find eucalyptus counseling a willow not to weep, while on the opposite side of the globe in Peru, Claudia leads us on a tour of a forest in the Valley of the Salas River.

The down side of trees is that no matter how rooted in a place they are, trees may come down. Similarly, we may find ourselves uprooted by life or circumstances. James Jourdan reflects on life, inspired by a fallen tree. Christopher also reflects on the fallen, as does Genevieve, while Pablo reflects instead on a tree deliberately felled.

Xris, the Flatbush Gardener, celebrates trees found in memories, both personal and societal.

Of course, sometimes the trees root themselves in our imagination, or their roots stray across the fragile boundary between the known and the unknown. Vicki pointed me to this picture of a tree that contains a portal to another reality.

Some of the trees we find in the reality inside us, we celebrate in stories and pictures. Others push through and bloom in poetry ancient and modern.

May you find green and growing trees where ever you look.

This concludes the July Festival of the Trees, the first one of FOTT's second year. If you'd like to host the August fest, or any future edition, write to Dave, bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, or Pablo, editor (at) roundrockjournal (dot) com.

You looking at me?

Bitter? Me?

Two green herons just perched on the snag in the backyard. I grabbed my camera, only to find that I'd left it turned on last time and the battery was dead. Of course, by the time I raced to get a charged battery, the critters had moved on.

Just seeing them was fun, but it would have been a great picture.

I'm sitting on the deck with laptop and camera, in case they come back. There's a doe grazing in the far field, the barn swallows are swooping over head, and there's a fair representation of blackbirds, doves, robins, bluebirds, grackles, starlings, and sparrows. Swallows always seem particularly joyous, and today they are chattering quite energetically as they swoop.

I love it here. I've never felt this strongly about a place, but I just love it.

At a distance, beauty

Baby, baby

Baby killdeer. I've been trying for weeks to get a photo of mama bird as I've seen her around the neighborhood. Then today, I'm out for a walk, and there she is with papa and three babies. Too cute for words.

How I spent my summer vacation

At least one day of it: Playing football. (You gators just stop listening, right now!)

If you know Ann Arbor, you know that football is serious business and that Maize and Blue are not just colors. So what better way to spend the day than at the Women's Football Academy? It's a charity fund raiser for the UM cancer center and has been running for nine years.

We spent the morning at the practice field rotating among 10 groups of coaches and players, learning basic skills and going through the same drills as the players do when they are training. Of course, we got to stop after a couple of run throughs, and we skipped the part where you put on pads and try to knock each other out off the field and back to Ohio.

After lunch, we went over to the Big House and ran some plays in scrimmage. Even starting from the 20 yard line, we found touchdowns challenging but just getting out and playing was a ton of fun.

So, I had a great time, learned more about football, and helped a good cause. The event raised more than $180,000 for the cancer center patient and families fund and I have a shirt and hat autographed by every player I could get to sign it, plus Coach Carr. I now have the perfect outfit for all those upcoming football Saturdays.

Weekend Roundup

There were two articles of interest in the New York Times today, the first a depressing but not surprising story about the decline in bird species that make their home in meadows. Development, not global warming is the identified culprit. If you needed another reason for making your yard wildlife-friendly, here you go.

Meadow Birds in Precipitous Decline, Audubon Says - New York Times

The second, more upbeat article, focuses on "garden coaches" - a service for the clueless (among which I number myself) who need advice and help but don't want to merely write a check and hand over the garden to a landscaper. So there goes your last excuse ....

Plant! Water! Weed! - New York Times

in the right hand column, you'll see a section titled "The Buzz on Other Blogs." This is a list of posts I've found interesting in my surfing and reading. Most, but not all, come from sites in my blogroll; you can click on any title to go directly to that post and read the full text. You can also click at the bottom of the list, where it says "read more" and be taken to a page with all the current past Buzz posts compiled. Broaden your horizons with a new blog!

A weed is merely a flower in the wrong place

Experimenting

Remembering that I had taken some close ups (not true macros) of both plants and animals with my first camera, a Canon Powershot 90, I thought I'd dig it out and see if it still worked.

It didn't - not sure what the problem is but the batteries drained in about 2 minutes after turning the camera on - so I went on to Plan B. The Pro90 had an optional "close-up" lens you could attach to the front of the camera for magnification, so I attached it to the front of my shortest lens to see if it would work with an SLR. It took some practice to get any benefit out of it, but eventually I figured out how to get it to work.

These are two of the results - raindrops on hostas - and I think they turned out okay for a first try. More pix tomorrow.

Be still and know

I've been thinking and reading a lot about Place as a concept recently. Sacred places, connections to the land, putting down roots - all the ways we talk about the indescribable connection between ourselves and particular places on earth. I don't understand it, but I feel it resonate with me on a primal, subconscious level.

There are many places identified as sacred in our world. Denali, the Great One, is awesome, in the root meaning of the word, when you stand in its presence. From the air, it is breathtakingly, heartrendingly beautiful. Cruel, cold, challenging, and yet an integral part of Mother Earth, the warm and loving cradle of us all.

Backyard birding

If your backyard is the Grand Canyon.

Since I'm still somewhat under the weather, I'm spending time cleaning up electronic things - the computer, the blog, the website - you know, the usual. So I'm uploading some of the pictures that used to be buried on my website to flickr and every now and then one pops up that sparks a memory or idea or is just a favorite. Yesterday's grackle photo was one such, but here's another, very different one. I know some of you reading this will understand when I say that despite the overwhelming beauty and majesty of the canyon, I would have been disappointed if I hadn't seen a condor at least once while I was there.

Darn!

I was hoping to get a picture of baby robins learning to fly, but they flew the coop when I wasn't watching. I'll keep an eye for them around the yard and hope to get a second chance. Still, as a proud godmother, I'm happy to see them launch themselves into the world and wish them every success in it.

I've had the flu or something similar this week, so while I'm recuperating, I've been cleaning up the website, catching up on email, and going through some of my older photos. I came across this one, taken several years ago at the San Antonio zoo. I'm partial to grackles, and this pair, with the female holding nesting material in her beak, caught my eye.

Kids grow up so fast these days

Remember the baby robins from last week? They're already the avian equivalent of teenagers. At casual glance, it's hard to tell if this is the nestling or the parent.

I have a couple more snapshots I'll put up on flickr.