Apr 27 2007
Dendrology
Pine Trees, California
Cypress Swamp, North Carolina
Cherry Trees, Washington, DC
Banyan Tree, Hoomaluhia, Hawaii
Coastal Redwoods, California
Decidious Trees, Maryland
Trees in Maryland
Trees completely enchant me. They catch my eye, and my spirit. The most tranquil place I have ever been is undoubtedly the redwood forest of California. Trees command respect and tell countless stories.
Today is Arbor Day. It is pouring rain the DC area today (helping the trees, no doubt!) but it is still a great time to celebrate trees and how they impact our lives. The Arbor Day website has a myriad of resources: the history of the celebration, a comprehenisve tree database, guide to the benefits of trees, Arbor Day e-cards, info on RainForest Rescue, and many ways to take action in your own community (and with your wallet). I donated, and bought some of the shade-grown, fair-trade, organic coffee for my caffeine-addict husband (who also loves trees).
Do you have a particular memory about a tree? or a tree that holds a special place in your heart?
My family moved around the U.S. a lot when I was growing up. My father’s career is based in natural resources, and he spent many years doing field work, and learned about numerous plants, trees, and animals. As a child, I spent many hours with my family on various camping trips, hikes, and road trips, we admired the landscape of trees, and we tested our parents by always asking what kind of trees we were seeing. We moved to several different states during my early childhood: When we lived in Wyoming, we encountered large conifer forests - in West Virginia, the Appalachin decidious forests - in New Mexico, the pine forests in the mountains, and the yucca plants of the steppe. Each new state brought beautiful and interesting new possibilities. My sisters and I frequently climbed the mimosa tree at our West Virginia home, and we saw the saplings grow into larger trees at our home in New Mexico. Now, Kris and I celebrate and honor trees: our upcoming trip to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, our weekly walks through the Maryland parks and wooded areas, and our own landscaping techniques.
Field Guide to Trees of the World
HAPPY ARBOR DAY!
My grandfather used to be the head of the US Forest Service, so trees are close to my heart as well. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have beautiful trees. I remember my grandpa telling me what was what as we walked through a forest near the house where I spent my first 10 years. Every time I run through a forest, I think of my grandpa. Nice, huh?
My father actually planted a tree for both myself and my sister when we were born….pretty neat to see them all big now!
all i can say is the flying circus is all i can think of with your post.
“the larch. the larch.”
Oh, what a lovely post! Thanks for sharing these photos.
I spent a big chunk of my teens and early twenties in treatment at a pediatric chemo clinic — whenever one of the kids there dies, the other patients plant a tree on the hospital grounds. Now that I think of it, it’s sad that there are kind of a lot of trees that have been planted that way … But it’s still a neat ritual.
Oh geez, I could talk to you about meaningful trees in my life for hours.
Like the dogwood my parents planted in honor of my First Communion (still blooming right now), and the weeping cherry we planted for my daughter, born on Washington’s birthday, and the wishes my family planted with it.
Or the “Magnolia Drives” my dad would take us on every Spring after church, stopping the car in front of each of his favorite magnolias in the neighborhood. Or the one with the wind chimes that helped us choose his grave site on a barren January day.
My beloved, immense maples in front of my last house, which I watched for hours while I rocked my children on a porch swing, one of which destroyed my car during a hurricane, the rest of them literally being cut down by the city on the very day we moved away.
Happy Arbor Day to you, too Lolly.
Oooh! Without realizing it is Arbor Day, i posted some tree photos today too. Well, trees and a few other things…all while hanging out of my bedroom window. No joke. LOL!
My brothers and I practically grew up in trees. We had a big apple tree in our yard with a treehouse and a tire swing. We spent hours and hours climbing around and eating the apples. We planted at least 40 trees at our last house, including a Magnolia to mark the place where our dog Noodle was buried. We were forced to move from there last year, so now trees sometimes make me sad.
Beautiful photos! I used to live in the Redwood Forest…it’s amazing. Birches on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota are quite amazing too. They smell “right” to me.
Wonderful post! I have several favorite trees, actually:
- My favorite individual tree is the humongous magnolia in my maternal grandparents’ backyard that my sisters and I practically lived in when we would go visit them.
- My favorite African tree species is the baobab
- My favorite tree species from my younger days is the dogwood
- My current obsession is the saucer magnolia.
Yay for trees! Happy Arbor Day!
Dogwood trees remind me of the happiness of my childhood. Weeping willows always make me stop and reflect a bit, I think they are beautiful trees. Happy Arbor Day Lolly!
Our yard is blooming with pear trees, apple trees, and cottonwood right now…the cedars are sending out their neon-green neo-needles…but my favorite tree in the back yard has to be the red maple I received from my son and husband for my first mothers day in 2003. She’s sprouting new growth now.
One of the biggest changes of my move is getting used to the new environment. Certainly, a salient feature of the Seattle area is the evergreen trees that are everywhere. I love how even on cloudy days, their intense color stands out and makes me happy. Unfortunately, I’m also starting to learn about all of the logging that takes place here. I hope to learn more about it so I can help with protecting the beautiful natural forests we have out here.
I grew up in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee and I have fond memories of hiking and camping in the woods. One campground we frequented in Dennis Cove had giant rotten tree stumps - the kind you can hide inside when you’re a kid. They seemed like a wonderful treat at the time. Now I look back and realize they are the remnants of the Chestnut blight that killed almost all of the American Chestnut trees a long time ago.
Sorry to be so morbid! I guess the realization of what I missed reminds me to take care of what we have.
I love magnolias and jacarandas. When I was a kid at summer camp we had to hug trees as a punishment. One particular kid did so and thusly we discovered that pine trees can smell like vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. Unfortunately for the councilors it did make punishment far less punishing as we’d all hug the tree anyway to see what “flavor” it was.
Happy Arbor day! I love mimosa trees, they smells so good and have those pretty little flowers. Of course, they are even better if they are in WV :).
Saguaro cacti. And as a former tree farmer in Africa, I can also answer this question as “anything but eucalyptus.” Those damn trees destroy the water table.
My cacti on the other hand are silent, sweet giants of the desert.
And you, beautiful lady, have lost a ton of weight since that Hawaii pic!
I LOVE trees of all kind. thanks for sharing had no idea there is an Arbor day. will have to mark from now on on my calendar.
Lolly, I thought it was just me, but I absolutely adore all trees - when I see one being cut down I actually tear up. My grandfather was a gentleman christmas tree farmer, just because he loved trees - I miss him.
Your tree pictures are lovely, I will be back often to view them.
I love trees too and I always have. As a kid, I climbed trees all the time. There was one particular favorite in my backyard on Long Island that i would climb so that I was level with the second floor of our house. It would freak my parents out. They were sure that I’d fall but I never did. Often, I’d take a book up there and sit in the cradle of the branches and read for hours. Years after I moved away, my mother had tree trimmers in and they found a paperback that I’d left up there years ago. It was Blubber by Judy Blume. I always wondered where it went.
Hmm, good post. I have been looking at trees lately and marveling at them. Amazing life forms. I am from California, where most trees are evergreen, except for Aspens and Oaks (which figure prominently in my life, along with the evergreens.) And I now reside in Portland,OR. Spring still catches me off guard. I’m not used to it! It’s so magical. These gigantic plants breaking out explosively and colorfully into foliage. Fall is so much more gradual, almost solemn, but spring is a riot. My favorite part is all the flowering trees snowing in springtime and the air is so delicately perfumed by all the pollen and blooms. I miss my rambling, palomino Oaky hills and my tall coniferous and aspen filled forests from my home state, but nothing beats spring with deciduous trees.
What a beautiful post, both the words and the pics.
I have 3 memories to share….as a kid we had a huge Redbud in the backyard. I used to love to lay under it as it was budding and look up at the sky thru a lattice of thousands of tiny pink buds.
I remember a truly GINORMOUS Magnolia on a huge corner lot one town over from where I grew up - they needed six cranes to hoist that amazing tree out of the ground and people came for miles to say good-bye to that beautiful tree.
Lastly my Dad’s sister Aunt Helen had a huge weeping willow in her front yard. At least one weekend a month we made the 2 hour trip to New Jersey and oh the fun we kids had in that tree….I can almost still see the lightening bugs winking thru the branches.
Thanks for the memories Lolly!
I grew up in Southern CA, and every summer as a child we would drive up the coast on HWY 101 to North Bend, OR to visit my grandparents. I loved the fact that the further north we got, the more trees there were. My best friend and I used to talk about how we wanted to live in a place that had alot of trees when we grew up. One of my most vivid memories was driving through the redwooods, and the drive-through redwood tree.
It is more than 20 years later and my friend lives in the San Diego area. But I live right in the middle of redwood country, where the redwoods meet the sea, in the “real” Northern California. (Yes, there is still alot of California north of San Francisco!!!!) I love having National Forest all around me, and take great comfort in seeing those “towering giants”. When we go on vacation, the best part is coming home and driving through the redwoods. When we bought our present house, there was an acre parcel that our house faced, with a forest and trails that my chldren and all the neighborhood kids played in.
The dogwood flowers in the East look all wrong to me, because they only have four petals. I grew up in California and to me real dogwoods are the ones that grow on the Yosemite Valley floor, along the river. They have five petals.
They’re beautiful in the spring, covered with white flowers and shining in the sunlight. They grow along the river because they need the sunlight and elsewhere they’re overshadowed by the pines.
No doubt Western dogwoods look all wrong to Easterners because they have too many petals.
My grandparents had a big apricot tree in the yard of their farmhouse. I vividly remember being fascinated with the sloughed-off shells that covered it during a “cicada summer” when I was a kid.
You know me, I grew up in our trees over the years and I even have scars to proove it. I love trees as well and I have been planning on planting one in our backyard for quite sometime now. I just need to get on that…don’t know what kind yet.
Love You!
I found out this year that I’m probably allergic to trees. Which is really really sad.
I love a flowering tree - magnolias, dogwoods, cherry blossoms - but I’ll agree with you - nothing compares to the redwoods. Nothing.
i grew up moving around a lot too and even today when i travel for business or pleasure going to a new place the first thing i notice is the trees. how in the east the predominate tree type is decidious (sorry about the spelling, i’m too lazy right now to look them up) and in the pacific northwest, it’s the evergreen. of course, my favorite time of year being the fall when the leaves are changing. the palms in CA — when i was a kid we had a palm tree in our front yard that was maybe 10 feet tall. a couple of years ago i went back for a visit and it’s now maybe a hundred feet tall, dwarfing the house. i remember visiting the redwood forest as a child and driving the car through the trunk of a tree. and at home, we have some wonderful old oaks, maples and pines on our property and j and i always fight about the ones he wants to have cut down because “they’re in the way. ” whereas i think that they give our house, a kind of rundown little house, a little majesty.
I have always had a particular affinity for the white pine. Not an exciting or showy tree but they smell great and the sound of the wind through the needles is very soothing. As a kid there were a couple that were special to me, one for its sheer SIZE! One because I played amongst its rots making up stories to myself about the wee folk that could live there.
As an adult I had a big beautiful and full white pine across the road from our small homestead. Then a road crew came along one morning as I stood at my kitchen window, in my jammies, sipping coffee and loving “my”tree and the ass in the tractor trimmer lifted the shredding thingy and plunged it INTO my tree!!! For no good reason! it was no threat to riving being well back from the road and ditch.
That crew won’t be forgetting my wrath in my jammies and boots anytime in their life time I am sure. They tried to “fix” the damage with chainsaws, cleaning up the broken shredded branches, but my heart was so broken for my favorite tree.
Now I live in another province in the suburbs. There is a magnolia a few streets away that I make a point of stalking each spring. And a group of white pines in a neighbors yard. :oD
I have two experiences–I once went to Washington D.C. with my two best friends to see the Cherry Blossom Trees and it was wonderful and I once worked on a shoot (When I was a wardrobe Stylist for T.V. commercials) in the Red Wood Forest and it was amazing.
It’s so strange to be reading this post right now…I’ve been doing some weeding and I came across a children’s book about a Coastal Redwood tree. It brought back my memories of the Redwood forest. I miss it so much! It’s truly the most enchanting place on earth. The thought that some of those trees have been around for over 2,000 years. wow.
When I was in my late teens/early twenties and living in Boston, I used to spend a lot of time at the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. There was one tree in particular that I used to visit a lot, a beautiful weeping birch, the kind where the branches grow all the way down the the ground, then go underground and come back up again. That was a truly magnificent tree, and sitting under there was incredibly peaceful. The whole world was gone, and it was just me and that tree. That was a difficult period in my life, and that tree gave me a lot of solace. When I get back to Boston for a visit I’d like to go back and visit it again. (And get a photo of it! I don’t have any, and I wish I did.)
Just like Phoe, I marvel at magnolia trees in bloom. Their season is tooooo short and they are soooo beautiful. They really remind me of my mom - I can just hear her in my memory - “Just look at that magnolia” and that is exactly what I hear when I see a blooming magnolia!
when i was a kid (6th grade, winston-salem, nc) … on arbor day, my elementary school sent each kid home with a little sugar maple, root ball and all. we planted it in our front yard, in view of I-40, next to downtown. later that year, or so, my father accepted a partnership in shelby, nc. my parents went house shopping, found a house, but we couldn’t move yet … so, my little tree was dug up and moved to the yard of my father’s partner’s property. there it stayed for unknown months. once we moved down to shelby, my tree was dug up again, and moved to my parent’s home … where it grows now … 25 years later.
my sugar maple grew up straight and tall. it’s a beautiful tree.
i love trees. i can’t name them all … but i could when i was a kid ……
and, if i were a tree … i’d be a willow.
If you love trees you should read “Eucalyptus” by Murray Bail, an Australian author. He won the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It’s an amazing read, but it helps to have a field guide to eucalypts beside you! I didn’t and was still entranced, but I’ll go back one day and read it again with the filed guide. Despite the title, it’s a fiction story with the theme of eucalypts tieing itall together. The back cover has excerpts from reviews “Wonderful …. brilliantly told …. a moving, exhilarating love story” - The Australian; “Magical” - New York Times Book Review; “An astonishing achievement” - Independent Magazine; “Mesmerizing” - Washington Post - etc etc. Read it! You’ll love it.
You are not going to believe this Lolly, but we were just talking about dendrology at dinner tonight! We were playing hangman at a restaurant while waiting for our food and my husband played this word.
Now, the backstory is that when I was in college and waiting to hear back from graduate schools for a master’s degree program, I got a call very early in the morning that woke me up from a sound sleep. I talked to the person, who it turns out was calling me (on the west coast) from Vermont (and didn’t realize the time difference!) and offering me a position in the graduate biology program if I would agree to teach a “drendology” class. I was so out of it I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I said something fairly reasonable about getting back to him and then had to look it up to find out what the word meant. Only then did I realize he must have meant dendrology. I told my husband-to-be this story and he brings it up every so often just to annoy! Anyway, a very long winded way to say that your post title was just too much of a coincidence! Happy Arbor Day to you! BTW, I didn’t take that position, but ended up at U of CA Davis and studied birds which was where my heart was anyway.
Will you be going to Machu Picchu? If so, be aware…you will be at some mighty high altitudes. More so in Cusco. Absolutely beautiful part of our world. My husband and I were just there in February.
i love these tree photos lolly… so beautiful! i am so drawn to trees also and am always looking up into their branches when i walk… these are all so exquisite!!
Trees have always been spiritual and important to me too! I agree that the redwood forests in California are just amazing.
I used to climb a tree in my yard growing up to watch the neighborhood. I would pretend I was in charge of keeping things safe and sit at my patrol for hours.
I got these cool book plates for my library - I though you would be interested too - since you’re a fellow book lover and librarian!
http://tinyurl.com/394mqc
A tree growing out of a book - what could be better!?
(Well maybe the tree could be growing yarn…)
I love trees- big old yellow pines (mature ponderosa) are my favorites- so beautiful, nice vanilla smell in the bark. So stately. When I worked as a field forester, I always gave them an extra hug after measuring the diameter.
I remember the ‘grandma’ tree, a big old Doug fir next to the Hamilton Mesa trail in NM- always gave her a pat as I passed.
thanks to Phoe for mentioning Jacaranda. I remember them from my Peace Corps days (Paraguay) along with a host of others- the big tajy outside my door, samu’u, cedro, yvyra pyta turning the country side yellow when they bloomed, palo santo, and one whose name I can’t remember- big red flowers. And the banana and avocado trees, also outside my door.
As the weather warms up, I remember the mango trees best of all. Those big old trees had the best shade and so cool underneath. I want one here (eastern Washington, the state)!
In guarani, the native language of paraguay, the word for tree is ‘yvyra’-
‘yvy’ meaning earth, soil, etc. and ‘ra’ a suffix meaning future, or something that is to be- so trees were “future earth/soil” Think about it. Makes perfect sense.
ps- I’m a forester by training, though no longer doing field work.
Lolly, check it out! If you love trees, you’ll probably love votefortrees.com
Make sure to check out the Cedrus the Entertainer’s MySpace page (it’s linked from that site) …it’s pretty hilarious.
Smiles,
Erin
Those Sequoia’s are screaming to me to visit. I must get on a plane. I must get on a plane…..