Posts Tagged ‘tree’
“Trees are sanctuaries”*…
John Lewis-Stempel recounts a day in the life of an oak and the creatures that call it home…
Our friends the trees have an unremarkable life, or so it seems to us. They come into leaf, their fruit drops, or is gorged on by birds and the winds of autumn strip them of their dressing to leave them as the cold, bare sentinels of winter.
However, if we were to stand, tree-like ourselves, in a British copse and watch a single oak tree for an entire 24 hours — say when spring hatches out of winter — what would we see?…
Among their deceptively inert branches, trees shelter feathered Pavarottis, scuttling beetles, opportunistic fungi and fierce owls. A quick– and delightful– course in woodland ecology: “A day in the life of an oak tree, from mistle thrush in the morning to mice at midnight,” from @JLewisStempel in @Countrylifemag.
* Herman Hesse
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As we deliberate on the deciduous, we might send fertile birthday greetings to John Bartram; he was born on this date in 1699. An American botanist, horticulturist, and explorer, based in Philadelphia for most of his career, he was judged by Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to be the “greatest natural botanist in the world.”
He started what is known as Bartram’s Garden in 1728 at his farm in Kingsessing (now part of Philadelphia)– considered the first botanic garden in the United States. His sons and descendants operated it until 1850; it still operates under a partnership between the city of Philadelphia and a non-profit foundation, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
“When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all”*…
In fact, you may not have seen them– really seen them– at all…
Photographs of trees whose trunk and all visible branches have been removed by computer. Only the explosive power of the leaves remains, like fireworks in broad daylight. Through the process of retouching images, I sought to extract by subtraction this explosiveness, this will of life which participates in the majestuousness of the plant world but which is sometimes veiled by our habits of perception...
Visual artist and photographer Hugo Livet on his series “Fireworks” (“Feu d’artifice”). More at his site.
* E. O. Wilson
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As we commune with Kilmer, we might recall that it was on this date in 1307 that Wilhelm Tell (or we Anglos tend to know him, William Tell) shot an apple off his son’s head.
Tell, originally from Bürglen, was a resident of the Canton of Uri (in what is now Switzerland), well known as an expert marksman with the crossbow. At the time, the Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking to dominate Uri. Hermann Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt (the Holy Roman Empire’s title for “overlord”) of Altdorf, raised a pole in the village’s central square, hung his hat on top of it, and demanded that all the local townsfolk bow before the hat. When Tell passed by the hat without bowing, he was arrested; his punishment was being forced to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Walter– or else both would be executed. Tell was promised freedom if he succeeded.
As the legend has it, Tell split the fruit with a single bolt from his crossbow. When Gessler queried him about the purpose of a second bolt in his quiver, Tell answered that if he had killed his son, he would have turned the crossbow on Gessler himself. Gessler became enraged at that comment, and had Tell bound and brought to his ship to be taken to his castle at Küssnacht. But when a storm broke on Lake Lucerne, Tell managed to escape. On land, he went to Küssnacht, and when Gessler arrived, Tell shot him with his crossbow.
Tell’s defiance of Gessler sparked a rebellion, in which Tell himself played a major part, leading to the formation of the Swiss Confederation.
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in”*…
In European societies, knowledge is often pictured as a tree: a single trunk – the core – with branches splaying outwards towards distant peripheries. The imagery of this tree is so deeply embedded in European thought-patterns that every form of institution has been marshalled into a ‘centre-periphery’ pattern. In philosophy, for example, there are certain ‘core’ subjects and other more marginal, peripheral, and implicitly expendable, ones. Likewise, a persistent, and demonstrably false, picture of science has it as consisting of a ‘stem’ of pure science (namely fundamental physics) with secondary domains of special sciences at varying degrees of remove: branches growing from, and dependent upon, the foundational trunk.
Knowledge should indeed be thought of as a tree – just not this kind of tree. Rather than the European fruiter with its single trunk, knowledge should be pictured as a banyan tree, in which a multiplicity of aerial roots sustains a centreless organic system. The tree of knowledge has a plurality of roots, and structures of knowledge are multiply grounded in the earth: the body of knowledge is a single organic whole, no part of which is more or less dispensable than any other…
As Krishna observed in the in the Bhagavad-Gītā, “stands an undying banyan tree.” Explore it at “The tree of knowledge is not an apple or an oak but a banyan.”
* Isaac Asimov
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As we celebrate diversity, we might spare a thought for Douglas Carl Engelbart; he died on this date in 2013. An engineer and inventor who was a computing and internet pioneer, Doug is best remembered for his seminal work on human-computer interface issues, and for “the Mother of All Demos” in 1968, at which he demonstrated for the first time the computer mouse, hypertext, networked computers, and the earliest versions of graphical user interfaces… that’s to say, computing as we know it.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way… But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself”*…
“We’ve taken a complete rethink of how wood is used as a material,” said designer Gavin Munro. His production method upends traditional furniture manufacturing processes that involve cutting down trees, trucking logs, sawing the wood, then gluing back them together, generating a lot of industrial and ecological waste in the process.
Over the last four years, Munro and his team at Full Grown have been nurturing hundreds of willow trees, patiently waiting for the right harvest time. Guided by Munro’s studies in tree shaping and botanical craftsmanship, the trained furniture designer is using grafting techniques to coax the tree branches to form chairs, tables and lamp, and frames…
More at “This designer doesn’t make chairs. He grows them—from trees.”
* William Blake
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As we agree that there is nothing like a tree, we might recall that it was on this date in 1898 that the first school of professional forestry in the U.S., the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell, was created by an act of the New York State Legislature. Dr. Bernhard Fernow, then chief of the USDA’s Division of Forestry, was invited to head the new College, and set about creating a 30,000 acre demonstration forest in the Adirondacks. In part to test his theories of forest management and in part to help pay for the program, Fernow and Cornell entered into a contract with the Brooklyn Cooperage Company to deliver them wood… and set about clear-cutting large swaths of the forest. As a result of the public outcry that followed, the school was defunded and closed in 1903. (It “reopened” under new management in 1911 at Syracuse University, where it has been operating since.)
Dr, Fernow
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