Trees are bursting out all over #ArborMonth #phenology

May is Arbor Month. We're pleased that MNDNR is promoting the theme "Plant Trees For Clean Water." The Arbor Month celebration started in Minnesota about 40 years ago, shortly after we arrived here. We're still putting down roots and have taken on some Ent-like characteristics, possibly because we realize that, if it weren't for trees, the oxygen supply on which we depend would be much more sparse.

maple tree bud burst

Photo by J. Harrington

Recently, we learned that an artist, Katie Holten, has created a tree alphabet and a book About Trees. With luck, and maybe some pleading, we'll get a copy of her book for Father's Day this year or maybe our upcoming birthday. That seems like a reasonable follow-on to reading Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees. We have now put that back near the top of our "to be read" stack, in honor or Arbor Month. If we get really lucky, there'll be enough warm, sunny days this month that we'll be able to finish "Hidden Life" on the screened porch without developing frost bite.

oak tree bud burst

Photo by J. Harrington

Our hopes about warmer days have been strengthened by the fact that the local oaks have finally experienced bud burst, sometime since the weekend past. We'll enjoy watching leaf out all month long. And, since today we also saw, while walking the dogs, the first dragonfly of the year, we'll look forward to seeing more of them. Another sign of warmer days.

To return to Katie Holten and her tree alphabet, she's Irish. That makes us wonder how much of her tree font development may have been influenced by the Early Medieval Irish alphabet "Ogham." There are so many things we didn't know, and even more that we don't know we don't know because we haven't learned enough to ask the necessary questions.

I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land

By Rita Dove

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it.
Emily Dickinson

It wasn't bliss. What was bliss  

but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours  

in patter, moving through whole days  

touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite  

housekeeping in a charmed world.  

And yet there was always  

more of the same, all that happiness,  

the aimless Being There.  

So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,  

lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror.  

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,  

pretending he could organize  

what was clearly someone else's chaos.  

That's when she found the tree,  

the dark, crabbed branches  

bearing up such speechless bounty,  

she knew without being told  

this was forbidden. It wasn't  

a question of ownership—  

who could lay claim to  

such maddening perfection?  

And there was no voice in her head,  

no whispered intelligence lurking  

in the leaves—just an ache that grew  

until she knew she'd already lost everything  

except desire, the red heft of it  

warming her outstretched palm.

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