On Seeing Trees

7 minutes

About ten summers ago, I began seeing trees for the first time. Not that I’d been entirely indifferent to them before. There was that tree in my front yard in North Carolina whose close-set whorled branches made a ladder to heaven, and the other one in California that I used to hang and drop from, reveling in my ability to diffuse gravity with bent knees and well-timed roll. I had a child’s professional interest in trees as structures to be explored, and as droppers of branches from which swords, and bow-and-arrows, and forts could be made. Yet it never occurred to me in those far-gone days to learn to recognize a species at a glance. I had, at best, a vague knowledge that oak trees dropped acorns, and that pines were sticky and sharp. Like every American child, the word photosynthesis was imprinted in my brain like a catechism question; but that was all. I didn’t know trees. They were just there.

I was hired to teach fifth grade, which included a class on natural history, and I had to remedy my ignorance. At that time, my wife and I liked to go walking on summer evenings after dinner, and I resolved to learn one new tree per walk. This turned out to be an easy and fun project. A decade later, my classes are different, and I no longer teach natural history, but that summer’s lessons have stayed with me.

Trees are like words. Learn a new one, and you’ll soon start to see it everywhere. Each species has its own identity. The great thing about nature knowledge is that it trains the eyes. I can no longer drive by a forest without noticing some of its individual members. I don’t see anonymous crowds of green anymore, but a bustle of furry stick-men, living words calling out their names to me. Here are some of the first I learned.

The American Sycamore

American Sycamore (By I, Mundhenk, CC BY 2.5)

This handsome hardwood is as a good a “first word” as any, and may have been the first tree I knew by sight. With most trees, a combination of leaf shape and growing pattern make the best identifiers. But not the sycamore. Its leaves resemble those of a maple, though they grow in an alternate rather than opposite pattern. The sycamore’s real trademark is its famous bark. Near the bottom of the bole, brown scales may grow closely together, but these soon flake off to reveal the sycamore’s characteristic mottled pattern. The blotchy swirl is like a sort of peaceful camouflage of light browns, and grays, and oranges, as if the hefty creature had vested itself for a lifetime of meditation.

Sycamore Bark (By Richard Stephen Haynes - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

These are very thirsty trees, and their presence heralds a nearby creek, or a river, or some unseen but plentiful source of fresh water. When growing beside a stream, they tend to lean out and over it, like strong guardian angels. Some are angelic in another way, growing almost shock-white over time, and glistening in the sun. These white sycamores remind me of the elf-haunted woods of Lothlorien.

With older sycamores, the deadwood tends to rot out, leaving the outer tree with its cambium layer intact, so that older and larger sycamores are often hollow. American settlers made temporary homes in these large spaces, for in those days there were still old-growth trees in the hundreds of years, some as much as thirteen feet in diameter. Such giants are hard to come by now, but impressive sycamores can still be found in out-of-the-way places. A yellow-tinted relative called the London Planetree is often planted along streets in commercial areas, but it’s not nearly as impressive-looking as the Eastern Sycamore.

The Maple Family

Maples are among the easiest trees to identify. Their lobed leaves grow oppositely on the twig, and each species drops a winged “helicopter” seed called a samara. With a few notable exceptions, such as the scrubby-looking boxelder, maple leaves are simple, lobed, and palm or star-shaped. Each species tends to have a very striking profile, so that even winter identification (sans leaves, fruit, and seeds) becomes relatively easy in time. The silver maple’s stripy, overlapping bark, and its leaves’ white undersides combine to account for that tree’s name, while the deep brown bark and violent yellow-orange foliage of the sugar maple renders its autumn form as pleasant to the eyes as its boiled-down sap is to the human pallet. The red maple’s bark, gray and plainer than the others’, is still quite recognizable in winter, but its the variable reds of its leaves and twigs which give the tree its name. The Norway maple is a common planting tree, with boxy, thick, dark-green leaves that yield a milky sap when broken. It’s great for shade, and even has a purple-leaved variant that is quite exotic-looking.

Red Maple Leaf (Photo by **Marta Wave** from **Pexels**)

The Oaks

This most famous of the tree families is divided into two great houses: the red-black oaks, and the white oaks. The leaves of both grow alternately on the stem, and are usually pinnate, with irregular lobes with deep sinuses between them. The lobes are roughly parallel to each other across the midrib of the leaf, and demonstrate a characteristic, charming irregularity; a sort of commentary from Mother Nature on the geometer’s rigid concept of symmetry.

The tale-tale difference between the two great houses are the bristle-tips of the red-black oak leaves, which are lacking in the white oaks. The bark of species in the white oak group tends also toward a silver or white color, and has pleasant, slim, overlapping scales, while the red oak’s bark is darker, and more close-set, and more formidable in appearance. Among the more striking species in the latter group are the scarlet oaks, trees whose slim, many-lobed, and bristly leaves turn blood-red in autumn. The white oak group’s exemplary member is the Eastern White Oak. With its understated blue-green ink-blotch leaves, and its white-gray bark, this tree is perhaps the most beautiful of all hardwoods. Its leaves are among the last to appear in spring, and, after they turn a soft pink-magenta in late autumn, remain on the stem for the first month of winter.

Despite being able to hybridize freely within their respective houses, oaks somehow stay true to form over time. Though each hybrid produces trees whose leaves are intermediate in design between those of the parent trees, the distinctive varieties do not melt away into an amalgamation of oak forms, as might be expected.

No account of oaks would be complete without mentioning acorns. As with their trademarked leaves, each species of oak makes its own unique style of shelled seed, providing yet another means to distinguish it from all other species. With their varieties of leaf forms, bark patterns, and acorn types, all realizing certain common principles, oaks are a sort of visual metaphysics; an outdoor laboratory of essence and accident.

Pines and Conifers

More ancient than the broadleaf hardwoods, the pines and their needle and scale bearing relatives represent a starker take on the idea of a tree. I once thought of all evergreen trees as pines, but this is quite a large error. Not all evergreen conifers bear needles, and not all conifers are evergreen. From a distance, pines, spruces, cedars and the like may look similar, but their differences are actually well-defined.

The distinctive feature of a pine is its slender needles, which grow in clustered bunches of 2-5 in a whorled pattern along the twigs. Pine branches are often whorled about the trunk, so that the whole pine images a semi-fractal growth pattern, one found in all trees, but in a more obvious way here than in the hardwoods. Larches and tamaracks are similar to pines, while spruces and firs resemble each other more than they do the pines. The spruce’s needles are short, densely-set, and grow individually all along the twig, rather than from close-set bunches (which is how the pine’s needles grow.) Spruce needles are square in the cross-section, so they can be rolled between the fingertips, but a fir’s soft, flat needles will not turn over when rubbed between thumb and forefinger. Then there are the varieties of cedars, which have scaled leaves rather than needles, and some of which bear fleshy fruit. Perhaps the weirdest conifer is the prehistoric-looking bald cypress, a bright green creature from the same family as the massive redwoods, whose leaves turn brown and fall off in the winter. If that was not strange enough, the tree produces bizarre “knees,” which grow up from its roots, sometimes poking out of a nearby swamp or marsh.

Bald Cypress “Knees” (By Photo by and (c)2016 Derek Ramsey, CC)

The Simple Joy of Paying Attention

I learned many more trees that first summer, and have learned much in the time since. Once a person begins to notice fine details, those details cease to be subtle. There seems to be a human tendency to make the world a mere backdrop, and thereby to miss the most interesting parts of it. Attentiveness to nature is a great way to counteract this deeply-rooted human flaw. Paying attention is also a path to many simple joys.

Though it takes time to learn the names of individual species, and while the brain needs repeated experiences to develop the kind of pattern-recognition for trees that it has for human faces, this outcome is well-worth the effort. After even a few weeks of careful attention, the tree-trained mind begins to notice differences in foliage types, in distinctive sprays, in leaves, in colors, and in shapes. One finds himself coming across a new tree and noticing it as a new tree. One begins to be bothered that he recognizes only two out of three species in a certain stand of trees that he’s walking past. Like a careful reader, the mental collector of trees starts to underline the words he doesn’t know. He begins to make educated guesses, wondering, for example, if this is the tree that means blackgum, if that is the tree that means bald cypress. He has seen those words before, but until now his eyes glazed over them. Now he feels compelled to look them up.

Over time he begins to pick out some individuals even in a crowd of trees he’s speeding past on the highway. He starts to recognize familiar species from a distance, and to notice the change in forest composition as he hikes up or down a mountain trail. He becomes sensitive to the difference in yellows between a hickory and a beech’s fall foliage. The mere presence of large numbers of one species over there makes him curious about the specific soil quality that might account for it, and about the types of birds and small mammals that he might find in these trees, as opposed to those others.

Through the trees, as through a magic wardrobe, he begins to see a new world. In truth it is the same world, but one he never before noticed. He once walked around with his eyes closed. Back then, nature was just a pretty backdrop, refreshing and enjoyable, no doubt, but not entertaining. Now it provides endless entertainment, bottomless intrigue, multitudes of new — but answerable — questions. More than that, he begins to see Nature as a whole; a dance of trees, and soil, and animals, and wind, and water, and sun; all of it shot through with purposive motion, and yet never mechanical; never predictable. Even words like “tree” and “bird” may begin to seem a little insulting, as if saying “that tree over there” was like shouting “Hey you!” As his knowledge grows, so does his ignorance. And that is wonderful.

The ordinary naturalist becomes happily aware of how little he knows. So much of his daily life is lived in a fog of general ignorance, but now he’s more aware of that, and he’s hungry for light. This ignorance is a very pleasant humiliation, a foretaste of an endless coming-to-know that begins now, in this life, and must continue into eternity at the feet of an Everlasting God.

Ten summers ago, I started to pay attention to the green peoples of the forest. Would that I had begun earlier — but there’s no rush. Every day, I learn something new. I have all the time in the world. So do you! And, if we are both good students of reality, following it ever upward towards its source, we shall meet someday, small and in awe, our eyes edging ever-upwards, our tiny hands resting on the roots of the Tree of Life.

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