A Cleansing of Heavenly Trees

Sometime before 8 am a few mornings ago, a large truck arrived in front of our house, a group of strange men piled out with chainsaws in tow, and began chopping down a sizeable portion of trees on the side of our house and yard. Who commissioned these men? Certainly not the owner of our rental house - he was too cheap to even agree to put window coverings in this place. We concluded that it must be the neighbors, and that these trees which seem in "our" yard must actually be part of theirs. We still are puzzling over why, if someone were to go to such trouble, they would only remove some of them, and not all, why they'd merely cut a five-foot swath between the tallest trees and the fenceline. At the end of the day, the landscape was significantly changed.

Usually I would be sad at such a violating gesture, but not this time. The removed trees are all "tree of Heaven," ailanthus altissima, a highly-invasive species native to China and Taiwan. They are the foundation of what is literally a non-native ecosystem in our yard. I once spent two days in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh with no other goal than to remove ailanthus seedlings, fought with them in my own yard there, and I know firsthand what a pervasive, stubborn, impossible species it is. I know too that because those men left behind remnants - the stumps - by the end of the summer, it's likely that much of that work will have been pointless. It can, and will, come back with a vengeance. That's what it does. Always.

Just more evidence that things out of place are usually out of place for good reason.

A Proper Naturalist I Am Not

So, I've admitted that I'm pretty good with identifying and knowing more than *normal* people should about a wide range of animals (don't get me started on my dull, but exhaustive knowledge of freshwater mussels...), save birds, since I have peculiar bird issues and they kind of creep me out (I'm working to overcome the creepy factor, slowly). But I also have to admit that I am really, painfully ignorant about trees and plants. I guess we all have elements of the natural/non-human world that we are more drawn to than others. And plants and trees just typically don't capture my interest all that much. Well, if I happen to learn about them I find this knowledge interesting, and useful, but I don't go outdoors with a guidebook in hand trying to figure out what things are.

So I have decided that to better appreciate where I am living, I should learn a whole lot more about this landscape. Today I started with identifying the beautiful pink trees that have exploded in bloom ALL OVER the place in the last week or so. Not a hard task: they're Cercis canadensis, the very common Eastern Redbud tree . I do like knowing the names of things.

It occurs to me, and maybe this is something L. should comment on, that my own interest in the natural world is often prompted simply by aesthetics, by my own perceptions of beauty, particularly when it comes to plants and trees. Things which I find attractive compel me to learn more, to uncover a meaning, name and significance.

Of Place and Words

I just ran across this anthology of Ohio writers that looks really interesting. Looks like it's a collection of place-based writing, by several people whose other work I admire a great deal (I didn't realize some of them were from ohio originally - I associate them with other places). I'll definitely have to pick this one up. Might make a good gift for other Ohio folks too.

J. and Z. also gave me this brand new book about the redwoods that I'm looking forward to reading. Some reader reviews have suggested that Preston focuses too little on environmental issues and too much on the "adventure" aspect of some of the people he profiles, but it still looks really intriguing. Ihen, I shall have to, as J. says, "Get my Appalachia on" in terms of reading about the area to which we'll be moving.

Oh! and thanks again to L. for sending me those excerpts from that John Daniel book. I'm going to use the "Among Animals" chapter in the nature writing class this summer! I'm having a terrible time planning the nature & environmental writing syllabus. There is just too much to potentially read. Too much that all feels utterly significant to include. It's a real struggle to choose what to leave out. I want to include everything!