There is something about trees, straight and tall and the way they stand. I caught sight of them as I wound my way into Heritage Village just off the Arner Townline. The Black Walnut grove is to the right of the dirt road that winds around and into the village. My focus was this tree stand, and as I moved closer, small groups of these trees huddled, one or two shyly pausing behind one another, stock still, like children in the schoolyard who cease playing to spy your car drive by, and now they’re watching me. I have something to learn from them. It reminds me of a quote from the German novelist Hermann Hesse who declared trees to be “the most penetrating of preachers.” He wrote, “I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.” Hesse says: “Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.” Hesse also describes trees as “sanctuaries … Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” The German writer finally says, “A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”
Peter Wohlleben, a forester turned writer and philosopher, takes the story further in his book, The Hidden Life of Trees. As someone whose lifetime is working in forests, he learned that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, and then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines. He recounts going out one day and passing by a collection of odd mossy stones he had seen many times before. This time, however, the arrangement looked different, and so he bent down and picked up one of the stones. They seemed odd-shaped, curbed with hollowed-out areas. He writes: “Carefully, I lifted the moss on one of the stones. What I found underneath was tree bark. So, these were not stones, after all, but old wood. I was surprised at how hard the “stone” was, because it usually takes only a few years for beechwood lying on damp ground to decompose. But what surprised me most was that I couldn’t lift the wood. It was obviously attached to the ground in some way. I took out my pocketknife and carefully scraped away some of the bark until I got down to a greenish layer. Green? This color is found only in chlorophyll, which makes new leaves green; reserves of chlorophyll are also stored in the trunks of living trees. That could mean only one thing: this piece of wood was still alive! I suddenly noticed that the remaining “stones” formed a distinct pattern: they were arranged in a circle with a diameter of about 5 feet. What I had stumbled upon were the gnarled remains of an enormous ancient tree stump. All that was left were vestiges of the outermost edge. The interior had completely rotted into humus long ago — a clear indication that the tree must have been felled at least four or five hundred years earlier. How can a tree cut down centuries ago could still be alive? Without leaves, a tree is unable to perform photosynthesis, which is how it converts sunlight into sugar for sustenance. The ancient tree was clearly receiving nutrients in some other way — for hundreds of years.”
Much later when I returned home from walking in this over-cast autumn day, I processed the pictures, and printed out a picture from that day, the one of the Black Walnut grove, and used a 100% cotton fibre based paper with beautiful tonal transitions to show it off. My wife nodded approvingly and tipped her head to one side, then remarked, “That’s nice.” The response was not at all what I expected. I never anticipated praise. Somehow maybe I couldn’t capture that quiet, solitary, surprised look, or stand-back and hesitant cloistered aura of the moment. I must return. Fay Goodwin, a British photographer known for her black and white images of the British countryside, said, “I like photographs that leave something to the imagination.” So, maybe it’s that. Maybe there is too much in the picture, not enough of subtlety to leave the picture posing its own challenges, provoking the imagination of the viewer to script their own tale. I am not sure. Still, the picture warms my heart.
