Snow

It's snowing again today. The whole Columbia campus has turned white. The trees are breathtakingly beautiful, all laden with snow, standing quietly like giant mythical jewels reclaiming their place on the landscape. They dwarf over the tiny figures of students rushing into buildings. I imagine how beautiful it would be to see such trees in an empty landscape, devoid of any human presence. Meanwhile, the campus is magical and I wish I had something better than my iPhone camera to record this very moment.

Fagus sylvatica

It's been one of the wettest springs in recent memory. I don't mind the rain. It seems to slow everything down, which is nice. After a week of rain all is drenched in saturated colors, bringing everything intensely to life. I came upon this magnificent beech tree this morning and had to stop to admire it for a long time. It had recently lost a limb, but that hardly seems to diminish its powerful presence. It's no wonder that ancient cultures as different as the Egyptians, the Druids, and the Chinese all had a reverence for trees. I love the way this beech tree looks so primordial, its shallow roots exposed by the soil erosion on the steep slope on which it stands. It looks like a drawing of a tree in a fairy tale book.

Trees

I am studying trees, learning to identify them by habit, trunks, and foliage. It's a bit complicated since all the trees are changing daily at the moment and nothing looks the same from one day to the next. A tree can look completely different naked and with buds, flowers, and foliage. They also vary enormously in their shape, just as no human beings look the same even though we are all of the same species. 

I also love the whole history of plant names. There is a large literature devoted to the stories of plants and their place in culture.

The Trees by Philiip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

 

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.