Six Million Leaves, Without Budging An Inch

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My husband and I have been tree shopping lately, for a pine in our front yard needs replacing. We’ve been debating the merits of different varieties.  Flowering crab? Linden? Red maple? Dogwood? Who knew there were so many choices?

I’m intrigued by the way in which trees have begun to fill my consciousness. Here I’ve lived for  five decades without really thinking about them, and now I can’t walk down a street without noticing them. It’s a bit like being pregnant and discovering how many other pregnant women there are out there.

And such green treasures those trees are! My neighbor’s pin oak is a monarch among

trees, straight and tall and regal (but too big for the space we have, alas). I eye another neighbor’s maple with covetousness, but when I do the math I realize I will be moldering in the grave by the time a tree planted by me would reach such a towering height.

Even more than birthing a baby, planting a tree is a leap into the future. A small

one, of course, but I am taking pleasure in thinking of those who will enjoy our tree long after we have moved to another plane of existence.

Annie Dillard has a wonderful paragraph about trees in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped

lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and

flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree

creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water

lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full

summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a

single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate,

without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating

deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes; it splits,

sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed

fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out

ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.