1 of 8

I have come late to the knowledge of trees, and while I would like to think that I have loved them all my life, that's probably not really true. Had I loved them all along I would know more about them by now. The most enlightening and attractive writers about trees seem to have been lifelong aficionados—one book I recently read begins, "Having been partly arboreal since the age of eight, I … "—and the ease with which they describe their old friends shames me a bit. Reading them, I feel much the same envy I feel when watching an experienced skater flow across an iced-over pond.

In the preface to his first collection of essays, Happy To Be Here, Garrison Keillor explains how he came to realize that the years he spent, at the outset of his career, trying to write a big novel were just wasted. Looking back on that fruitless time, when piles of typed pages grew on his desk without amounting to anything more than piles of typed pages, he came to see that his ignorance of trees was emblematic of his difficulties. The novel-in-progress itself

lay on a shelf over the radiator, and next to it stood the typewriter stand, up against a window that looked out on an elm tree and a yellow bungalow with blue trim, across the street. I assume it was an elm because it died that spring during an elm epidemic and the city foresters cut it down, but in fact there are only four or five plants I can identify with certainty and the elm is not one of them. I regret this but there it is: plant life has never been more to me than a sort of canvas backdrop. There was a houseplant in that bedroom too, some type of vine or vine-related plant, and it also died.

The characters in his novel, he says, spent a lot of time smoking while propped against trees; but what kind of trees he did not say. Nor did he care. In retrospect Keillor saw that the story grew dull and lifeless because its fictional world was so skimpily furnished; characters who devoted so much time to "leaning against vague vegetation" could scarcely expect to be worthy of a reader's time.

I have spent much of my own life surrounded by vegetation equally vague, though I rarely lean on any of it and haven't smoked since I was about sixteen. For one thing, as a child I was anything but arboreal: my fear of heights confined my tree-climbing to the apple and peach trees in my neighbor's garden, where I could barely get six feet off the ground, and while I could identify those trees when fruit was hanging from them, in other seasons I would have been out of luck. Almost the only tree I could name with confidence was the pecan, because our yard was full of mature, heavily-bearing pecan trees that dumped thousands of nuts on the ground every fall. (I was distinctly shocked when we moved from that house and I discovered that people paid large sums of money for pecans. I thought of them primarily as a nuisance: one of my jobs every fall was to gather up paper grocery bags full of nuts and deliver them to the neighbors, since otherwise crossing our lawn would have been like walking on ball bearings. I figured that the neighbors were doing us a favor by taking the things off our hands.) And I am not sure that I could have identified a pecan tree if I came upon it in the springtime and if it were surrounded by other kinds of tree, or tree-related plants.

Yet the very form of Tree was endlessly fascinating to me. We lived in an old ramshackle house which had the single virtue of a large L-shaped porch, and in the frequent afternoon thunderstorms of my Alabama childhood I would park myself in a dry spot on the porch and watch, almost literally mesmerized, the tall trees' dialogue with the wind. I never tired of this spectacle, nor did I ever miss an opportunity to encounter it again. The enormous creatures really did seem almost to talk to one another, and perhaps to me. Just a few weeks ago, when powerful southerly winds rushed into my part of Illinois, I was walking across the wide front lawn of the Wheaton College campus, and when I passed under an enormous oak I heard that same language and felt transported to that porch in Alabama and our cluster of pecan trees. But I didn't pause in reverie; instead I quickened my pace, because in winds so fierce that old oak could easily have dropped a branch big enough to kill me.

next page... |  1 of 8