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I apologize for not writing any posts last week. I got upset hearing about how blogging is dead and only podcasts and video content matter (also I was seduced away from the stupid, worthless internet by the evanescent beauty of the cherry tree). But, even if writing is worthless and doesn’t matter and the only people of any importance are rich blathersome celebrities, it hardly seems right to leave all opinion-making to them. So I will try to make up for last week’s absence by posting more this week!
Pursuant these matters, April is poetry month, and I failed to write a post about poetry! So, in a spirit of year-round poetry appreciation, here is a quiet poem which seems to fit with this year’s cold spring and various worldwide crises. The poem was written by the largely-forgotten poet, Charlotte Mew (an unhappy spinster whose large family was destroyed by mental illness and bankruptcy). Although Charlotte Mew died in 1928, she saw the ways of the world clearly and her poem feels like it could be about the present. Likewise, although the poem is about what it is about (large beautiful trees being cut up and carried off), it is also clearly about bankruptcy, downfall, ruin, and defeat. Finally, somehow there is a lowly (yet pitiable) dead rat in the poem which makes me think of posts about the despised (yet morally righteous) rats. But enough talk, here is Charlotte Mew’s lovely poem about sycamore trees:
The Trees are Down
—and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees—
(Revelation)
They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!—)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’
Here at Ferrebeekeeper we have delved into giant ancient trees, yet we left out one of the most astonishing and iconic trees of all–the African baobab (Adansonia digitate). Full grown baobabs are among the most massive flowering plants in the world, and, like the yews, the sequoias, and the great oaks, they can live for an enormously long time—up to 2500 years according to carbon dating. The African baobabs live on the dry, hot savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. The trees grow up to 25 m (85 feet) in height, but it is their mass which makes them astonishing: trunks with a diameter of 14 m (46 feet) are not unknown. Shaped like jugs or squat bottles, these trunks help the trees store precious water during droughts. Below the ground, the trees are even more astonishing. The roots grow wider and deeper than the branches which is why enormous baobabs can be found in seemingly parched scrublands. Their roots seek out secret water basins and find hidden underground rivulets.
Baobabs are also known as “dead rat trees” because of the appearance of their fruit. Admittedly this does not make the fruit sound super appealing, yet it is edible and nutritious and a market is springing up for baobab fruit smoothies. In addition to providing fruit for humans, the leaves and bark of the tree is important to wildlife on the great savannas.
Although the trees are practically synonymous with the landscape, humans know less about them than one might suspect. Although the trees are fertilized by pollen born by fruit bats and bush babies, the full process of fertilization is not entirely understood. Indeed, botanists are increasingly unsure whether Adansonia digitate is actually just one species. The other baobab trees are largely native to Madagascar (although there is one Australian species, and a species on the Arabian Peninsula) so it seems like the genus originated on the microcontinent and then spread to the great supercontinent.
As you might imagine, the baobab features heavily in innumerable myths, folktales, and religions of Africa. It is the magic fairy tree of that land. My personal favorite story comes from the Zambezi basin, where tribes tell of how the proud baobabs grew so tall and beautiful that they began to rival the gods themselves. In wrath the gods inverted the trees so that the fat roots now grow into the sky, but the trees were still splendid, till evil spirits put a curse on the strange white flowers. Now anyone who picks these fantastic blossoms is subject to terrible bad luck…more specifically a lion will kill and eat that person! That should keep the blossoms safe.
But, of course, in the Anthropocene world, such made-up curses don’t keep the trees safe at all. There is one true curse on the great baobabs. Across Africa they are dying. Trees which were saplings during the fall of the Roman Empire (the western half!) are swiftly succumbing to an unknown scourge. To quote a tragic article in the Atlantic, “Of the 13 oldest known baobabs in the world, four have completely died in the last dozen years, and another five are on the way, having lost their oldest stems.” The full truth of what is felling the giants is subject to debate, but botanists and arborists agree that the rapid warming of the world is the most likely culprit. Trees which lived for two millennia in arid wastelands in the heat of equatorial Africa are suddenly dying from high temperatures. Some of these trees have been landmarks for countless generations of people. It is as though a mountain died and withered up
I am not sure how to properly quantify something so troubling, but the truly ancient past offers some upsetting clues about what might soon become of the Baobabs’ home (which is humankind’s first home too). Set aside your tears for the great trees and join me, tomorrow. We are going to take another trip back to the beginning of the Eocene, the “dawn age” which calls to me again and again. In that sweltering summer world of 56 million years ago, there are clues about what will be the fate of baobab trees and of their home ecosystem. The Eocene was a world without ice. The arctic oceans were warm year-round. Rainforests filled with unknown marsupials covered Antarctica. I hope you will boldly join me in going back to that bygone age, but I am worried you will not like what we find, and I am worried we are not going to like what we find in the future either.
God DAMMIT, humankind, can you not even let me end on a chilling note without making it stupid?
Apples (Malus pumila) originated in Central Asia somewhere around Turkey/Georgia/Armenia–where the wild apple (Malus sieversii) still grows. These delightful members of the rose family have been continuously cultivated, hybridized, grafted, and cloned since prehistory. Apples are shockingly promiscuous and their seeds are different (sometimes extremely different) from the parent, so varieties (“cultivars”) are cloned and grafted. There are more than 7500 cultivars of apples grown and each is really a clone—or a still living clonal scion–of the original tree they come from. The history and meaning and delight of the apple is beyond my ability to even begin to discuss, however I want to talk about the best variety of apple which is widely available in the United States, the Golden Delicious, because it comes from the same place as me. The first Golden Delicious tree comes from Clay County, an obscure county in West Virginia where my whole family hales from (well, at least for the last 250 years or so, I guess we are from Africa by way of Europe originally).
Golden Delicious apples are a bright yellow (or yellow green) apple which are extremely sweet and fragrant. The original tree was found on the Mullins’ family farm in Clay County and the fruit was locally known as “Mullin’s Yellow Seedling” and “Annit apple” until 1914/15 when it was renamed the Golden Delicious by Stark Brothers Nursery to whom Anderson Mullins sold the cultivation rights and the tree (for the then princely sum of $5000).
Golden delicious apples are wonderful for cooking, salads, and sauces, but their sweet taste makes them perfect for eating too (although their bright crisp flesh and nearly transparent skin makes them susceptible to bruising). Wikipedia tells us that “In 2010, an Italian-led consortium announced they had decoded the complete genome of the Golden delicious apple. It had the highest number of genes (57,000) of any plant genome studied to date.” To my eye, Golden Delicious apples also look like the golden apples of Aphrodite which sometimes play a saucy role in Greek mythology or even the forbidden apples of the Hesperides which conferred immortality (if you could get past Hera’s dragon). Anyway I picked a bunch of them upstate this past weekend and I can’t stop thinking about them…or eating them. After Halloween week is done, I will share my favorite apple pie recipe. However next week is not about apples…it is about snakes!
Hollow (Katie Paterson, 2016, wood)
A lot of conceptual art strikes me as being perhaps a bit [cough] lazy. The concept is forced to stand in for the elegance and beauty of masterful craft. But here is a sculpture where the concept and the craft are both amazing: the work doubles as a lovely artwork and as a story of truly ecumenical breadth. The synthesis is sublime. This is “Hollow” a 2016 sculpture by the Berlin-based Glaswegian artist Katie Paterson.
“Hollow” is a folly grotto in the historic Royal Fort Gardens of Bristol. It looks a bit like a wooden megalith from the outside, but inside it becomes a magical proliferation of thousands of rectangular solids made of wood which give the simultaneous effect of a comfortable wooden grotto and an otherworldly scene from religion or abstract mathematics. The rectangular shapes are all wood and all clearly belong together. Yet the pieces are all different colors, densities and textures because they represents all trees…ever.
Paterson traveled the world gathering more than 10,000 samples of every known species—from trees young and old; from taxa alive and those long extinct. There are petrified remnants of the first forests which sprang up 390 million years old, and bits of the horsetails which preceded those. There are slivers of genera long gone, which now exist only as rare museum specimens. There are pieces of historically significant trees like “Methusela” the oldest known Bristlecone pine…and from clonal colony giants like Pando. There are also hunks of historically meaningful trees like a surviving gingko from Hiroshima, the Fortingall Yew, and suchlike. There are human stories aplenty, but they are dwarfed and transcended by the majesty of arboreal diversity and development through the ages.
The piece is indeed hollow and it is illuminated only by the Earth’s sun, as is entirely proper for a piece about trees (which live even more in tandem with our star, than other life forms—though each living thing depends on it). We humans come from an arboreal order, and the worship of trees is nearly universal (sacred trees sprout up up even in hardnosed monotheistic faiths like Islam and Christianity) yet trees are so much older than us…or even than mammals. The full story of trees exists in deep time which is difficult to comprehend in a meaningful way. “Hollow” is a microcosmic sculpture which endeavors to present a sliver of this complexity. The work succeeds in enshrining both the abstruse sacred quality of trees and the real nature of their diversity and long history here on Earth.
Oak-wood (Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, 1887, oil on canvas)
Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (Ива́н Ива́нович Ши́шкин) was born in Yelabuga, in central Russia near the Volga in 1832. His father was a free-thinking merchant who encouraged exploration of the world and supported young Ivan in his artistic studies. Ivan became part of “the itinerants” a group of artists who chose to ignore the rigid rules of European art and doggedly pursue their own interests and subjects. For Ivan this was the magnificent forests of Russia which he painted in all of their splendor with stupendously adroit realism. He surely ranks as one of the greatest forest painters of all time. Each of his canvases presents a living forest as its own world. Every tree is as distinct as a person and they are joined as a thriving whole within a larger ecosystem of plants, fungi, and living things.
Stream by a Forest Slope (Ivan I. Shishkin, 1880, oil on canvas)
Here are three of Ivan’s astonishing paintings. The viewer can feel how each forest has a completely different character and mood. The open meadows around the great oaks in the first painting are as different as possible from the brown stream running out of the firs…which is again as different as can be from the dark pine wood filled with woodears and mosses.
Wind-Fallen Trees (Ivan I. Shiskin, 1888, oil on canvas)
Yet, though they are different, each of his forests is a beautiful and sacred place—a transcendent slice of nature. Ivan’s work is not as famous as it should be because he chose to take it directly to the Russian people rather than selling it to aristocrats or Europeans (an attitude which was part of the itinerant philosophy). However his travels through rural Russia kept his mission pure and kept him close to his true love—the Russian woods. Thanks to his life beyond the limelight we can now travel these erstwhile greenwoods by means of art and learn to see the breathtaking majesty of the forest.
Australian Banana Groves Destroyed by Panama Wilt
Sooo…I try to keep it light on Mondays so we can get through these long weeks, but one of our recent posts demands an immediate follow-up. Remember how I was discussing the grim fate of ‘Gros Michel’ (‘Fat Michel’) the strain of bananas which were wiped out by Panama disease in the 50s? Well, Panama disease has mutated and returned. It’s baaaack…and this time it destroying the once immune ‘Cavendish’ plants which make up almost every banana in Europe, Africa, and the New World Photos are becoming more and more common of dying banana plants and desperate farmers burning their groves. ‘Cavendish’ plants are clones and if one is susceptible, they all are. I really like bananas (when they are ripe) and the idea of doing without the radioactive potassium-rich fruit makes me sad. What are we going to do?
We have the technology?
I guess a good market solution would be to make a transgenic banana that was resistant to the Panama disease, patent the critical gene fragment, and then sell sterile clones of the frankenfruit. Since I like science and bananas (though not necessarily giant agribusinesses) so this is an acceptable solution to keep the yellow fruit on the table.
Industrial banana washing in Costa Rica
An alternate idea, however strikes me as far better. We should send out teams of banana farmers and taste-testers to South East Asia (the first home of the banana) to collect purple, white, red, and gray bananas. Different folks can start growing all sorts of new bananas around the world. Undoubtedly some of them are more delicious than ‘Gros Michel” and I bet they are all more resistant to the blight.
In fact just yesterday, regular Ferrebeekeeper commenter Beatrix reported on the delicious (albeit plain-looking) bananas of Nepal. She writes:
Here in Nepal we have all sorts of different bananas growing wild & in cultivation. They vary from short sweeties to starchy plantain sorts. Nepalis don’t have names for the different types of bananas. One of the tastiest varieties here is the ugliest – it is rather small (fingerlike), sporting a mottled greenish black peel with patches of gray lichen when ripe. The peel is surprisingly paper thin but the the flesh is a rich golden yellow & the taste is the most incredible, sweet custard-y banana flavor ever. I have never tasted this type of banana anywhere but Nepal. Most Asians prefer the starchy, bland bananas that most westerners would consider unripe – they think by the time a banana gets to the yellow mottled with brown stage it’s rotten.
Who here doesn’t want to try these delicious ugly bananas? I am ready to pack up and head off to Nepal just to try them! What we have is a marketing problem. If these charlatans can sell people on stuff like organic food and bottled water, why can’t they sell delicious (but ugly) finger-length bananas? The second coming of Panama disease needn’t spell the end of bananas (although we may lose the familiar bright yellow “Cavendish”)—perhaps this could be the beginning of a glorious new era of multicolor bananas of all sizes and flavors!
Or we could use technology and modern farm techniques to make some crazy bananas!
Magical Tree
by JourneyArtist (deviantart)
Today is Arbor Day, the annual international celebration of trees. Like my distant heathen ancestors, I partake in a bit of tree worship. Because of their immense size, strength, beauty and longevity, trees are an obvious metaphor for the numinous. However there are also more subtle and compelling reasons that trees are the ideal symbol of divinity.
Trees are at the center of a vast web of commensal relationships between living things. They rely on large mutualistic collections of organisms to survive. Trees cannot live without an unseen world of symbiotic organisms in the soil. The towering plants rely on nitrogen fixing bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes to take nutrients from the earth. Likewise trees communicate through fungal networks which link them together in improbable ways we are only now learning about.
Trees utilize bees, flies, monkeys, and birds for pollination…and to disseminate their seeds. They call on different parasitoid wasps for defense through elaborate biochemicals. We should really envision a tree not as a big spiky discreet thing sitting in the lawn, but as a vast flow chart/rolodex of connections with other living organisms.
Of course trees are not unique in being an interconnected node within a vast web of life—that is really the way all life is. It is a grotesque human conceit that humans stand outside and above nature. I have always thought of humanity as a problematic youngest child. We are the favorite (for the moment). We have such gifts…but we are so arrogant, unhappy, and unstable. And we are so so monstrously greedy. I sometimes like to imagine trees as a gentle stable elder brother.
Actually though, mammals are much older than flowering trees. For hundreds of millions of years our pathetic little ancestors cowered beneath the roots of conifers, cycads, ginkgoes, tree-ferns and such. Then, at the end of the Mesozoic, the ascent of mammals happened at the same time that the angiosperms took over the land. Our shrewlike ancestors evolved into arboreal primates as the angiosperms themselves were becoming the forests.
We grew up together! While the great angiosperm forests of the Eocene may not have required much from our squirrel-like grandparents, today’s forests desperately require our good graces so that they are not all converted into parking lots. Plywood, and ugly discount furniture.
Anyway, my thoughts are getting away from me. I only wanted today’s post to be a reminder of Arbor Day and how wonderful and beautiful trees are. Here is a small gallery of lurid yet evocative images of sacred trees! I especially like the pictures of trees together with outer space or the cosmos (like the big portal tree at the top). Happy Arbor Day!
Space Tree by MartijnVn on DeviantArt
We are coming up on the Yule season and that means ornamental conifers! As I was putting up my traditional tree of many animals, it occurred to me to see if there were any spooky Gothic-themed Christmas trees. And, oh indeed…there are so many Gothic themed trees and ornaments out there!
Although at first these dark trees might sit wrongly with traditionally minded revelers, a moment of thought will reveal that Gothic trees are quite appropriate! Not only is the Christmas tree an ornament for the darkest & hardest time of year (Winter Solstice) it is also an ancient relic of pre-Christian Europe when pagan folk venerated trees. Furthermore the idea of Christmas trees, like the ancient Goths themselves, originated in Germany and Scandinavia. For years, pundits have been worrying what happens when marketers put up their Christmas decorations earlier and earlier. Maybe this is what happens: a reversion to druidic darkness.
Here are some Gothic trees—some are “goth” in the modern punk rock sense, while others are pagan, macabre, ironically twisted, or just winsomely slender. In case this is making you anxious, it’s all in seasonal fun! Also I threw in some beautiful Gothic-revival Christmas trees to evoke feelings of Victorian opulence! Enjoy the gallery and the holiday season (but don’t worry, we’ll have more appropriate seasonal fare next week).
What a cool crystal thing!
Gothic Revival Christmas!
I guess, it’s sort of spooky…
This one might be slightly photoshopped–although cats do love Christmas trees!
What?
Dammit, there isn’t even a tree in this! Is anyone paying attention?
Traditional Victorian Gothic Revival
And Here’s a really good one for the dramatic conclusion. It has a touch of the cosmic–and it’s also a shout-out to tree worshipers everywhere).
Large bowl with design of miniature potted plants (Ming dynasty, Jiajing mark and period, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, Porcelain; underglaze blue-and-white; Tianminlou collection)
It’s been a while since we had any posts about how beautiful trees are. Therefore here are two Ming Dynasty bowls which feature tree art. The first bowl above is rather large and dates back to the reign of the Jiajing emperor (which lasted from 1521 AD to 1567 AD). The Jiajing emperor was a noted loon who believed absolutely in magical portents and auspicious signs—which in turn made him a pawn to corrupt court officials who used the monarch’s credulity as an opportunity to steal and/or ruin everything. However the emperor’s obsession with magic meant that Jiajing-era porcelain was marked by a beautiful sense of occult whimsy and Taoist fantasy. This bowl shows four different potted plants: a cypress, a pine, a peach, and a bamboo which are growing in a beautiful garden filled with butterflies, cicadas, and dragonflies. The plants are shaped in the form of four different auspicious words fu, shou, kang, and ning (happiness, long life, health, and composure).
Blue and white Ming Bowl with garden scenes (Chenghua reign marks)
Interior scene from the Chenghua bowl
The second bowl is smaller and arguably finer. It also shows a garden scene bounded beneath by two ornamental borders of extreme elegance and beauty. A dwarf flower tree is bursting into blossom among spring foliage (the opposite side of the bowl shows a bamboo grove). Inside the bowl is a beautiful miniature garden of rocks, bamboo, and flowering trees. The tiny bowl was manufactured during the Chenghua reign (from between 1464 AD and 1487 AD) which was a troubled era of court intrigues and palace murders (which took place at the orders of the villainous concubine, Lady Wan). This little bowl, however, is exquisite and seems to have escaped the shadows of its era. For half a millennium the tiny perfect Ming garden has been blooming in delicate shades of cobalt glaze.
Detail
Gathered here for your amusement and delight are three world flags which feature trees (cedar, pine, and palm). I have arranged them in chronological order, but this could also represent order of importance, since Lebanon is a nation, Norfolk Island a territory, and the British Indian Ocean Territory is essentially a military base.
The Flag of Lebanon
The flag of Lebanon shows one of the famous cedars of Lebanon which are referenced so poetically in the Bible. The colors and layout of the flag were specifically designed not to refer to any of Lebanon’s different religious groups. To quote Wikipedia, “The red stripes symbolize the pure blood shed in the aim of liberation. The white stripe symbolizes peace, and the white snow covering Lebanon’s mountains. The green cedar, (Species: Cedrus libani or Lebanon Cedar) symbolizes immortality and steadiness.” This flag was first flown in the dark year of 1943 as the world reeled in chaos and battle.
The Flag of Norfolk Island
Norfolk Island is a small verdant island in the Pacific Ocean located between Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia. The flag of Norfolk Island was adopted in the long ago year of…1980. It shows a Norfolk Island Pine Tree on a white field between two bands of green (which represent the island’s rich vegetation). Norfolk Island is technically an outer territory of the Commonwealth of Australia but it enjoys a high degree of autonomy.
Flag of the British Indian Ocean Territory
Civilians cannot visit the British Indian Ocean Territory. The only inhabited island, Diego Garcia, is dominated by vast secretive Anglo-American military bases from which the two allies run their Indian Ocean and Central Asian naval and air missions. The flag is similar to other British commonwealth/colony/dependency flags in that it has the Union Flag in the upper hoist-side corner. The crown represents the British monarchy and the palm tree is an obvious symbol of the island’s flora. The meaning of the blue wavy lines is unknown. Indeed it is unclear to what extent this flag is official or even in use. This flag has been in use since 1990.
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