Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape

Chapter 1. Taking Root: The Charter Oak

C H A P T E R O N E taking root: the charter oak ROOT: THE LOWER PART OF A PLANT, USUALLY UNDERGROUND, BY WHICH THE PLANT IS ANCHORED AND THROUGH WHICH WATER AND MINERAL NUTRIENTS ENTER THE PLANT. Michael Allaby, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Botany Iam openly polygamous when it comes to trees. My first love was a sycamore (Platanus acerfolia). The mottled bark, furry balls, and satisfying sound of its name attracted me. But what kept my affection was its presence on my grandmother’s street: my favorite was directly in front of her house. After I married, when the paint was hardly dry on our first home and we were already moving again, we took a slip of the willow (Salix nigra) our toddlers had just begun to climb, tucked it in with the photo albums and finger paintings, and we planted it at our new home with the wish that all our roots would grow well in the new place we had found. Much later, on a trip to the West Coast, the eucalyptus (probably Eucalyptus ficifolia) caught my eye and my breath. It, too, had the ‘‘pied beauty’’ of the sycamore, but it also rustled soothingly when the breeze touched its leaves. It had a slightly pungent scent that perfumed the air and a seedpod so beautiful I secreted it in my suitcase so I could look at it and look at it on my windowsill at home. Thoughts of California still evoke thoughts of eucalyptus, and each sycamore, if I allow it, conjures up my childhood as certainly as Proust’s madeleines did his. These, then, are some of memory’s trees: to paraphrase A. Bartlett Giamatti, the green trees of my mind. Over the years, they have had more than a few companions. So many, in fact, that I have lately felt a need to organize; to shape and cultivate my trees, to discover their preferences and their favored companions, and to learn their stories. So I have continued to look, but I have also been reading. The choices are almost as varied and numerous as the trees themselves. I select from folklore and field guides, history, plant morphology, dendrochronology , news clippings, geology, forestry journals, paleontology, legal opinions, and family papers. I read botany to learn how trees work—this from the British botanist Oliver Rackham: ‘‘A tree does not have a predetermined life-span as we do. . . . The onset of old age is determined more 1. Charles Sprague Sargent, The Silva of North America, vol. 8. (The McLean Library, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Philadelphia) by the size of the tree than by the number of its years; a tree that grows fast when young is likely to reach an early, middle, and old age.’’1 And I read poetry to understand how trees make us feel: When dusky night do nearly hide The path along the hedge’s zide . . . Then if noo feäce we long’d to greet Could come to meet our lwonesome treäce . . . However lwonesome we mid be, The trees would still be company.2 I travel, look, listen, and fill myself with stories that are as like mine as another face and as unlike mine as another face. I read essays. This from John Fowles: ‘‘trees are like humans: they need their pasts to feed their presents’’; and this from Emerson: ‘‘All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.’’ And I remind myself of what Annie Dillard says: ‘‘We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.’’3 Dillard wrote this about a trip to the Ecuadorian jungle, but I decide to visit Hartford, Connecticut, to get a feel for two different intersections—the intersection of Charter Oak Avenue and Charter Oak Place and the intersection of the past with the present. Hartford is the home of the Connecticut Historical Society. Sitting there in a quiet room at a library table, I am reading about a funeral for a tree. Centered between two items urging support for the newly formed RepublicanParty ’santislaverycandidate,thesoldier-explorerJohnC.Frémont, a black-banded front-page obituary in the August 21, 1856, Hartford Courant proclaimed the tree’s death. ‘‘The Charter Oak is Prostrate! Our whole community...