Teaching the Trees

Tulip Poplar

7 My first experience with tulip poplar trees (Liriodendron tulipifera ) made a lasting impression on me, but I had no idea then that it was the beginning of a long relationship. Back in the days when fourth-graders could hang out without parental supervision, my best buddy and I were practicing to be circus performers, specifically tightrope walkers. Our tightrope was a metal cable hung between wooden posts. The cable was not there to foster juvenile circus fantasies; it had been installed by the highway department to keep cars from spilling down the steep, wooded hillside. While awaiting my turn on the high wire, I looked down at the ground and saw a tuliplike flower with green and orange petals. I had no idea where this beautiful flower had come from until I looked up into the trees overhead and noticed other flowers like it there. Tulips that grew on trees! How magical! I sometimes ask others about their childhood memories Tulip Poplar 8 of plants. It turns out that many people have a very specific memory of a particular plant species, a memory of wonder, awareness, connection—sometimes almost to the point of fear. If you carry such a memory, you have probably tried to learn (though perhaps years later) the name of the plant that held you spellbound. I learned that my beautiful flower came from a tulip poplar tree. Some books call it a yellow poplar, but it will always be a tulip poplar to me. as fate would have it, I renewed my acquaintance with that species years later when I was an undergraduate studying the fungal diseases of plants. My faculty adviser was interested in a fungal disease of tulip poplar trees, and I found myself doing a scientific research project, my first, on Liriodendron tulipifera. I learned that a fungus named Verticillium can enter the tree roots and cause a disease that eventually kills the tree, either by physically blocking the water passageways or by producing a toxin. Our research project was designed to discover which of these two mechanisms was responsible for the tree’s death. After months of work in the laboratory I determined that the wilt was caused by a toxin. The procedure to purify the toxin involved a lot of glassware and drop-by-drop precision. By the time I got the toxin purified it was time to graduate, so I wrote up my senior thesis: “Isolation of a Lipoprotein from Culture Filtrates of Verticillium alboatrum .” It was my first taste of real science, and among other things it taught me that I was better suited to field biology than laboratory research. Be careful what you wish for. My most recent experience with a tulip poplar tree was sleeping in the top of one! You have probably heard of tree sitters: people who live for a time in the treetops to prevent a forest from being cut. 10 The tactic has been used a number of times, and sometimes it is successful. But how do you practice to be a tree sitter? How do you learn the techniques and decide if tree sitting is really for you? The best-known tree sitter of them all, Julia Butterfly Hill, began without any practice whatsoever. The first time she climbed up a redwood tree she was participating in a protest; the second time up she stayed for two years—protecting the tree’s life with her own.1 For the more cautious among us there is the Eastern Forest Defense Action Camp. Summer camp for radicals seemed the perfect antidote to the heart-crunching pain I felt driving by yet another clear-cut forest every week. At the camp a guerrilla activist half my age taught me how to climb trees using ropes and a harness. She and her friends had rigged a piece of board, about the size of a door, sixty feet up in a tall tulip poplar tree.After I proved myself capable of the climb she asked if I wanted to try spending the night up there.Yes, please.When I climbed up to the small platform in the dark, hauling my water bottle and sleeping bag up behind me, I wasn’t expecting to get much sleep. I had to wear my harness at all times, complete with carabiners and ropes, and clip in to a rope tied around the...