"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: trees

More Winter Red: Japanese Maples (2 of 2)

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From “Another Truth About Red Trees” in Primary Sources: Poems by Ann Staley:

Sweet fires, elegy to summer’s long goodbye,
you know them from the east side of the Alleghenies
Maple and Oak burnished by October’s flinty light.

They remind you of bronzed baby shoes, first crocus,
haunted Mars, blood count afterimage,
river water shimmering with late light —
unstoppable beauty, particular-and-everyday at once,
accidental signals, ballast for any doubt or regret you carry.

Red trees in the west now, Japanese maple sentinels, curbside,
that Big Leaf out along Decker Road nestled near conifer green,
and in the blurred periphery driving north past Ash Creek swale….

Today the trees signal autumn, its early, damp darkness,
wood-fire smoke in the neighborhood,
apples ripening in fruit-room baskets….

The painter set them down in acrylic;
the writer transforms them one more time.

From “Maple” in Lives of the Trees: An Uncommon History by Diana Wells:

“Many Japanese maples are red year-round, and almost all turn dazzling shades of scarlet in autumn. The Japanese celebrate their brilliant color with festivals, similar to those for spring blossoms. They love to tell a story about Sen-no-Rikyu, a famous sixteenth-century Japanese tea master, who had just finished sweeping the garden in preparation for a tea ceremony. It looked clean and soulless, so he flung two or three of the red maple leaves he had swept up onto the clear mossy ground.

“Not all maples turn red in autumn, but many do. The color comes from anthocyanin, produced as chlorphyll is withdrawn from the leaves and the tree shuts down for the winter. The sharp points of these blood-red leaves are probably the origin of the maple’s ancient Latin name, and our botanical name, acer, meaning ‘sharp’….

“Carl Peter Thunberg, a Dutch botanist stationed on the island of Deshima when the rest of Japan was closed to foreigners… brought the first Japanese maple west. This maple, Acer palmatum (‘like the palm of a hand’), has green leaves that turn scarlet in fall. In spite of imperial edicts, Thunberg was able to collect Japanese plants, partly by sifting through hay brought to feed the livestock on Deshima (and collecting the seeds in it) and partly by trading information with young Japanese botanists. In exchange for plants he taught them rudimentary Western medicine, and the Linnaean system of classification.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring the last of my Japanese Maple photos from late autumn/early winter. The first post is More Winter Red: Japanese Maples (1 of 2).

Thanks for taking a look!

More Winter Red: Japanese Maples (1 of 2)

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From “The Japanese Maple” in Shade and Ornamental Trees: Their Origin and History by Hui-Lin Li:

“The Japanese maple is undoubtedly the most variable species, so far as foliage is concerned, of cultivated trees or shrubs…. While in other ornamental plants, especially in herbaceous ones, variation frequently occurs in flowers, here the ornamental feature depends mainly on the leaves, and sometimes also on the shape of the plant.

“This great variation is brought out by intensive cultivation and selection in the Japanese garden. The species has been cultivated there since very early times for the brilliant red foliage in autumn so frequently praised in poetry and depicted in paintings. The Japanese call it ‘Takao maple’ because it is especially abundant on the mountain Takao, famous since ancient times for autumn coloration. They use it extensively in their gardens and also as a potted dwarf tree…

“The Japanese maple is a shrub or small tree. It is native to Japan and adjacent parts of the Asiatic mainland. In the Japanese literature there are hundreds of named forms, many of which are now also in cultivation in Western gardens. The variation may be either in the color or the shape of the leaves or sometimes in a combination of these two characters….

“In color, the leaves vary from bright green to yellow and different shades of red or purple. They turn yellow to orange or red in the autumn.”

From “The Japanese Maple” in The Turn of the Mind to That Shaded Place: Poems by A. G. Mampel:

For decades you’ve lightened us
in every season of the year
Your small veined leaves
in early spring
speak greenly
of life and promise and health
so soundly standing there
of bare trunk and crowded limb
There in the prime of summer
your luring red leaves — flirting
with ripe appeal
And even more — my autumn beauty
you offer mature foliage
a russet-red unspeakable glimpse
beyond breath or word

Hello!

I took the photos in this post (and the next one) whilst gathering some outdoor winter color for my Christmas project (see Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating) — but didn’t use them back then (which seems like YEARS ago, for some reason). The photos are of various Japanese Maple shrubs, trees, and leaves at their peak autumn color (or slightly past it) — which maybe fills in a gap as we wait patiently for the appearance of pre-spring buds and new flowers around the ‘hood.

Thanks for taking a look!

Broke-Trunk Trees (and Other Tree Chunks)

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From “My Broken Tree” in My Great Oak Tree and Other Poems  by Liberty Hyde Bailey:

Over my cliff is a maple tree
That always delights my heart to see.

In some stormy day its smooth bole fell
And now lies prone where it started well.

Its trunk is scarred, and with branchlets weak
That struggle still to the light they seek.

But straight to the blue its new limbs rise
And spread their leaves to the rains and skies.

One would not know from the verdant crown
That winds had beaten the old trunk down.

Its neighbors stern in the forest grim
Stand stiff and strict and all churchly prim.

But its branches spread more wide than they
And fling their fruits to the winds away.

And panellings fine its bole will make
When the artist comes his part to take.

Over my cliff is a broken tree
That it always cheers my heart to see.

Hello!

I have on several earlier posts quoted (click here!) from Liberty Hyde Bailey’s botanical work The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (which is so big I call it a “cyclopspedia”) — but had somehow missed the fact that Bailey was also a poet and published several books of poetry in the olden days. So I was pleased to come across his poem about a broken tree to go with the photos below: the poem seemed to mirror my brief obsession with photographing these damaged trees.

The first nine photos below feature the broken-trunk trees I came across in early winter — two that had likely split during last summer’s August thunderstorms; and one that must have come down during autumn’s similarly stormulous days, given that the leaves had switched on their fall shades before the tree came down. The color contrasts caught my eye — the dark fallen branches against red and orange groundcover, and the orange leaves against the pebblestone walkway. The first ones almost look like the tree dropped a section to rake up the leaves. I didn’t actually catch them raking leaves, to be honest — but maybe they only do that when no one’s watching.

Thanks for taking a look!

Winter Shapes: Japanese Maple Leaves (2 of 2)

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From The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge:

“[Trees] do not dwell only in the present. They remember the past, and they anticipate the future.

“How trees remember, I do not know: I have not been able to find out. But they do. At least, what they do now may depend very much on what happened to them in the past. Thus if you shake a tree, it will subsequently grow thicker and sturdier. They ‘remember’ that they were shaken in the past. Wind is the natural shaker, and plants grown outdoors grow thicker than those in greenhouses, even in the same amount of light….

“Most trees, like most plants of all kinds, are also aware of the passing seasons: what time of year it is and — crucially — what is soon to follow. Deciduous trees lose their leaves as winter approaches (or, in the seasonal tropics, as the dry season approaches) and enter a state of dormancy. This is not a simple shutting down. Dormancy takes weeks of preparation. Before trees shed their leaves they withdraw much of the nutrient that’s within them, including the protein of the chlorophyll, leaving some of the other pigments behind to provide at least some of the glorious autumn colors; and they stop up the vessel ends that service the leaves with cork, to conserve water.

“How do the temperate trees of the north know that winter is approaching? How can they tell, when it is still high summer? There are many clues to season, including temperature and rainfall. But shifts in temperature and rain are capricious; they are not the kind of reliable signal to run your life by….

“The one invariable, at any particular latitude on any particular date, is the length of the day. So at least in high latitudes, where day length varies enormously from season to season, plants in general take this as their principal guide to action — while allowing themselves to be fine-tuned by other cues, including temperature. So temperate trees invariably produce their leaves and/or flowers in the spring, marching to the rigid drum of solar astronomy; but they adjust their exact date of blossoming to the local weather. This phenomenon — judging time of year by length of day — is called ‘photoperiodism.'”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs focused on the shapes of desiccated Japanese Maple leaves, that I took in early January. The first post is Winter Shapes: Japanese Maple Leaves (1 of 2).

Thanks for taking a look!

Winter Shapes: Japanese Maple Leaves (1 of 2)

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From A Garden of Marvels by Ruth Kassinger:

“Deciduous trees… have evolved to deal with surviving cold months. In winter, the energy that a tree’s leaves are able to generate during short daylight hours is less than the energy required to maintain cell function in the leaves. In addition, the loss of water through transpiration exceeds the amount that the roots are able to absorb when groundwater is locked up in ice. So, in autumn, deciduous trees cut their losses. First, thanks to hormonal signals, they drain the sucrose from their leaves and send it to their roots and branches for storage. Then they seal off the leaves at their bases with a corky substance. Without water and nutrients, the leaves’ cells die. In the spring, the trees send stored sugar dissolved in water up the xylem to fuel the growth of new leaves and branches.”

From “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens in Three Centuries of American Poetry edited by Allen Mandelbaum and Robert D. Richardson:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place….

Hello!

January is a great month for hunting down those natural shapes of things that are most apparent only in the winter. For this post (and the next one) I scoured the trees for shreds of Japanese Maple leaves, those that still clung on and held an interesting form despite many days of rain, wind, and cold. Their tenaciousness is admirable — don’t you think?

Even though it was a cloudy day, there was enough sunlight breaking through so that some of the leaves — all but those in the last three images — got touched with a bit of backlighting, just enough so that they looked like the were glowing against the blue-gray skies.

Thanks for taking a look!