prayer

Yellow

is a dream-hidden daffodil,

brown shyness beneath the loam,

waiting

behind a hatch in the bulb.

Careful hands,

bring a rain-water bucket,

brimming with peace.

Douse life from its winter sleep.

Careful hands,

tempt joy from the ice-ground

and barge

shine sounding 

into the day -

a clarion of Easter-coming.

an oak in st. elmo

Our neighborhood, historic St. Elmo on the south side of Chattanooga and at the foot of Lookout Mountain, is one of the oldest neighborhoods in town. I vaguely remember someone referring to it as the original suburb of Chattanooga. 

The old houses stand along three avenues that run for twenty blocks or so, and range from bungalows, to Victorian monsters, to architectural mishmashes that have sprung up or evolved over the hundred plus year life of our little community.

As full of character as the houses may be, they wouldn't be the same without the massive trees that stand in our yards and line our streets. I have yet to find out if some of these giants were planted early in the 20th century after a clear cut, or if some were left standing from the forest that was here before the land was developed.

Anyways, it's inevitable that a city tree's life span will be capped by it's tough environment - air pollution, root disruption from construction of homes, tree houses, the occasional homeowner with a chainsaw. Considering these and other factors, trees are remarkably resilient and have numerous ways of adapting to their environment and healing themselves, which is why there are oaks and maples and sycamores throughout St. Elmo that have grown quite huge, some with trunk diameter's pushing four feet. That's why, treehugger or not, we'd all agree that it's sad to see one of the giants go.

Our neighbors a block away are having this giant oak removed by a local tree company - Robert's Tree Service. What a small world. I have a theory that once the wild, wild west was settled and became corn farms, suburbs, and ski resorts, all of the cowboys and outlaws had nothing dangerous to do, no ruckuses to raise, no taverns to tear apart in senseless brawls. So, what did they do with themselves? They bought a bunch of chainsaws and woodchippers and started tree companies.

Why is this oak being removed? Apparently, the small house at the bottom of the tree is being lifted off of it's foundation by the oak's sprawling roots. It also has serious rot throughout the main trunk's cambium and heartwood. It's only a matter of time before it falls on its own and causes serious damage to two houses beneath it, obviously, considering it's canopy covers somewhere around 2,000 square feet of ground space.

I've taken up the hobby of naming the trees around town. (You can roll your eyes now.) I like to think this tree was here before St. Elmo was developed, before roads were cut and the frames of houses were raised. In light of this oak's efforts to pick up the house built on top of it's roots and (if life were a comic strip) slide it off the hill so that it rolled down Hawkins Ridge and smashed into a mess of shingle and vinyl siding on Tennessee Ave., I've named this one "You're Not Welcome Here."

ghosts in the woods

Have you ever had chestnuts roasted on an open fire?

Me neither.

Have you ever wondered why not?

Me neither, until I started to become a tree geek a few years ago. If you ever find yourself putting one foot in the door of arboriculture, it won't be long till you here about the American Chestnut, and how it is no longer.

Last December, I proudly shared this fact with my mother, an avid and skilled gardener:

"Mom, did you know the American Chestnut is virtually extinct?" I said, proud to show off my arboricultural acumen.

"Well," her tone was famously polite, "yes, except that there are half a dozen of them growing down the street."

I accused her of lying, or even worse, a mistaken botanical identification. Polite, yet not easily swayed, my mother suggested we go for a walk, and so we did. Sure enough, we found half a dozen chestnuts with one and two foot diameter trunks growing along Riverside Drive, right there on the edge of Atlanta.

I wasn't wholly wrong, however, because it is true the American Chestnut, Castanea Dentata, has virtually disappeared from our forests. A century ago, a blight on the chestnuts began its steady progress through the northeast, then spread south down throughout the east until almost every chestnut, sapling to towering giant, was nothing but a skeleton of trunks and limbs. 

My grandfather, who grew up in Sweetwater in eastern Tennessee, remembers the year that the blight swept through our part of the world. He said one year the forests and hillsides were covered with massive chestnuts. The next year, only dead trunks and stumps.

If you're in the same generation as me, you've never thought of chestnuts when you think of the woods. Pines, oaks, maples - all of these are familiar to us, and we would notice if they were gone, tree geek or not. But we don't realize that our forests look very different from the way they did just over a half a century ago. They're still changing, and the forests of the southeastern mountains are going to look completely different to us within a decade if and probably when the eastern hemlock goes extinct in the wild, but that's a different story.

Some good folks in the worlds of botany, horticulture, and arboriculture, have devoted their life work to hybridizing American Chestnuts that will resist the blight that wiped, and would continue to wipe them out. The American Chestnut Foundation is at work in forests all over the place reintroducing and protecting fragile populations of chestnut trees.

Right here in Chattanooga, ringed by mountains, we live amongst forests that used to be dominated by Chestnuts. That is one reason why the ACF has chosen a swath of land on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain to plant hundreds of chestnuts in an effort to reintroduce them in the wild. The Lula Lake Land Trust, a well kept secret in eastern Tennessee that is only open to the public once a month, is the site of this work. We spent half the day last Saturday hiking around the land trust and got to trek over to the pocket where these tiny saplings are growing underneath massive old oaks and on the edges of hemlock groves.

And what did Nora think of all this talk of arboriculture, extinction, and hybridization?

She was thrilled.