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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 30, 2009
Trees not huggers
I am not what is called a "tree-hugger" by disposition. I find many trees have rough bark, that some have biting insects on them, and who knows what else.In the case of pines, there are all these twigs and needles -- they must first be trussed. Few tree trunks are of an appropriate diameter for hugging. They are themselves aloof, never, or hardly ever, hugging back. And what if the tree learns I am a print journalist: that I write for a paper that pulped one of its cousins? No, I am not a tree-hugger, and I will not become one; it's a dignity thing on both sides. I am nevertheless well disposed to trees, and have been for as long as I can remember. This is among my motives for opposing environmentalists, currently demanding the reduction of carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Trees live on carbon dioxide, and it is the hypocritical friend who flatters while he plots to choke you. Worse, some of the environmentalists are getting wise to the fact that increased forest cover would reduce the earth's albedo, or solar reflection. Since carbon-dioxide accumulations do not actually contribute to global warming (except in some fevered imaginations), but solar absorption does, the relationship between environmentalists and trees could easily sour. Of course -- I am being obtuse, environmentalists only hug trees in some figurative sense. Which is another point I like to make about them -- that they are all words, all bossy instructions. The traditional "conservationist" was an active, field-dressed, hands-on type. An "environmentalist" is by contrast an "activist," mouth-on type. Yes, it is the last Sunday in August, the summer has frittered away, and the prospect of regular labour is returning, even for our school teachers. The time for nature notes will soon be up. I mentioned dragonflies last week, and promptly ran out of space to puff another marvellous Canadian book just out: Biological Notes on an Old Farm, by the retired entomologist Glenn B. Wiggins, published by the Royal Ontario Museum. It is an unfolding of the complex layers of plant and animal life on an abandoned farmlot in Eastern Ontario, which the author and his family purchased years ago -- knowingly presented in words, pictures and diagrams over several hundred square pages. It doubles as an introduction to the whole natural order, with an aside on the entomology of old houses. Buy it and weep, for the beauty of the world. We are indeed blessed to be living at a time when, for a great variety of reasons, the study of natural history is in blossom. It is a golden age of field guides, and to the one I mentioned last week let me add another that every reader must obtain. David Allen Sibley is a most astoundingly competent natural observer and illustrator, famous already for the Sibley guides to birdlife, published nearly a decade ago, with their extraordinary depictions of birds very alive and in motion, on pages that go beyond the reach of previous field guides, good as they were at flagging standard marks for basic identification. Nature often renders photographers helpless; clarity and precision require the discipline of painting. Now trees are, if possible, more difficult to paint than birds. One learns by trying, and in my own inept fumblings with the botanical palette, I have found it an insuperable challenge to capture effectively any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of very specific greens that exist in the foliage around us, for each of which different principles of shading seem to apply. Sibley's new book is unlike previous tree guides. Rather than depict whole standing trees (the most misleading aspect: for individual trees of almost any species may exhibit radically different profiles, depending on where they are growing), with little side-panels for a leaf diagram -- he goes straight for the hard stuff. He paints the leaves in their seasonal conditions, the bark, the buds, the fruit, the flowers -- the unmistakable identifiers, all in exquisite colour. (The printers of this book deserve awards, too.) Trees, as I am just reminded, occupy three entire divisions of the plant kingdom: the Pinophyta (conifers, roughly), the Magnoliophyta (the broadleafs), and the Ginkgophyta. This last has only one surviving member, the Ginkgo tree, seemingly related more closely to ferns and mosses and algae and cycads than to other trees, especially in their means of reproduction. According to the fossil record, our Ginkgo went extinct two million years ago. (Ha!) There were other Ginkgo species, farther back in the planet's history, all long gone. Yet the tree we have is as old as dragonflies and paddlefish: hundreds of millions of years. It was not found wild, but only as a relic of ancient Chinese scholars' gardens. Where they found it, we don't know. The Ginkgo is a tree that positively flourishes in highly polluted, inner urban environments, and seems to benefit from irradiation (four of them famously survived Hiroshima). It stands, as Sibley's guide somehow does, at the very intersection of the utterly alien, and the utterly familiar. One could almost hug it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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