Trees Are Fountains
Trees are fountains. They spill into the sky in perfect forms. They can take a hundred gallons of water from the ground in a single hour and send it up their trunks out their graceful branches. Through the stoma on a giant crown of leaves they transpire the water vapor out into the sky. It returns as rain and cycles again through this perfectly refined system.
Fountains, however, are fleeting; every gesture lasts only a split second. Millions of movements piled atop each other create the form - a trick of the eye. Trees, on the other hand, fabricate a solid three dimensional record of every year’s performance. Maybe trees are both fountains and shadows of fountains. Every tree’s genius DNA collaborates with the sun to 3D print these majestic forms. If we could freeze a fountain it would be a glassy Elm tree. Trees are spilling upward and outward in sub-slow motion. Tree time is long and slow, meant for sloths and moss, difficult for humans to comprehend. We can learn so much about patience, forbearance, groundedness, stillness, strength and flexibility from the trees around us.
“A tree is a marvelous architectural victory over gravity.” I just read that sentence. It lives in A Sanctuary of Trees, by Gene Logsdon. He also refers to trees as living umbrellas that save the Earth from destruction. The recent documentary Kiss the Ground is also a beautiful and plain illustration of this obvious truth - trees shelter and feed the Earth, trees are the Earth. Trees create and sustain soil. Without trees we become a rocky lifeless planet. We are creating deserts in places where we have denuded the landscape and exposed the Earth’s soil to direct sunlight. We see this happen all over the planet in places that we have over harvested and clear cut the forest. We don’t sit around waiting for the desert that comes in the absence of the trees we have plundered, we build the deserts ourselves. We call them lawns, malls, parking lots, and freeways.
We practice tree suppression and tree prevention. We call it mowing and paving. We all know the extreme contrast between standing on a blacktop parking lot and standing under a giant shade tree on the same July afternoon. It only takes a hundred square feet to demonstrate what we have done to so much of the planet. We need trees. And we don’t even need to plant them - they spring up and express themselves everywhere we allow. It is painful to say that and concede that we are the keepers of the planet - we end up being the ones who decide what species will be and which will not. This is what we have signed up for and so we ought to take the responsibility very seriously. We have created a giant mess for all species, including ourselves. With all, and in spite of all, the knowledge and power that we wield it is time to humble ourselves before the trees and this wonderful system we are privileged to live in. Trees are fountains of life. If we simply stop the tree suppression we will have forests everywhere.
Trees are also fountains of carbon. This is especially apparent when they release their leaves back to the Earth’s surface like giant snowflakes. This process is taking place right before our eyes. I have always thought of leaves as coming off primarily in wind storms and weather events, one by one. However, camping on a recent November weekend Kinga and I noticed as quiet flushes of Oak leaves dropped by the hundreds in the still of the afternoon. A Red Oak over our tent gave us a spontaneous leaf shower, then ten minutes later a White Oak off in the woods. This leisurely quiet symphony amplified the presence of the trees as beings. It was like, oh there’s somebody there. Seeing the trees around us deciding to simultaneously drop a hundred leaves calls on me to recognize their being. I feel like the trees were having fun with us. Right when we thought we were most alone we discovered that we were surrounded by others. What a joy to receive word from the trees.
We, of course, participate in the building of these majestic fountains - they contain our breath. We contain their breath. This is one of the reasons that we like to get out into the trees. This reciprocity is so much more immediate when we are out there breathing with the trees.
