I love people who love trees. We’re a special breed aren’t we? What a joy to get a couple dozen tree people together to do what we love. Planting a tree is always such a satisfying experience. I’m sure you know the feelings - deliberation about placement, digging a perfect hole, filling it with goodies for the tree, setting the tree into a home you expect it to thrive in long after you are off planet, then you step back and look at what you have done. You have planted a tree. Then you look at it from the other side and get the same satisfaction all over again. Then you step across the street to look at it. It’s there. It’s home. You can’t wait until you next walk the dog or drive by. You can’t wait till fall to see the colors change. You can’t wait till spring to see the flowers and new leaves. And on it goes for the rest of your life. There is nothing like it. I’m so happy for you to have planted a tree.

Now, take these feelings and amplify them one-hundred times. We got to jam over a hundred trees into three city lots in neat rows- all types of exquisite forms and colors mingling there as a family, just like the volunteers who came out to do the work. I am filled with gratitude and joy for all the friends, neighbors, and tree kin who spent the weekend out there materializing dreams, stepping through ourselves and time into the future. It’s like that. You know, this is what tree planting is - tree life and tree time are ways for us to connect to a past and a future that are way beyond our little nows and concepts of self.

It’s perfect how Paul kept saying when people were stressing over details of placement, “come on, we’re not building a cathedral.” That’s coming from the guy who spent about 70 hours on the tractor just prepping the ground before a tree ever showed up. It helped me realize how much we were building a cathedral. His point, I think, was that while we are doing something so grand and spiritual for most of us, actually there is no wrong way to do it. I like this kind of cathedral. The trees will take care of themselves if we just get them into the ground.

Trees, in fact , will take care of themselves if we just let them. When we stop mowing for a season here they come. It’s really all we need to do; they throw their seeds far and wide and suddenly there’s a forest. Trees always do way better when they plant themselves. I don’t believe that they like to be dug up necessarily, or travel at 70 miles per hour on the freeway. However, in the name of diversity and aesthetics we bring the trees together in this formation. Some people are not ready for the beautiful chaos of a million trees planting themselves. The tree nursery and the arboretum are a gateway into the love of a forest. And for people who have or have ever had any problem with trees we have to step gently and paint beautiful landscapes with the trees so that they can see them. These trees are the paint box for Poletown. They will move out into the streets and arbs over the next few years and be the brush strokes of a future that is ours and those yet to come. Don’t ever be the againstest, be the forest.

You are invited to celebrate the Fall Equinox with Arboretum Detroit and Field Temple on Saturday, September 21st, 5-11 pm. There is so much to celebrate, among them is the completion of the first Arboretum project: Treetroit 1. Field Temple and Arboretum Detroit, 5333 Elmwood and 5300 Elmwood, Detroit, MI 48211

Everyone welcome

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The next few months we'll be preparing for, and implementing the Neighborhood Tree Nursery project, supported by a grant from Detroit Future City. You can read more about this project here.

We have set regular workdays for the first, second and third Tuesdays of each month, 6-8pm. This could mean picking up bricks and throwing them into a pile, pruning trees, picking up garbage, measuring distances, brainstorming ideas, and who knows yet what else. This is just the very beginning, since we have finally received the legal go-ahead to get started preparing the land.

Below is the approved design for the Nursery. We are hoping to be planting trees by the end of October."

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Before and After - Reflections from Michigan’s Old Growth Forest

Kinga stopped to take a picture of the massive nurse log that we climbed over.  It was covered with moss like most things in a mature forest. In the hole of a long gone branch she spied the tiniest of Hemlock saplings.  It was so fresh and tiny that it could have emerged days ago. I came to look and said that it would be a nice picture to use for the next blog and that we could title it “before and after.”  I thought this would capture something about the cyclical nature of life in the forest.  

Kinga said, “which is before and which is after?”  This question more accurately captures the cyclical nature of life in the old growth forest.  Nuances of understanding like this enter the mind like osmosis when we spend ample time in the forest.  There is a completely different sense of time and importance.

Yes, logic tells us that because the tiny Hemlock sapling is green and new, and that the trunk of the old Hemlock is horizontal and moss covered, that the tiny sprout is “after.”  The fallen giant is “before” because it lived likely 300 years before it fell to its current position perhaps 20 years ago. However, this giant, itself, once looked exactly like this little sprout, which in its turn will live a few hundred years before becoming horizontal and nursing the next tiny giant to be.  In short, there is no “before and after.” This is part of why spending time enriches our spirit and soothes the soul lest we think that there is a “before and after” for us. Seeing that a long fallen Cedar still has one green branch or that a mossy nurse log supports more life on the forest floor than it did standing remind me that death is a lie.  There is only the timeless flow of energy, circulating among the many beings here. 

Entering a forest is entering a soup of flux. We step outside of time and into a reality that is not constructed but just is.  Man-made landscapes and contrivances are wrung out of us like mopwater. Concrete and the grid of streets and strip malls, bright lights and sirens, cell phones  and television are wiped from the mind like ink from the whiteboard. Here we see with the whole self. We lose our “selves,” and breathe in reciprocity with the trees, back and forth connecting right at the source.  Enter tree time.

We are so fortunate to have a place like this in Michigan.  Although it is barely in Michigan; did you know you could drive for 12 hours and still be in Michigan?  Yes the Porcupine Mountains State Park is at the far western edge of the upper peninsula. Don’t let the drive scare you off. It’s worth it every time.  The park is about 60,000 acres of forest, half of which is old growth. There are about 100 miles of trails to hike, and 23 miles of wild Lake Superior shore.  And the trees just keep getting older, and younger.