This whole thing got started because my one-year-old daughter, Josephine, wouldn’t stop asking me about the world around us. The book that you are holding is an outgrowth of my attempts to deal with her questions.
Back then, Josephine had vanishingly pale eyebrows and hair that had grown into stylish jags. When she smiled, her eyes turned from thoughtful to impish, her cheeks dimpled, and she exposed the top four of her six teeth. She was just tall enough to clonk her head when she stood up suddenly under a table. She was not yet clever enough to understand the problem, so she’d rise vigorously, driving her head into the particleboard. Then she would sit down, wide-eyed but stoic, shift to a slightly different position, and repeat the maneuver. The fontanel of her skull had nearly closed by that time. I’d check it periodically as we descended the hill from daycare, she riding in a front pack. Walking two fingers back from her forehead and over the rolling smoothness of her straight blond hair, which smelled like playground sand, I’d find good thick skull extending far enough back that I’d begin to think it must have closed entirely, and then, under the pad of a forefinger—an edge, a terrifying softness.
My every cell ached to protect her, but she did have a few unforgivable flaws. For one thing, she’d ask me to name everything she saw. Her favorite word by far was “that,” usually uttered in a tone both interrogative and imperative. “That?” she would ask/command, extending an imperious finger. “That’s a house,” I would say.
“That!”—this time leaning backward in the front pack until I could see only the underside of her chin and her extended arm.
“That is the sky.”
“That!”
“A tree.”
“That!”
“Still a tree.”
“That.”
“Yet another tree.”
It was one of those awful bargains you find yourself striking as a parent: If you agree not to scream, I will allow you to suck the life out of me with this horrible and stultifying game. And so, after a few weeks, I added a rule to complicate the game—I would give the same answer only once per outing. The second time Josephine inquired about a tree, I would have to be more specific. “Trunk,” I would say, or leaves, a branch, a twig, a flower. And it was in this way that I noticed for the first time, though I’d walked by this tree hundreds of times, that it had tiny yellow flowers. The leaves were long and narrow, dark green on the top and, on the underside, nearly white, spotted with black. At the center of each cluster of leaves were tiny yellow flowers. I picked a few (a difficult task because breaking the supple green branch was like tearing a red licorice rope) and stuffed them in my pocket. Later, when I examined them, I saw that I had come away with about fifteen flowers, each one at a slightly different stage of maturity, revealing the stages of their development in my palm. A cluster’s flowers started as little green balls that would split and open, the petals of each pushing outward and then opening backward until the five yellow petals had perfectly interdigitated with the five green pieces of the sheath, alternating yellow, green, yellow, green. Orangey hairs tufted in the middle, with a single transparent rod at the exact center. In the next stage of life, this rod rose, carried upward by a bulging green fruit swelling from beneath, the yellow bits now falling away, until finally what was left was a ball about the size of a pea, topped by a spike. I had never seen any of this before.
The next day I put Josephine in the carrier a little early so we could make a one-block detour to the bookstore. There, I bought a used copy of The Trees of San Francisco. My flowers had come, the book told me, from Tristaniopsis laurina. It was one of the most common street trees in the city, and the author noted (uncharitably, I thought, after my intimate examination) that its bloom was “semishowy.” The name was a bit of a disappointment: I like a name that tells you something of a tree’s place in the larger scheme of things. To pass a tree and simply register it as a “tree” is to never really see it—and certainly never notice the flowers. To pass a tree and simply register it as T. laurina isn’t much better—worse if I memorized the name to inflict Latinate pedantry upon my friends. But knowing a name can also be a first step up a staircase to significance. “Tristaniopsis,” it turns out, indicates that the species resembles (“-opsis” means likeness) a shrub first identified by the French botanist Jules M. C. Tristan. “Laurina” came from the fact that it looked like a laurel tree. I liked this: It was the grittier, tougher Australian version of the Grecian laurel, this one woven into wreaths to crown rugby players and crocodile hunters rather than scholars and Olympians.
The flowers are supposed to emerge between April and June, yet all the trees—I had started noticing them everywhere by this point—were blooming in early November. Were the trees confused by San Francisco’s Indian summer? Or did they bloom twice, once in the April warmth and then again in the second summer following August’s false winter? If they bloomed twice, did that mean that, from the tree’s perspective, two years had passed, with Earth perhaps tilting faster on this side of the globe, causing it to lay down two rings in its trunk each calendar year? None of the answers were in my book, nor were there any of the stories I’d wanted to learn once I began examining the flowers. For whom are these fruits produced for, and how does that relationship work? Was it love, enslavement, a con? I resolved to watch more carefully.
My sudden fascination with the lives of trees wasn’t a random result of Josephine’s “That” game. There was a reason I’d bought a book about trees rather than a book on garage doors or telephone poles, which my daughter inquired about just as often. As a kid, I’d known all the trees that grew around my home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and this had given me access to a world otherwise invisible: When I saw a gray pine—scraggy branches, curving trunk, and dull, gray-green needles—I knew the earth beneath my feet was laced with serpentinite rock, and very little water. It meant I was at the lower, hotter edge of the Sierra’s forests. I knew these trees are also called digger pines, after the local Native Americans, whom the white gold miners had dismissed as “diggers” miserably grubbing for food. The gray pines’ twisting trunks, in the miners’ view, were as useless for timber as the native population was for servitude, and the two therefore shared the epithet. What the whites didn’t know was that the Indians weren’t digging around these trees, they were snacking: The pine nuts in their cones are fat and tasty. (It is telling that the prospectors—who could much more aptly be described as diggers—chose to mock digging as a sign of baseness.)
Being able to decipher a bit of the language of trees made my life richer. It allowed me to see the world a little more sharply. It let me sense what was happening underground and catch a glimpse of history. It made me feel a little more confident, a little more at home—a little more rooted. I wanted Josephine to experience this same sense of connectedness. And so, when she pointed into the branches and I had nothing more interesting to say than “That’s a tree,” it pained me. Had I really joined the boring ranks of adults who could see nothing more than that? Would I really allow myself to repeat this until Josephine was similarly dulled? And two years later, when Josephine’s baby sister arrived, it doubled my imperative to squeeze meaning from each bush and tree.
When I started trying to learn about the natural world around me, I discovered that it’s hard to find good guides to the natural history of urban environments. Until recently, people just haven’t been as interested in urban ecosystems. The typical city’s combination of trees from all over the world seems haphazard, and illegitimate: not really nature. In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the romance in the vibrant messes humans have created. And because urban wildlife is sparsely studied, it is fertile ground for discovery. When Kevin Matteson, an ecologist from Fordham University in the Bronx, simply stopped to observe each flower as he walked through New York City, he identified 227 different species of bees. When Rob Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University, asked one of his grad students to look around while visiting Manhattan, the student discovered a species of ant previously unknown to science. And when Emily Hartop, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, examined files from her own city, she found thirty new species. Though I could find dozens of lovingly compiled guidebooks on the wildlife of the Sierra Nevada, the topics of books I found on the wildlife of San Francisco all tilted toward convenience: A tree’s roots and fruits were presented only in terms of their intrusiveness and messiness. If I really wanted to teach Josephine more than just names, I realized, I’d have to spend some time in the back stacks of research libraries.
I started fairly slowly, just groping around, trying to figure out where to find the information I wanted. I learned the region’s trees bit by bit. As I did, I began to see variety where before I had seen uniformity. Where I had only seen eucalyptus, I began to see Australian willow, and red ironbark, and peppermint willow. I noticed that when Josephine heard birdsong, she would swivel her head, and so I began to stop and look too. At one corner we heard a bird singing with particular virtuosity, but didn’t see it until an elderly man stepped from his garage to point to the top of a power pole. It was creamy gray—almost invisible against the morning fog—with white and black bars on its wings and tail.
“Mockingbird,” the man said. “He comes and sings here for a couple weeks every year.” The more closely we looked the more the world opened itself to us, as if to reward our attention.
A week later, when Josephine said “That?” and pointed at a T. laurina, I could at least tell her its name.
I stepped close to the branches. The leaves trailed against Jo’s reaching hand. I pulled down a branch for inspection: There were none of the yellow flowers we had seen before. In their place were dense clusters of fat green fruit.
“Look at this, Josephine,” I said. And for once, she didn’t simply shout “That!” again. Instead, she grabbed the branch, fingered the little green pods, and murmured, “Whoa.”