A

long the Stony Kill, a couple of miles from here,

grows a stand of mature sycamores. Each one rises

like the family tree of some slow-to-develop but

ultimately fruitful lineage. Their stout lower boughs

reach outward, almost parallel to the stream, but the uppermost

branches and twigs—crowded together, gray and white—crook

straight to the sky. Not far away, near the crossroads in New

Concord, an immense black walnut rains down nuts in autumn,

staining the roadway with indelible ink. I remember the scent

of the green hulls from childhood. South of town someone has

nailed a sign to the trunk of a massive white oak. The sign says

“Christ Died for Our Sins.” Whenever I drive by I think of the

nail in the wood and the zeal that drove it home. I wonder too

what the sins of a white oak could possibly be.

In the woods near the house, I’ve found a chestnut oak

and any number of hornbeams and hop-hornbeams. This fall I

identified a butternut—a tree I’d never recognized before—along

the plow terrace above the creek. A colony of beeches can be

seen from the south windows, and the winter branches of a

gnarled black cherry—garroted for years by a chain supporting

a deer-stand—have been roughly scribbled against the western

skyline. I’ve even grown fond of the dead elm down by the barn.

Every day it instructs me in the distinctive, spreading shape of

the elm—“vase-like,” the tree books say, as though vases came

only in elm-form.

I could go on, but perhaps you see my point. More and

more, the most important landmarks in my mental topography

are trees. None of them are historic in the sense that history

took place beneath their boughs. None of them are champion

trees, tallest or thickest or oldest. Nothing of any significance

has happened to me beneath them—no picnics, trysts,

epiphanies—nor to anyone I know. It makes no difference. It’s

enough to admire them, to try to understand their lives and to

cultivate, so to speak, a deciduous philosophy. Recently, I came

across a sentence, written in 1832, by an Englishman named

THE LONE-TREE FOREST