Community of Trees

Walking into the SW corner of the forest, leaving traffic noise along the road behind the protective wall of vines and junipers, stepping into the peace of the real forest. The real forest trees are young and old: stately old giant bur oaks and sprightly young sugarberries. They are straight and tall as a green ash or gracefully bowed as an elm. It is a diverse community. The trees talk to one another. Ethylene and other compounds are the language. Roots and mycorrhizae are the internet. They respond when a neighbor has been attacked by elm disease or armillaria. They witness the short floods that come and drown the soil for a day or a week. They feel the fall of the old neighbor. They witness the play and gambol of smaller creatures around their base: deer, raccoon, squirrel, opossum, rabbit, skunk, box turtle. They stand, in the cold and ice of winter, against the night winds. They are there when storm winds come and break the branches and trunks of the tallest.

Walking into the forest, you can see the neighborhood, the community, if you let your eyes go un-focused, and wide, to see all the young trees and old, tall and straight or bent and broken.                                                    

Their silhouettes in the half hour before dark against a darkening gold sky, reveals the individual forms, grown and created by the particular interplay of species and the genes of individual trees, a neighborhood of competing canopies and the accidents of windfalls.