Spruce Tree Quotes

Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.

The full moon rises. The fog clings to the lowest branches of the spruce trees. The man steps out of the darkest corner of the forest and finds himself transformed into... A monkey? I think not.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929

Beauty was all around them. Unsuspected tintings glimmered in the dark demesnes of the woods and glowed in their alluring by-ways. The spring sunshine sifted through the young green leaves. Gay trills of song were everywhere. There were little hollows where you felt as if you were bathing in a pool of liquid gold. At every turn some fresh spring scent struck their faces: Spice ferns...fir balsam...the wholesome odour of newly ploughed fields. There was a lane curtained with wild-cherry blossoms; a grassy old field full of tiny spruce trees just starting in life and looking like elvish things that had sat down among the grasses; brooks not yet "too broad for leaping"; starflowers under the firs; sheets of curly young ferns; and a birch tree whence someone had torn away the white-skin wrapper in several places, exposing the tints of the bark below-tints ranging from purest creamy white, through exquisite golden tones, growing deeper and deeper until the inmost layer revealed the deepest, richest brown as if to tell tha all birches, so maiden-like and cool exteriorly, had yet warm-hued feelings; "the primeval fire of earth at their hearts.

As the glow of the cabin windows turned to flickers through the trees and then to black, her eyes adjusted and the starlight alone on the pure white snow was enough to light her way. The cold scorched her cheeks and her lungs, but she was warm in her fox hat and wool. An owl swooped through the spruce boughs, a slow-flying shadow, but she was not frightened. She felt old and strong, like the mountains and the river. She would find her way home.

One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That’s 115 times longer than the average human lifetime.

The Snow Man" One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (Vintage; Reissue edition February 19, 1990)

Let's sum up... a little house, white and green or to be made so... with trees, preferably birch and spruce... a window looking seaward... on a hill. That sounds very possible... but there is one other requirement. There must be magic about it, Jane... lashings of magic... and magic houses are scarce, even on the Island. Have you any idea at all what I mean, Jane?" Jane reflected. "You want to feel that the house is yours before you buy it," she said. "Jane," said dad, "you are too good to be true.

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light.

Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who’s heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In

The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair.

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one, do now as I bid you, climb the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree; wait at the top, attentive, like a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon; it behooves you to be generous. You have not been completely perfect either; with your troublesome body you have done things you shouldn’t discuss in poems. Therefore call out to him over the open water, over the bright water with your dark song, with your grasping, unnatural song—passionate, like Marie Callas. Who wouldn’t want you? Whose most demonic appetite could you possibly fail to answer? Soon he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime, suntanned from his time away, wanting his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him, you must shake the boughs of the tree to get his attention, but carefully, carefully, lest his beautiful face be marred by too many falling needles.

He looked up to the tall spruce trees and noticed an eerie silence envelope the camp. Not a bird sang when the gates to Dachau opened. It seemed an evil-smelling place, and the dreary surroundings befitted this wicked establishment.

The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave, — a vital spot on the lake's surface, — laughed and frolicked, and showed its straight leg, for our amusement.

To our indigenous ancestors, and to the many aboriginal peoples who still hold fast to their oral traditions, language is less a human possession than it is a property of the animate earth itself, an expressive, telluric power in which we, along with the coyotes and the crickets, all participate. Each creature enacts this expressive magic in its own manner, the honeybee with its waggle dance no less than a bellicose, harrumphing sea lion. Nor is this power restricted solely to animals. The whispered hush of the uncut grasses at dawn, the plaintive moan of trunks rubbing against one another in the deep woods, or the laughter of birch leaves as the wind gusts through their branches all bear a thicket of many-layered meanings for those who listen carefully. In the Pacific Northwest I met a man who had schooled himself in the speech of needled evergreens; on a breezy day you could drive him, blindfolded, to any patch of coastal forest and place him, still blind, beneath a particular tree -- after a few moments he would tell you, by listening, just what species of pine or spruce or fir stood above him (whether he stood beneath a Douglas fir or a grand fir, a Sitka spruce or a western red cedar). His ears were attuned, he said, to the different dialects of the trees.

What is the colour of Christmas? Red? The red of the toyshops on a dark winter’s afternoon, Of Father Christmas and the robin’s breast? Or green? Green of holly and spruce and mistletoe in the house, dark shadow of summer in leafless winter? One might plainly add a romance of white, fields of frost and snow; thus white, green, red- reducing the event to the level of a Chianti bottle. But many will say that the significant colour is gold, gold of fire and treasure, of light in the winter dark; and this gets closer, For the true colour of Christmas is Black. Black of winter, black of night, black of frost and of the east wind, black of dangerous shadows beyond the firelight. I am not sure who wrote this. I got it from page nine of “A Book of Christmas” by William Sansom. Google didn’t help. It is rather true I think, that the true color of Christmas is black. For like the author said in succeeding sentences “The table yellow with electric light, the fire by which stories are told, the bright spangle of the tree- they all blazé out of shadow and out of a darkness of winter

IT IS STARTLING to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.

There are trees growing in Philadelphia (at Fourth and Spruce Streets) and the University of Virginia (at Morea, a guest house) today that grew from the cuttings Lewis sent.

.. my husband can't pass by a beautiful birch tree or a beautiful spruce without just standing there, thunderstruck, watching... I'll have to be careful he doesn't merge with those trees body and soul, careful not to lose him altogether.

The hemlock tree is named spruce-pine, while spruce is he-balsam, balsam itself is she-balsam, laurel is ivy, and rhododendron is laurel.

They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.

Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you'll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that's me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that's me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie, that's me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that's me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that's me, sure as gun's iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that's Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that's Forrest, and I'm right behind him. Never see me again? You'll never not see me. And I'll never not see you . . .Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.

Let me write about an Icelandic road trip; a running man; backflashes galore; and slowly disclose what it is he’s running from. Bring him to Ásbyrgi; mention how the ravine was formed by a slammed-down hoof of Odin’s horse. Mention how it’s the Parliament of the Hidden Folk. Have him stare at the rock faces until the rock’s faces stare back. Breathe deep the resinous tang of the spruces. Let him meet a ghost from his past. Hear the bird, luring me in, ever deeper ever tighter circles. Where are you? There. On the toadstool-frilled tree stump.

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land.

DARK SPRUCE FOREST FROWNED ON EITHER SIDE THE FROZEN WATERWAY. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

To wake up on a gloriously bright morning, in a tent pitched beneath spruce trees, and to look out lazily and sleepily for a moment from the open side of the tent, across the dead camp-fire of the night before, to the river, where the light of morning rests and perhaps some early-rising[240] native is gliding in his birch canoe; to go to the river and freshen one's self with the cold water, and yell exultingly to the gulls and hell-divers, in the very joy of living; or to wake at night, when you have rolled in your blankets in the frost-stricken dying grass without a tent, and to look up through the leaves above to the dark sky and the flashing stars, and hear far off the call of a night bird or the howl of a wolf: this is the poetry, the joy of a wild and roving existence, which cannot come too often

Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees. Those branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays.

In the mist, in the darkness of the forest, in the dewdrops on the spruce needles. In the whales that swam in the sea, in the heart beating in my breast. Mist, heart, blood, trees. Why were they so appealing? What was it that enticed me with such power? That filled me with such enormous desire? Mist, heart, blood, trees. Oh, if only I could write about them, no, not write about them but make my writing be them, then I would be happy. Then I would have peace of mind.

Funnel The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost-new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died. The children honored their separate arts; two became moderately famous, three married and fattened their delicate share of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was a concert pianist. She had a notable career and wore cropped hair and walked like a man, or so I heard when prying a childhood car into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan. One died a pinafore child, she stays her five years forever. And here is one that wrote- I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive words and scratch out my short marginal notes and finger my accounts. back from that great-grandfather I have come to tidy a country graveyard for his sake, to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake. I like best to think of that Bunyan man slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan of culture to do it big. On this same scale he built seven arking houses and they still stand. One, five stories up, straight up like a square box, still dominates its coastal edge of land. It is rented cheap in the summer musted air to sneaker-footed families who pad through its rooms and sometimes finger the yellow keys of an old piano that wheezes bells of mildew. Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying through the mist. Where those eight children danced their starfished summers, the thirty-six pines sighing, that bearded man walked giant steps and chanced his gifts in numbers. Back from that great-grandfather I have come to puzzle a bending gravestone for his sake, to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake.

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors, But I, in my soul, am alive too. I feel I must sing and dance, to tell Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me. And I sing amid despair and isolation Of the chance to know you, to sing of me Which are you. You see, You hold me up to the light in a way I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps Because you always tell me I am you, And right. The great spruces loom. I am yours to die with, to desire. I cannot ever think of me, I desire you For a room in which the chairs ever Have their backs turned to the light Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you. If the wild light of this January day is true I pledge me to be truthful unto you Whom I cannot ever stop remembering. Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day On the wings of the secret you will never know. Taking me from myself, in the path Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me. I prefer "you" in the plural, I want "you," You must come to me, all golden and pale Like the dew and the air. And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

Sometimes life in my dream-come-true was uncomfortable, like waving good morning and smiling at strangers. That felt foreign to me. And I had never lived in a world where I was the only Latino. In New York City I could hide in plain sight, like a cactus in the desert. In Connecticut, I was a palm tree among spruces." - excerpt from Confessions of an Internet Pornogrpaher

Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.

How beautiful it was, lying embowered in the twilight of the old trees; the tips of the loftiest spruces came out in purple silhouettes against the north-weatersn sky of rose and amber; down behind it the Blair Water dreamed in silver; the Wind Woman had folded her misty bat-wings in a valley of sunset and stillness that lay over the world like a blessing. Emily felt sure that everything would be all right.

As he drifted into sleep, Harry’s thoughts were uncluttered, peaceful, ordinary. A hickory is windfirm, he thought. A white ash is strong against sudden shock. The sap of a Norway spruce binds a wound. He slept.

I distinctly heard the blackbird from the top of a spruce tree, and clear as glass I heard the lark high up and several other birds whose song I did not know, and it was so weird, it was like a film without sound with another sound added, I was in two places at once, and nothing hurt. 'Yahoo!' I screamed, and could hear my own voice, but it seemed to be coming from a different place, from the great space where the birds sang, a bird's cry from inside that silence, and for a moment I was completely happy.

Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green. But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over-and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.

A steady land breeze blew through the trees behind the house. The heavy new snow tumbled from spruce branches, first here, then there, filling the whole woods with steps and whispers. Between the tree roots on the sun side, the soil was showing dark and wet with little sprigs of lingon.

The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.

So, let's get back to why the roots are the most important part of a tree. Conceivably, this is where the tree equivalent of a brain is located. Brain? you ask. Isn't that a bit farfetched? Possibly, but now we know that trees can learn. This means they must store experiences somewhere, and therefore, there must be some kind of a storage mechanism inside the organism. Just where it is, no one knows, but the roots are the part of the tree best suited to the task. The old spruce in Sweden also shows that what grows underground is the most permanent part of the tree-and where else would it store important information over a long period of time? Moreover, current research shows that a tree's delicate root networks is full of surprises. It is now an accepted fact that the root network is in charge of all chemical activity in the tree. And there's nothing earth shattering about that. Many of our internal processes are also regulated by chemical messengers. Roots absorb substances and bring them into the tree. In the other direction, they deliver the products of photosynthesis to the tree's fungal partners and even route warning signals to neighboring trees. But a brain? For there to be something we would recognize as a brain, neurological processes must be involved, and for these, in addition to chemical messages, you need electrical impulses. And these are precisely what we can measure in the tree, and we've been able to do so since as far back as the nineteenth century. For some years now, a heated controversy has flared up among scientists. Can plants think? Are they intelligent?

I thought that good was to be found neither in man, nor in the predatory world of animals and insects, but in the silent kingdom of the trees. Far from it! I saw the forest’s slow movements, the treacherous way it battled against grass and bushes for each inch of soil. First, billions of seeds fly through the air and begin to sprout, destroying grass and bushes. Then millions of victorious shoots wage war against one another. And it is only the survivors who enter into an alliance of equals to form the seamless canopy of the young deciduous forest. Beneath this canopy the spruces and beeches freeze to death in the twilight of penal servitude.

so much of what we see lies in the name; that is an apple tree, that is an elm, that is a cherry tree, that is a spruce. If we look at it for longer, we might get beneath the name and see it as a unique, singular tree and not merely as a representative of the category it belongs to. And eventually we may even be able to see what it 'is', its presence in the world. But by then we will have come to know it so well that it will seem familiar to us, which in turn creates a distance, for that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years - we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.

How beautiful it was, lying embowered in the twilight of the old trees; the tips of the loftiest spruces came out in purple silhouette against the north-western sky of rose an amber; down behind it the Blair Water dreamed in silver; the Wind Woman had folded her misty bat-wings in a valley of sunset and stillness lay over the world like a blessing.

Winkler's breath plumed up onto his glasses. The entire valley was enveloped in a huge, illuminated stillness. Above him the clouds had pulled away and the sky burned with stars. The meadow smoldered with light, and the spruce had become illuminated kingdoms, snow sifting from branch to branch. He thought: This has been here every winter all my life.

This Is a Photograph of Me It was taken some time ago. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. In the background there is a lake, and beyond that, some low hills. (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the centre of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me.)

I explored the literature of tree-climbing, not extensive, but so exciting. John Muir had swarmed up a hundred-foot Douglas Spruce during a Californian windstorm, and looked out over a forest, 'the whole mass of which was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire!' Italo Calvino had written his The Baron in the Trees, Italian editionmagical novel, The Baron in the Trees, whose young hero, Cosimo, in an adolescent huff, climbs a tree on his father's forested estate and vows never to set foot on the ground again. He keeps his impetuous word, and ends up living and even marrying in the canopy, moving for miles between olive, cherry, elm, and holm oak. There were the boys in B.B.'s Brendan Chase, who go feral in an English forest rather than return to boarding-school, and climb a 'Scotch pine' in order to reach a honey buzzard's nest scrimmed with beech leaves. And of course there was the realm of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin: Pooh floating on his sky-blue balloon up to the oak-top bee's nest, in order to poach some honey; Christopher ready with his pop-gun to shoot Pooh's balloon down once the honey had been poached....

eagerness. The front man turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other. A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness. Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the left of the second cry. “They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front. His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent effort. “Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a rabbit sign for days.” Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them. At the fall of darkness, they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees on the edge of the

I’d read, listen to music, or just sit there and watch the leaves spinning in the wind. Needed to be away from everyone, everything. That’s what hunting became for me. I liked being on my own. The quiet of it, the stillness of the snow, the familiar spruce, fir, and pine trees, the challenge of the hills, finding footprints of large and small game. All of it a world I understood and one that didn’t need to understand me.

He saw a valley, over which hung a low, orange sky. All the lines of this world were indistinct and the shadows were blurred, cast by some alien light. In the valley there were no houses, no traces of humanity, not a single clump of nettles or a wild currant bush was growing. There was no stream, though the place where one used to be was overgrown with thick, hard, tawny grass, like a scar. There was no day in this world, and no night either. The orange sky kept shining all the time - neither warm nor cold, motionless and indifferent. The hill was still covered in forest, but when he looked at it closely he could see that it was dead; at some point it had hardened and turned to stone. Pinecones hung on the spruce trees, and their branches were still covered in ashen needles, because there was no wind to scatter them. He had a terrible foreboding that if an sort of movement were to occur in this landscape the forest would come crashing down and turn to dust.

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

But Douglas fir and ponderosa pine were both better than the spruce and subalpine fir at minimizing water loss, helping them cope with the drought. They did this by opening their stomata for only a few hours in the morning when the dew was heavy. In these early hours, trees sucked carbon dioxide in through the open pores to make sugar, and in the process, transpired water brought up from the roots. By noon, they slammed their stomata closed, shutting down photosynthesis and transpiration for the day.

They never lost their way or seemed even momentarily uncertain of their location. They traveled narrow paths cut through tuckamore and bog or took shortcuts along the shoreline, chancing the unpredictable sea ice. Every hill and pond and stand of trees, every meadow and droke for miles was named and catalogued in their heads. At night they navigated by the moon and stars or by counting outcrops and valleys or by the smell of spruce and salt water and wood smoke. It seemed to Newman they had an additional sense lost to modern men for lack of use.

Greenery Juniper, Oracle Oak and Hop Tree, California Buckeye, and Elderberry. Pacific Dogwood and the pale green Eucalyptus, Quaking Aspen and Flannelbush. raw, sprouting, lush green love green with envy green with youth green with early spring olive, emerald, avocado, greenlight ready, set, GO! greenhouse, greenbelts, ocean kelp, cucumber, lizard, lime and forest green, spruce, teal, and putting green. green-eyed, verdant, grassy, immature green and leafy green half-formed tender, pleasant, alluring temperate freshly sawed vigorous not ripe yet promising greenbriar, greenbug, green dragon greenshanks running along the ocean's edge greenlings swimming greenlets singing greengage plums green thumbs greenhorns and greenflies- how on earth amid sage swells kelly hillsides and swirls of firs did I ever find that green of hers? holly, drake, and brewster green, pistachio, shamrock, serpentine terre verde, Brunswick, tourmaline, lotus, jade, and spinach green: start to finish lowlands to highs no field, no forest, no leaf, no blade can catch the light or trap the shade; no earthly tones will ever rise to match the green enchantment of her eyes.

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness. A farmer pauses in the doorway of his barn and he is wearing the right boots. A sheep stands under an apple tree and it wears the right look, and the tree is hung with puckered frozen fruit of the right color. The spruce boughs that bank the foundations of the homes keep out the only true winter wind, and the light that leaves the sky at four o'clock automatically turns on the yellow lamps within, revealing to the soft-minded motorist interiors of perfect security, kitchens full of a just and lasting peace. (Or so it seems to the homing traveler.)

Though I could see for many miles, apart from distant plantations of Sitka spruce and an occasional scrubby hawthorn or oak clinging to a steep valley, across that whole, huge view, there were no trees. The land had been flayed. The fur had been peeled off, and every contoured muscle and nub of bone was exposed. Some people claim to love this landscape. I find it dismal, dismaying. I spun round, trying to find a place that would draw me, feeling as a cat would feel here, exposed, sat upon by wind and sky, craving a sheltered spot. I began to walk towards the only features on the map that might punctuate the scene: a cluster of reservoirs and plantations.

When the logs in the fireplace crackle merrily, the corpse of a beech or oak is going up in flames. The paper in the book you are holding in your hands right now is made from the shavings of spruce, and birches were expressly felled (that is to say, killed) for this purpose. Does that sound over the top? I don't think so. For if we keep in mind all we have learned in the previous chapters, parallels can definitely be drawn to pigs and pork. Not to put too fine a point on it, we use living things killed for our purposes. Does that make our behavior reprehensible? Not necessarily. After all, we are also part of Nature, and we are made in such a way that we can survive only with the help of organic substances from other species. We share this necessity with all other animals. The real question is whether we help ourselves only to what we need from the forest ecosystem, and-analogous to our treatment of animals-whether we spare the trees unnecessary suffering when we do this. That means it is okay to use wood as long as trees are allowed to live in a way that is appropriate to their species. And that means that they should be allowed to fulfill their social needs, to grow in a true forest environment on undisturbed ground, and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. And at least some of them should be allowed to grow old with dignity and finally die a natural death.

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

The spruce is sculpted by the elements, bottlebrush scrawny, topiaryed by the weather. This boreal forest stretches over eight thousand miles in an unbroken line around the circumference of the globe: 30 percent of the world’s tree cover, four million square miles, the planet’s single largest biome. A broad, evergreen brushstroke that encircles the north, running through North America, Scandinavia, Siberia, marking the band of the subarctic. Forests of moose, of lynx, of bear. Forests of thimbleberry, strawberry, nagoonberry, lowbush cranberry, highbush cranberry, watermelon berry, bunchberry, crowberry, huckleberry, blueberry, cloudberry, bearberry, salmonberry. Forests home to many of the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies, summers of wildfires and perpetual light, and winters of fifty below.

You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment. When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else. If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut. Both are strikingly resilient, and they will tell you about all the fires they have survived. And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from – a tree so tenacious it can fend off even the flames that aim to destroy it. If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend time beside a sugar maple. If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pretty, are no less ephemeral than vainglory. By the time you leave, you might feel a bit more humble, more grounded. To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead. And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

The Red Cedar of Vancouver. It is six hundred years old and can expect to live until the twenty-seventh century. There is something disturbing about finding yourself in front of a living thing which you know will be there in six centuries' time. As though it had already survived you. You feel dead in advance, and yet so far removed (a spatial depth, measurable in light-years) that all anxiety is dispelled. You even feel a little immortal through this tree that has survived so many of its descendants. There is no equivalent in the human species; no one lives to be proportionately as old as the four-thousand-year-old spruces of deepest Arizona.

I guess you could get the Christmas tree.” Inexplicably, our brittle-branched spruce Christmas tree had not caught fire.

She felt that, before she went back, she must slip along the pasture fence and explore a certain path which she saw entering the grove of spruce and maple further down. She did—and found that it led straight into Fairyland,—along the bank of a wide, lovely brook—a wild, dear, little path with lady-ferns beckoning and blowing along it, the shyest of elfin June-bells under the firs, and little whims of loveliness at every curve. She breathed in the tang of fir-balsam and saw the shimmer of gossamers high up in the boughs, and everywhere the frolic of elfin lights and shadows. Here and there the young maple branches interlaced as if to make a screen for dryad faces—Emily knew all about dryads, thanks to her father—and the great sheets of moss under the trees were meet for Titania’s couch. “This is one of the places where dreams grow,” said Emily happily.

„.. my husband can't pass by a beautiful birch tree or a beautiful spruce without just standing there, thunderstruck, watching... I'll have to be careful he doesn't merge with those trees body and soul, careful not to lose him altogether.

Calmer again, he looked out to see he was sandwiched below the cloud and above the fog. There was no way the helicopter would see him here. The cabin was nearer, but he was still too far above it and night was getting closer. He had to keep going. He plucked another couple of limbs from a tree. The pine scent thrilled his senses. He was alive. Norman half walked, half skidded down the slope until eventually it began to widen and the gradient relaxed. He found Sandra a little further down, tall spruces surrounding the patch of snow where she lay. Norman’s seat from the plane was just above her. Her eyes were open but she was stiff and dead. He covered her body with twigs then moved on. Now that the slope was shallow enough for him to control his descent, he slid on his bottom down the apron for at least 300 m (1,000 ft). He made his way down into a narrow and twisted gulch in front of the huge ridge he had seen earlier. Carefully he avoided the ice-covered stream that snaked below him. Get wet, you get hypothermia, you die.

the violins of Antonio Stradivari and the Guarneri family are what the spruce trees of Fiemme Valley in northern Italy would sound like if those trees could sing.

Firs and pines and Sitka spruce thicken around me, pushing in from all directions, black-tipped fairy-tale trees that knit shadows out of nothing, night out of day—as if they’ve stolen all the light and hidden it somewhere.

Rainforest Nictitating eyelid sky omening leaf mould melancholia mollusc ruminating spores/ spruce pores sweat steamed [fungus]/ frog needles old man's beard devil's club seeps gloom.

Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over—and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that’s why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don’t know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.

The blunt stares from all the others outside is really starting to get to me. The least they could do is be more subtle about it. Hide under a tree and spy on us behind our backs like a normal human being

reforestation programs introduce spruce and pines to areas where they are not native, and the newcomers experience substantial problems in their new habitats. Usually, they are brought to low elevations that are too warm and dry for conifers to thrive. As a result, the air is dustier, as you can clearly see when the dust motes are backlit by sun streaming down on a summer’s day. And because the spruce and pines are constantly in danger of dying of thirst, they are easy prey for bark beetles, which come along to make a meal of them. At this point, frantic scent-mails begin to swirl around in the canopy. The trees are “screaming” for help and activating their arsenal of chemical defenses. You absorb all of this with every breath of forest air you take into your lungs.

In an article entitled "Upset about the Golden Spruce? Re-examine your perspective, says Hadwin," he told a reporter for the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer that "we tend to focus on the individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered." “Everybody’s supposed to focus on that and forget all the damage behind it. When someone attacks one of these freaks you’d think it was a holocaust, but the real holocaust is somewhere else.

To our right there was a gentle burst of sedge grass completely surrounded by nettles, backed by a row of wild bergamot. Beech-trees hovered over every earthly thing in that direction, spiking into the regathering clouds. To our left were the spruces where the firecrests and the dunnocks and the three-toed woodpeckers lived.

You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment. When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else. If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut. Both are strikingly resilient, and they will tell you about all the fires they have survived. And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from–a tree so tenacious it can fend off even the flames that aim to destroy it. If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend time beside a sugar maple. If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pretty, are no less ephemeral than vainglory. By the time you leave, you might feel a bit more humble, more grounded. To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead. And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

You don’t have to hold my arm,” he snapped. “I’m not a baby!” He pulled away from Erica and promptly ran straight into a spruce tree.

Jack walked me through the garden, naming plants and flowers with dizzying speed: blue spruce, hydrangea, and boxwood gave winter interest to the garden. Quaking aspen and Boston ivy grew along the fence. Pink Spike and Crimson Queen Japanese maple added colorful purple foliage along with First Love speedwell and panicled hydrangeas. "These plants are fighters," he said. "Even without any nurturing, they've managed to flourish. They do what it takes to survive.

The tops of hemlocks and Sitka spruces pigtailed into pointed green purse strings.

Young spruce sprout particularly well in the dead bodies of their parents. This is known as “nurse-log reproduction” in English and, somewhat gruesomely, as Kadaververjüngung, or “cadaver rejuvenation,” in German. The

THE HAPPY SPRUCE INN, it said. Cartoon trees with googly eyes and idiotically smiling faces grinned down at the Stiff as it pulled into the driveway of a large, boxy building with all the charm of a haunted mental institution. “What a lovely setting,” Driggs said. “For murder.” “Okay, Lex,” Uncle Mort said as Pandora put the car into park some distance away from the front door. “You’re going in. Now—” “Wait, I’m going in? Why not you?” “Because I’m deriving far too much enjoyment from the Stiff’s leaky fumes. Now just go in, tell the person at the front desk your Uncle Mort sent you, and find the rest of the Juniors. It shouldn’t be hard. You seem to have a knack for attracting large groups of angry people.” She cringed. “You think they’ll be angry?” “No time like the present to find out. Now go.” “By myself? What about—” She looked at her other choices. Pandora was picking her teeth in the rearview mirror. Grotton was Grotton. And Driggs’s hand was still stuck. “Sorry,” he said to her, giving his wrist another futile tug. “The old arm-in-the-seat dilemma.” Lex haughtily unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. “You are the worst band of fugitives ever,” she said, slamming the door.

One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old.

The residence sat toward the back of the property, which sloped up across a masterfully landscaped yard shaded with maple and spruce trees, dotted with stone sculptures—fountains, birdbaths, angels—and not a leaf to be seen on the pockets of lush green grass. An engine turned over near the house. Letty stepped off the drive and crawled into a thicket of mountain laurel as a boxy Mercedes G-Class rolled past. Through the branches and tinted glass, she glimpsed Chase at the wheel, a young boy in a booster in the backseat. The car ride over had only intensified her nausea, and as the diesel engine faded away, she put her finger down her throat and retched in the leaves. She felt instantly better. Weaker. Less drunk. But better.

Originally the Indians made their tepees of buffalo hides, but since the destruction of the buffalo herds by the white man, domestic cow hides have been used, as well as canvas. New buffalo-hide tepee covers were made every spring. The size of the tepee depended somewhat on the number of horses the tribe or family had, because it required several horses to transport a large tepee. The poles were made of lodgepole pine, cedar, spruce, or any other straight tree. Flexible poles were not used. The poles averaged about 25 feet in length and tapered from 4 to 1 inch in diameter. In warm weather the lower part of the tepee was raised up on the poles to allow the breeze to blow through. In cold weather the space around the bottom between the stakes and the ground was packed with sod to hold it down tightly and to keep out the snow and drafts. When the tepee was new it was nearly white. But by spring, the smoke and the weather had darkened it at the top and the skins became quite transparent. At night the campfires made the tepees look like large Japanese lanterns. On the Great Plains the wind is usually from the west and for that reason the tepees were set up with the smoke hole facing the east. The flaps, or smoke hole ears, as they are called, were used to control the drafts and to keep the wind from blowing down the smoke hole. In case of a storm they could be lapped over to close the smoke hole completely.

Variations on a Summer Day" I Say of the gulls that they are flying In light blue air over dark blue sea. II A music more than a breath, but less Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, A repetition of unconscious things, Letters of rock and water, words Of the visible elements and of ours. III The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs That turn into fishes and leap Into the sea. IV Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star, Lantern without a bearer, you drift, You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course; Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned You are the will, if there is a will, Or the portent of a will that was, One of the portents of the will that was. V The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken. There was a tree that was a father. We sat beneath it and sang our songs. VI It is cold to be forever young, To come to tragic shores and flow, In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones, Being, for old men, time of their time. VII One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guineas, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent. VIII An exercise in viewing the world. On the motive! But one looks at the sea As one improvises, on the piano. IX This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea, Night and day, wind and quiet, produces More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds. X To change nature, not merely to change ideas, To escape from the body, so to feel Those feelings that the body balks, The feelings of the natures round us here: As a boat feels when it cuts blue water. XI Now, the timothy at Pemaquid That rolled in heat is silver-tipped And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French Translation of a Russian poet. XII Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers: Hugh March, a sergeant, a redcoat, killed, With his men, beyond the barbican. Everywhere spruce trees bury spruce trees. XIII Cover the sea with the sand rose. Fill The sky with the radiantiana Of spray. Let all the salt be gone. XIV Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle Of mica, the dithering of grass, The Arachne integument of dead trees, Are the eye grown larger, more intense. XV The last island and its inhabitant, The two alike, distinguish blues, Until the difference between air And sea exists by grace alone, In objects, as white this, white that. XVI Round and round goes the bell of the water And round and round goes the water itself And that which is the pitch of its motion, The bell of its dome, the patron of sound. XVII Pass through the door and through the walls, Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance, Pine-figures bringing sleep to sleep. XVIII Low tide, flat water, sultry sun. One observes profoundest shadows rolling. Damariscotta dada doo. XIX One boy swims under a tub, one sits On top. Hurroo, the man-boat comes, In a man-makenesse, neater than Naples. XX You could almost see the brass on her gleaming, Not quite. The mist was to light what red Is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing, Without teetering a millimeter's measure. The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence. It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping.

Pourchot, after breakfast, goes off to measure the largest of the spruce near the campsite. He finds a tree twenty-two inches in diameter, breast high. ...Pourchot says he will write in his report that there is one tree of such girth. 'Otherwise, the Forest Service might think there's timber here.

It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.

weeks. It was the same stuff every year. Santa mugs filled with candy canes. Canisters of homemade hot chocolate mix. Starbucks cards she’d never use—not because she didn’t like coffee but because she rarely made the seven-mile drive to the nearest Starbucks. Enough cookies for a bake sale wrapped in various colors of cellophane and tied with ribbons. Garish ornaments that would never hang on her tasteful Victorian tree in the bay window—which she hadn’t even put up this year. The odd handmade scarf in a color outside a palette she would ever don. Spruce Valley was small, with distinct but overlapping social circles. Re-gifting was next to impossible, even if she waited a year, though she might be able to give away the Starbucks cards if she took them out of the envelopes. She might use the hot chocolate mix, though she never found it a bother to make hot cocoa on the stove. At least the mix would keep. She had no appetite for the cookies.

Calling to Measure It’s an obsession now, this matching And measuring, comparing, for instance, The coral-violet of the inner lip Of a queen conch to the last rim of dusk On the purple-flowering raspberry To the pure indigo of the bird-voiced Tree frog’s twittering tongue, then converting The result to an accepted standard Of rose-scarlet gradations. It’s difficult to say which is greater- The brevity of the elk’s frosty bellow Or the moments of fog sun-lifted Through fragrances of blue spruce Or the fading flavor in one spoonful Of warm chocolate rum. I mark out space by ten peas Strung on a string. The pane perimeter Of my window, for instance, is twenty-eight Lengths, twelve lengths over. Seventy pea-strings stretch from bed To door, Four go round my neck. My longing for you is more painful Than the six-times folding, doubling And doubling, of a coyote’s Most piercing cry, more inconsolable Than a whole night of moonlight blinded By thunderclouds, more constant Than black at the center of a cavern Stone below leagues of granite. I gauge my cold by the depth Of stillness in the pod heart of a frozen Wren. I time my breath by the faltering Leaves of aspen in wind. I count the circles Of my dizziness by the spreading rings Of rain-lassos on the pond, by the repeating Bell chimes of the corridor clock, By the one unending ring of the horizon. Where is the tablet, where the rule, where The steel weights, the balance, the book, Properly to make measure of a loss So grand and deep I can spread and stitch it To every visible star I name- Arcturus, Spica, Vega, Regulus- in this dark Surrounding dark surrounding dark?

Everything waits and moves. Our hearts, beating. The stars, wheeling over the spruce trees.

In their urge for survival, the seed-bearing trees hit upon countless different devices for carrying pollen from one flower to another, but essentially the methods fall into two main categories. The first is wind-pollination, which requires the presence of light, small, dry pollen grains, easily shaken from the stamens, or male flowers. To receive the tiny bits of pollen that are blown about by the wind, the stigmata of flowers must be long, or feathery, or sticky, or so constructed as to trap the fine dust. All conifers are pollinated this way, as are the poplar, ash, birch, oak, beech, and certain other species. But since this method is so haphazard, a disproportionately high percentage of pollen is wasted and these trees must produce immense quantities of pollen in order that even a tiny amount will be effective. Scientists have estimated that a single stamen of a beech tree, for example, may yield 2,000 grains, while the branch system of a vigorous young birch can produce 100 million grains a year. One pine or spruce cone alone releases between 1 and 2 million grains of pollen into the air: In Sweden, which is covered with spruce forests, an estimated 75,000 tons of pollen are blown from the trees each year.

Even on that first, clear afternoon, the dark earth between the gravel paths and the deep green of towering pine, fir, and spruce trees contained the memory of recent snow and rain. The ocean at the far end of the camp was the color of slate. Everything Siobhan was wearing was brand new: a black fleece she’d chosen for its silver heart-shaped zipper pull, her first pair of hiking boots, even her underwear. She felt a thrilling, terrifying dissolution of self. She was far from her parents, her classmates, anyone who had ever known here. She was curious to find out who she would be.

The walnut tree told me when Emeline Margulies turned eighteen. Law-wise in Pennsylvania, a girl burns her ships at eighteen. Her daddy was dead and she was alone, so I bound her with spells, talk of blue spruce situated off the front porch, small-mouth bass jumping bugs at the lake, and how sunshine bounces from the water to the orchard and turns pear blossoms gold. She bought every word and wiggled close. I took her wrist and got my hand on her neck and I couldn’t think of nothing save the bones inside her.

Pines and spruces can't be sheared like yew or hemlock, but they are stately in large landscapes, where their eventual size is a plus. (But they are a nightmare in small yards, where their eventual size is like having a brontosaurus nesting in the front yard.)

Above us was a canopy, the stretching arms of cedar and spruce and Douglas fir. We knew to follow in silence, watching our steps, heads bowed. We were in a temple.

The big white house glowed on the hill above them, tranquil in the afternoon light, the big red spruce behind it a looming but benign presence; not for the first time, he felt that the tree was somehow guarding the house—and in his present fragile mental state, found that notion a comfort.

A biologist from Leningrad, Boris Tokin, described them like this back in 1956: if you add a pinch of crushed spruce or pine needles to a drop of water that contains protozoa, in less than a second, the protozoa are dead. In the same paper, Tokin writes that the air in young pine forests is almost germfree, thanks to the phytoncides released by the needles. In essence, then, trees disinfect their surroundings.

A multitude of algae live in salt water. Thanks to them, large amounts of oxygen bubble out of the ocean year round. Algal activity in the oceans balances the oxygen deficit in Central European forests in the winter so well that we can breathe deeply even when we are standing under beeches and spruce covered in snow.

I think of the irony that I fully appreciated that my tree was alive only just in time to hear that it had died. But it’s more than that—my spruce tree was not only alive; it had a life, similar to but different from my own. It passed its own milestones. My tree had its time, and time changed it. Time

I walk into the night forest. I reach out my hands on either side. I can feel the smooth bark of the Red Alder trees and the rough chasms of mature Douglas Fir, and then I can feel the stringy fibrous bark of the Western Red Cedar. I can push my fingers into the Cedar bark; it is like cloth to my fingertips. But here and there I can also feel the lacelike fingers of Hemlock and the prickly needles of Spruce touching my face and my neck.

Some species-like spruce-rely on timing. Male and female blossoms open a few days apart so that, most of the time, the latter will be dusted with the foreign pollen of other spruce. This is not an option for trees like bird cherries, which rely on insects. Bird cherries produce male and female sex organs int he same blossom, and they are one of the few species of true forest trees that allow themselves to be pollinated by bees. As the bees make their way through the whole crown, they cannot help but spread the tree's own pollen. But the bird cherry is alert and senses when the danger of inbreeding looms. When a pollen grain lands on a stigma, its genes are activated and it grows a delicate tube down to the ovary in search of an egg. As it is doing this, the tree tests the genetic makeup of the pollen and, if it matches its own, blocks the tube, which then dries up. Only foreign genes, that is to say, genes that promise future success, are allowed entry to form seeds and fruit. How does the bird cherry distinguish between "mine" and "yours"? We don't know exactly. What we do know is that the genes must be activated, and they must pass the tree's test. You could say, the tree can "feel" them. You might say that we, too, experience the physical act of love as more than just the secretions of neurotransmitters that activate our bodies' secrets, though what mating feels like for trees is something that will remain in the realm of speculation for a long time to come.

Research revealed the spruce to be an absolutely unbelievable 9,550 years old. The individual shoots were younger, but these new growths from the past few centuries were not considered to be stand-alone trees but part of a larger whole. And, I think, quite rightly so. The roots is certainly a more decisive factor than what is growing above ground. After all, it is the root that looks after the survival of an organism. It is the root that has withstood severe changes in climatic conditions. And it is the root that has regrown trunks time and time again. It is in the roots that centuries of experience are stored, and it is this experience that has allowed the tree's survival to the present day.

When they are choosing their trees, deer go for whatever is unusual. Whether they choose spruce, beech, pine, or oak, they will always choose whatever is uncommon locally. Who knows? Perhaps the smell of the shredded bark acts like an exotic perfume. It's the same with people: it's the rare things that are most highly prized.