Arboretum Diary

"The saw works only across the years, which it must deal with one by one, in sequence. From each year the raker teeth pull little chips of fact, which accumulate in little piles, called sawdust by woodsmen and archives by historians;" Leopold, from "Good Oak"









10/27

A short walk in among the murky paths through Curtis Prairie, now that the leaves have turned and most fallen from the oaks, the remnants reveal some structures of natural contours of time past.  Leopold makes the poetical observation of natural time in A Sand County Almanac by tracking the

decades through an allegorical saw blade, for the great bur oak can live upwards of three hundred years old, and among all things we see in this ancient savannah, it is the oak that would know better than any the history of this place.  A straight line of old and noble burs line, as the signage claims, ramparts of the old farm fence, just one more landmark to a time long gone when farms might try to make claims over landscapes not well suited planting or cattle grazing.  The bur oak, however, knows its place; attracted to the edge of, not in the center of, forested regions, near abundant water and a sun source that allows the limbs maneuver in its own space.  If fire might come by the rare landing of lightening, that is not a problem, for the bur is tolerant and will not break.  If fire is not the enemy one such season, maybe it is draught the next.  The great bur has this covered by assistance of a rare taproot which burrows down as far as it must go to drink.  If squirrels, mice, even grazing cattle might like to slow the prospects of the regenerating oak by dining on the acorns, the bur has found a strategy for this as

well, purposefully increasing its flowering of acorns every three years to such an abundance that the predators cannot keep up with the feast. Some acorns slip through the cracks and find their own nestled portion of the mud for the infancy of a new taproot...as long as it chooses to live a hundred feet from great grandfather, who has come to enjoy his space.  What one set of eyes sees as the decrepit black lines of a falling mammoth, another, if he is patient, sees the history of slow time and can understand the changing of patterns that have carved out of the prairie wetland with only slight nudging, here and there, by man.