Into Restoration

"It has been often said, and I shall argue the case myself, that the only remark of nature is its silence, but that is not because the world around us has nothing to say. It is because we come unequipped with ears to hear." – Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year






10 -16


By October at the Arboretum, as our naturalists had commented, 'it's all done now.' This was nothing more than a common observation we likely all made to ourselves, as we took a brief walk outside into the native flower garden, looked out among the remaining native burr oaks, the red cedar, still a beautiful forest green, up onto the glowing red and orange ash, and beyond. The comment simply meant that there were no wildflower species yet flowering, virtually all, except the small white aster, had gone to seed, became crusty as burnt sticks still upright, and the color, the almighty characteristic of all wonderful plants, had faded for the season where it will its turn next spring or summer, depending. For the trained naturalist, this isn't such a tragic thing. Identifying features, as we would learn, were still as abundant as the eye might choose. For the untrained, however, reading the winter twig or the crisp ovular head of an old coneflower, is more of a challenge, and that was the point of the exercise.  Leopold himself often talked about the 'pretty' being the first and most obvious tantalizer for the common person to become enamored with the natural.  The theory of the land ethic might go that in order to become an initiate in the world of land ethics, we all have to find some point of entry into interest, and how things look is a natural start. It's likely not much a stretch in further logic to realize that the number of enthusiastic observers drop off significantly as the season changes from the radiant variety in the early August prairie to this moment now, deep October, soon to turn to the matting down by monotonous snow whereby those same plants become mere brown lumber in among the shoots and valleys of white clumps.

To be capable of combating this lack of interest as the seasons change is a great prize. As an author of  'twig' reading mentions in the first paragraph of his article, "What an interesting world awaits those who can enjoy the out-of-doors in the frost and winter weather. The trees, so bleak and bare, really become old friends to be recognized by their shapes and by the scars and buds upon their branches. Become an initiate in the art of recognizing trees without their leaves and you add a new interest and a new past time to your winter activities." What a pitch-perfect thing for the trained naturalist to say to the novice. As a lover of the pretty, it is far too easy -- and one might even make the point necessary -- to merely pass by the crush of a million features offered by every species along the way.

That ash that so majestically represents the corner of the native garden plot in a full bloom of October colors will soon be a massive rising cascade of pitchforks. We pass and briefly comment on its gray dreariness, its grayish brown bark, the prospect of the ash borer, and so on. And yet, as we walk up to the leaf bunches head high and bring down the branch we can begin to look more closely at what is happening under the color, for the color here, as with the plants, will soon be gone. Reading the buds, as the naturalist language might go, becomes not only an interesting past time for the sake of seeing old friends, but a critical mode for identification. Looking more broadly over the landscape of the entirety of the Arboretum, where raw, sometimes native, woods merges with restorative plantings, identification becomes quite critical. We are moving beyond the realm of friendly encounter of the pretty and into the realm of science.

The winter twig offers some similar features to look at and once distinguished the twig itself becomes its own thing pretty. The terminal bud at the end is a small treasure of identification, changing in shape, size and pattern of scaling. The terms from here, moving in towards the trees, are lenticel, leaf scar, bundle scar, lateral buds and terminal bud scale, the last of which is a ring that measures the growth from one season to the next, measured to the end of the terminal bud. Every tree will have its distinct features; to memorize these features, maybe go so far as to hold up to the hand held magnifying glass, is the new off season walker's prize of the visual.  Thinking of the zoom lens of interest in the natural world, it seems important to still consider the advice that was implicitly written all through the works of Leopold: always consider aesthetics of the natural world. Don't ignore the complexity of soil and landscape, but also don't become automatons of fact. Maybe where science meets philosophy is where art stems from, a goal that everybody could out, or maybe already does without knowing it?