The Cellar Door Book Society: Arbor Day Special: the Forest, the Trees, and a Bit of Tweeting

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This is an age-old metaphysical question, one that challenges conceptions of reality and hazardous hardwoods. Given the globally warm socio-political climate, it's fair to assume that when a proverbial tree falls in a theoretical forest, some segments of the populace will declare tree a trigger warning and remove themselves to a safe space; some will don foliage hats and knothole sweaters and march against tumbling lumber; some will celebrate windfall building material for a great wall along our southern border; some will blame it on Russian hackers and clamor for a Congressional investigation... and some will tweet about it: SAD! FAKE FOREST NEWS! ONLY I CAN SOLVE! The point of this blog post, of course, is not to politicize trees or to polarize the forest, but rather to salute our leafy neighbors, to share non-pulp-non-fiction and-- because spring has at long last sprung-- to celebrate fine-feathered friends that tweet.

Skyward through a Japanese Cherry, Keeneland Race Course, Kentucky.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben.

Greystone Books, 2016. 272 pages.

Non Fiction and Biographies

Leafing through this slim volume happily affirms that trees are profoundly apolitical, expressing no party affiliations and eschewing snarky partisan dust-ups on Facebook. They are, however, community-conscious and civic-spirited in their own vegetative ways-- capable of networking, nurturing, warning others against danger, and sharing nutrients with under-the-weather neighbors. We may never know how much scientific insight and arboreal enthusiasm is lost in translation from the original Das Geheime Leben der Baume, but this dispatch from a German forester offers a pleasing blend of scholarship and whimsy... a gentle reminder of the interconnectedness of living things, the succession of life, death, and regeneration, the cyclical nature of nature.

Companion Pines at Storm Point, Yellowstone National Park.

American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow.

Scribner, 2013. 406 pages.

History and Travel

Who woodn't want to trip the timeline of American history in the company of trees? In this exhaustive survey, we spend time in the shade of Liberty Trees, where colonists congregated to plot and plant the seeds of a new nation. We visit Henry David Thoreau's existential retreat in the New England woods. We travel to an inferno-ravaged Wisconsin lumber town and stroll the urban wilds of New York City's Central Park. Along the way, we meet and greet tree-loving American luminaries like George Washington, who, contrary to pop-culture reports, did not fell that famous cherry tree-- but who may have been capable of telling a fib or two through false teeth. American Canopy invites us to see the forest through the trees: to view our sweeping national story through natural resources remarkable for their utility, their stature, their longevity, their calculated practicality, and their incalculable sublimity.

Hanging in There: Bristlecone Pine at Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah.

Celebritrees: Historic and Famous Trees of the World by Margi Preuss.

Henry Holt, 2010. 36 pages.

Picture Books

This charmingly illustrated gem of a picture book resides on a wooden shelf in my favorite elementary school library. It profiles fourteen celebritrees from around the world, trees that have borne silent witness to our collective history and cultural heritage: a gnarled bristlecone pine in California's Ingo National Forest that has endured Earth's elements for roughly four-thousand-eight-hundred years; a baobab tree in Australia that served as a prison for Aborigines at the turn of the twentieth century; the Bodhi Tree in India where Buddha reputedly gained enlightenment; the Major Oak in England's Sherwood Forest where, legend has it, Robin Hood and his band of oh-so-merry men sought refuge. It's chock-full of facts and perhaps a few alternative facts for human readers about the oldest, biggest, most magnificent organisms on our planet.

Local Celebritree: Dying 600-year-old White Oak, recently removed in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Good books don't grow on trees. Money doesn't grow on trees, either; however, Screaming Trees-- an alternative-grunge-neo-psychedelia band from Ellensburg, Washington state-- gave us Dollar Bill on their 1992 break-out album, Sweet Oblivion. It has a good beat and a melody that really grows on you:

One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives by Bernd Heinrich.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. 210 pages.

Non Fiction and Biographies

Nowadays, every self-respecting blogger needs a twitter account, so here's one wherein an amiable, bird-watching biologist chronicles-- using more than one-hundred-forty characters-- everyday encounters with wild, winged creatures. Heinrich's close observation is revelatory; his delight in his subject is contagious. His focus is on particularized bird stories, as opposed to broad study of bands, bevvies, broods, coveys, flocks, and gaggles of endothermic vertebrates, so the resulting narrative is at once intimate and relatable. The memoir is interspersed with author-created black-and-white illustrations, and there's a bonus section of color plates smack-dab in the middle of it all. All hail the flycatchers and flickers, the warblers and woodpeckers, the hawks and the harbingers of seasonal change... MAKE AMERICA TWEET AGAIN!

Berries and Blue Sky: Mountain Ash at Shenandoah National Park.

The Wild Duck Chase: Inside the Strange and Wonderful World of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest by Martin J. Smith.

Walker & Co., 2012. 261 pages.

Non Fiction and Biographies

If it looks like a duck stamp book, swims like a duck stamp book, and quacks like a duck stamp book... then it is probably a duck stamp book! So much for abductive reasoning, and so much praise for a book about competitive wildlife painting. Admittedly, the canon of duck stamp literature is limited, so when something on the subject comes along and is recommended by a discerning husband, one takes heed and reads. This moderately-sized tome takes readers into the peculiar milieu of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, the only juried art competition run by the United States government. As we wade and waddle through a singular world, we are party to ideological and cultural clashes betwixt rural hunters and suburban-to-urban birders and conservationists-- and to a surprisingly intense rivalry between quirky artists in their pursuit of creative achievement and prize money.

Favorite Trees: Beeches in the Paddock at Monmouth Park, New Jersey.

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren.

Alfred A Knopf, 2016. 290 pages.

Non Fiction and Biographies

There are trees in this frank, fresh memoir: also, soil and seeds and blades of grass, and rain and wind and birds and bees and weeds and wildflowers. The botanist-author describes a life in science, from a lab-haunting childhood in rural Minnesota, through grown-up battles with mental illness, to seasoned and reasonable stability and contentment in personal and professional life: from the dejection of failed hypotheses and foundering funds to the exhilaration of discovery and camaraderie with lab partner Bill. What emerges is a vision of science, like the forest, as sanctuary-- a sacred retreat that becomes defining reality. Jahren issues several well-placed cautionary notes and calls to action: Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than 8 billion new stumps. Words that prompt me to pull another book from a wooden shelf in my favorite elementary school library....

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Random House, 1971. 64 pages.

Picture Books

For nigh unto a half century now, the Lorax has been speaking for the trees, delivering an environmental message from the land of Brown Bar-ba-loots and tufted Truffula Trees. Inarguably, trees provide physical sustenance, helping to clean the air we breathe, providing us with food and fuel and medicine and shelter. I don't think I'm going out on a limb suggesting that they provide a measure of spiritual sustenance, as well. Beneath their benevolent branches we rest, we recreate, we reflect, we read... we remember a resonant rhyme from the Lorax: Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.