The Tree Folk (Part 2) By Henry Turner Bailey

This is Aurora with the Tree Folk Part 2.

So relax and let's begin.

Colors in tree robes change with age,

As I suggested a few moments ago.

Those changes cannot be illustrated in pencil.

You will have to use your own eyes.

Make up your mind to concentrate on tree colors for one year out of your 3 score and 10.

You would never regret it.

You would see the water maples when the spring awoke them some morning in April.

And they became conscious of their nudity,

Blushed themselves into a netted robe of coral.

You would see the elms put on their brown old laces and the beaches don their spangles of copper.

You would see the sugar maples in silks of chrysoprase and the apple trees in velvets of jade.

The woodlands in April are more lovely than at any other time of year.

And the new robes of the Tree Folk are of gauze,

Veiling but not obscuring their exquisite bodies.

And the color of that gauze ranges from silver through gold and copper to ruby and emerald.

The trees in spring have colors for which there are actually no words in the language and no images in the mind as Ruskin says.

Colors which can be appreciated only when present to the eye and not even then unless you have the soul of an artist.

These robes thicken and change in color throughout the spring,

Until in summer they are all green.

Not one green,

But all the greens there are.

As the fall approaches,

These greens dissolve into all the colors of the rainbow.

The cotton woods become yellow.

The maples orange,

The oaks red.

The pines and hemlocks keep their green.

Blue and purple appear in hazy distances and slumberous shadows in the seed packs which the cedars,

The viburnums,

And the grapes wear as jewels of sapphire and lapis lazuli and amethyst set in Roman gold.

It is a thrilling pageant.

There are some who have never seen it,

Some among the great company of autoists whose motto is anywhere but here,

And who recognize but three kinds of growing things.

When they see a blur of green low down,

They exclaim,

Grass.

When the blur of green is head high,

They say,

Oh bushes.

And when it is so high that it extends above the upper rim of the windshield,

They say,

Trees.

Verily,

He hath made everything beautiful in its time.

Cooperation is another strong point with the tree folk.

They know how to pull together to maintain the family traditions.

When I was a student at the Massachusetts Art School and went to Boston daily on an old colony train,

We used to see above the roof of the pumping station at Cohasset what appeared to be the top of an immense elm tree.

A great green dome glittering in the morning light.

But as the train moved on,

We discovered that the dome was supported not by one giant trunk,

But by three common trunks.

After midnight,

When things come alive,

The three trees must have discussed the situation somewhat as follows.

Here we are growing so near together that no one of us can be a perfect elm.

We will cooperate to show the world what a first class elm looks like.

The middle one was speaking.

We can do that if you,

Brother,

Will agree to grow southward mostly,

And you,

Brother,

Will agree to grow northward while I grow eastward and westward only.

Whether they came to that agreement in so many words or not,

I do not know.

But that is what they did,

And the result was the handsomest elm dome on the south shore.

The town fathers saw fit to use the knoll on which the faithful brothers stood as a gravel pit,

And in course of time they undermined and overthrew the trees,

Thus bringing to knot the patient work of a hundred years.

Down on Cape Cod,

At Hyannis,

There used to be a row of willow trees as handsome as a house of fire.

The foliage of these trees was about like smoke in appearance.

To the eye of the artist,

That is very handsome indeed.

It is as handsome as an ostrich plume,

Or the cloud from the locomotive of a mile-long freight train.

What makes it beautiful?

That which artists call gradation or rhythmic sequence.

That plume goes from broad to narrow,

From open to solid,

From gray to black.

Moreover,

Its general movement follows the line of that curve of force you have heard of before.

How different it is from a row of young maples,

Such as the new park commissioner boasts about.

All alike,

The same size,

The same distance apart,

Not a dead one in the lot.

That perfect row of A-number-one trees is as handsome as the noise a vigorous boy makes with a stick rattling along a perfectly good picket fence.

Something to get on your nerves if continued much longer,

But suppose that same sequence of notes were to be sung by Gali Kursi.

You would be thrilled and breathless and on tiptoe for the dying echo of that last note.

It has become an exquisite rhythmic sequence of tone.

Such was the mass of willow foliage.

The willows discussing after twelve o'clock at night their situation on the bleak cape,

With the winds from the North Atlantic pounding away at them,

Decided to cooperate to maintain the family tradition.

The first knelt and held his umbrella with the handle almost horizontal.

This enabled the next to hold his standing.

The third to walk upright,

And the last to pose nonchalantly as though nothing had happened.

Thus,

All together they produced the massive crown of a gigantic willow.

This is a far more impressive presentation of the family ideal than any single individual could have achieved.

Cooperation is the secret of every symphony,

Of every masterpiece of painting,

Of every cathedral.

It is the secret of all noble achievement.

The darkness and chains of hell,

Dr.

William T.

Harris used to say,

But are symbols of the isolation of the individual.

The joys of heaven are all cooperative.

The trees understand cooperation,

Even within personal limits.

When the wandering boy thoughtlessly knifes off the leader of a young pine,

Two or more of the branches rise up to take its place.

At first,

They compete for primacy,

But as soon as one branch has proved its capacity for leadership,

The others retire from the race and fall back as cooperating members of the growing tree.

Herein is wisdom.

Cooperation is a cardinal virtue in the tree world.

Good trees are honest,

Frank,

And unashamed of their past.

They never try to hide a scar,

Or dye their hair,

Or paint their faces.

They never wear wigs or false teeth.

They accept what befalls them and do the best they can.

Or,

As a friend of mine says,

They take the favors providence thrusts upon them and look as cheerful as possible.

The tree bears in its body the true record of its life.

The tree folk,

Like people of our own race,

Become more interesting with age,

Chiefly because their appearance reflects their life history,

Their real character.

A baby's face means nothing except to its doting parents and to its immediate grandmothers.

The face of a child of ten is much like the face of any other child of that age.

But when a man has lived intensely and suffered much,

Failed a few hundred times,

And triumphed once or twice,

His face begins to have a character all its own,

Good or bad,

According to the heart in him.

We are not responsible for the face we are born with,

But we are responsible for the face we die with.

Character is so precious,

So personal,

So individual,

That each human being has a name all his own.

You do not like to deal anonymously with people.

You like to have intimate names of your own invention for your best friends,

Names known only to the elect.

When you come to have intimate friends among the trees,

You will feel the same toward them.

You will have names for them,

As I have for the chief seaters upon my country place.

The hill on which my house stands was owned first by Timothy Hatherley,

Merchant adventurer from London.

It was granted to him and his conahasset partners by the King of England before 1626.

That old cedar I mentioned,

To which I feel like lifting my hat,

I call Timothy Hatherley.

The next owner of my hill was William Booth,

1650 or so.

Consequently,

The next oldest cedar,

The one beyond the wall,

Westward from the back door of my studio,

The one in which my ruby-crowned kinglet stops to sing to me the first morning in May every year on his way from Yucatan to Labrador,

Is named William Booth.

A few rods eastward,

On the edge of one of the terraces of the drumlin stands Jotham Wade,

The next in order of age.

Timothy Hatherley is about 400 years old,

William Booth about 325,

Jotham Wade is 250.

He was the next owner of the land.

From him it passed to Celia Peakes,

A cantankerous little old maid,

Married at last to a deacon when past middle life,

Who hobbled about,

Bowed over a cane.

The next oldest cedar,

A squat one,

Whose leader was ripped off by some accident a century ago,

Bears her name.

Aunt Lydia had the land next.

You would admire the tree named after her.

It is a cedar in its early prime,

Tall,

Symmetrical,

And as handsome as she was at 70.

That cedar is about 125 years old now.

Aunt Lydia has passed the age and shape of the spire.

Cedars hold that schoolgirl figure for about 75 years.

Having attained approximately full height at 50,

They grow stouter and broader and more picturesque as the centuries deal with them.

I would like to introduce to you some of the other members of our woodland aristocracy.

It is worthwhile to have a nodding acquaintance,

At least with the first families.

Methuselah is one of the white pines.

Two centuries old,

He fills a crystal sphere some 80 feet in diameter.

You can lie flat upon his thick top as on a curled hair mattress.

Henry Howe has done it.

The frontis piece gives you a glimpse of the body of Queen Victoria,

An old beach in the Grand Ma Clapwoods.

They used to say in England that Victoria could sit perfectly still longer than any other living person.

Her namesake out sits her.

There she has been for 200 years,

And there she is likely to remain for 200 more.

It is startling to come upon her white body,

Gleaming against the dark background of the gloomy swamp woods.

And then one almost feels guilty even to look at her.

You would enjoy old King Priam,

A veteran red-seeder in the Severn's pasture.

He was so named because of his sons,

Who stand about him to protect him from his Greek enemies.

The Trojan King had 70 sons,

They say.

This old potentate has 83 by actual count.

They stand around him in a solid ring,

The oldest as tall now as the old man himself.

There is a secret pathway you could follow if you knew the password that would take you through the magic circle into the King's hall.

You would find it circular,

Roofed with a pierced fretwork of jasper and verdantique,

And floored with malachite.

In the center,

By the side of the King,

In the springtime stands a great living bouquet of egg lanteen,

And in the fall one of barberry,

Dripping with jewels of sard.

You should see Homer,

The blind singer,

A pine on the fall's ledges,

Beneath whose shadows I lay me down with great delight,

And listen to the surf sound of an aerial sea.

And the martyr on Judge's Hill,

A noble hemlock,

Still living,

Though half his limbs have been slashed off by sinful man to deck a Christian holiday.

And Agamemnon,

King of Men,

Lord of Mount Ararat,

A giant upon whose shoulders you can sit and see all eastern Massachusetts and half of the bay.

All your country,

Sea,

And land dwarfed to measure of your hand,

Your day's ride a furlong space,

Your city tops a glimmering haze.

Then you ought to know Eleanor,

The Queen Elm,

A hundred feet high,

With floating garments of green silk,

Whose fringes almost touch the ground,

And old Odin,

The King Oak,

Who spreads at his feet on the silver snow when the New Year moon sails high above,

A cape of purple lace a hundred and twenty-five feet from side to side,

And who sometimes wears diamonds between all his fingers.

Lazarus is a pitch pine at Trustworth.

He was smitten down in his young manhood by the Great Gale of 1898,

But we stood him up again with big stones,

And there he stands to this day as vigorous and handsome as ever.

Time would fail me to tell of Spoudaios and the Icebox and the North Pole,

And of the Tree of Heaven to which Ascent is made by Jacob's Ladder,

And of Shagamenticus,

Big Chief of Elms,

And Massasoit,

The great wild cherry who still stands guard by the Indian cornfield on Huckleberry Island,

And of Noah and the patriarch Job,

Who through patient continuance in well-doing attained a height of a hundred feet,

Shaded cattle,

Guided sailors at sea,

And gave farmers' boys a glimpse of the golden dome of the State House twenty-five miles away.

These all grew old gracefully,

Bearing witness to the fact that all things work together for good.

For a hundred years,

Two valiant pines have stood their ground side by side,

Meeting the fierce drives of the southwest winds in summer and of the northeast gales in winter.

During recent years,

They have been reinforced by the rock maple they sheltered in his youth,

Beneath whose protection,

In turn,

Young pines are flourishing to carry the fight on into the next generation.

What wind-bent and ice-mamed veterans they are,

But how defiant.

They are infinitely more picturesque than any of their cousins,

Captured by some city-bred man for his country seat,

And clipped with malice of forethought into the form of a spinning top or an umbrella or a spindle of button molds.

If such barbering of trees is art,

Let's go back to nature,

Where the blind forces of the air provoke the tree-souls to fight for life and so achieve undreamed of marvels of matchless beauty.

Friendship implies more than a passing acquaintance.

It is something that germinates and grows,

Flourishes,

Blooms,

Ripens.

Start a friendship with one tree,

Go to that old oak at least once each season,

In spring,

In summer,

In autumn,

And in winter.

Stand a respectful distance from him before sunrise some morning in September and see him take shape out of the gloom feature by feature until he smiles at you the best good morning you ever heard.

See him at noon under July's meridian light,

How he glitters,

What a handsome braided rug of violet and green and gold he throws beneath his feet.

See him in November at sunset when he stretches out his giant arms and waves the last remnants of his royal crimson robes as a salute to his departing god.

Visit him once in a fog,

Once when it rains,

Once when he wears ermine like a king,

Once when he is dressed in crystal for the carnival of sunshine the morning after an ice storm.

Go look at him once when his green waves rise and fall and roar and hiss under the lashings of a tempest.

See him without his robe some morning in February when you can admire his fine proportions and the athletic muscles of his limbs with their knotted joints as Enid once admired Geraint.

Notice the texture of his skin and that now empty nest of robins in his hair.

See him some calm morning in April when after his long sleep he stands breathless before the sun god with his peace offering of 10,

000 times 10,

000 jewels of topaz.

See him once in the soft night when he is resting within his starlit pavilion of purple.

I thought I knew Spudeos but he gave me a surprise one morning in January when I found his body sheathed in plate glass.

I never dreamed that a pine trunk could have such colors.

You do not know your favorite ash until you have heard his triumphant bass some windy day in March.

He holds the record for depth and vigor in the lower registers of tone.

An apple tree in bloom under a full moon is divinely beautiful.

On that night in May wings of angels fill the orchard and charge the air with the odors of paradise.

And go there at noon when the golden bees are singing.

A friend is one who knows all about you and likes you just the same.

Has any single tree the right to claim you as a friend upon that basis?

Do you know all about him?

Alas,

Nobody does.

He is a mystery at best.

Go to any open door in the forest,

Any gothic arch you see in the bowl of an old tulip or maple,

Giving access to his heart.

Stand there reverently upon his doormat of leaf dappled moss and knock gently.

You will find,

As John Burroughs said,

That the Infinite himself will come to answer.

But do not be discouraged.

The tree will welcome you as a friend.

All the trees ask is a little affectionate attention.

All the trees ask is a little affectionate attention.