What do you think of trees?

I love trees! I had to hold back tears each time my husband cut down a tree in our yard surrounding our house. He was opening up space for the wind turbine and solar panels. I was attached to certain ones and spent a lot of time near them. I still love trees. In the park yesterday, I was taking pictures of one particular tree without its leaves yet.
 

What do you think of trees?​

Can't imagine life without 'em
Especially when living amongst them

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It includes a whacky human story but I really liked The Overstory by Richard Powers. Of course I grow some myself and enjoy seeing them on walks too.


From The Overstory by Richard Powers:

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.
First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning -a million million years of branching- nothing more exists than lean and simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout -backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.
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I like them, but not so close to the house!

We have acres of them. I cut the down, dead, and dying trees for firewood. A few years back I cut and debarked some poplars and used them to make a swing set for my grandkids. And 25 years back I planted over 1000 evergreen seedlings, some of which are quite tall now.
 

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We've planted several trees on our property. A cherry tree and two maples in the back yard and an oak tree we raised from an acorn! We found a sprouted acorn in the flower bed, dug it up and replanted it in the middle of the yard. My husband carefully mowed around it for several years and now it's twice as tall as us! A squirrel gnawed off a branch when it was little so it got a little lopsided looking, but it's starting to fill in.

My trees are my babies!
 
I think trees are wonderful to be around. They have a kind of calming effect. Some are humbling. Many trees have seen and witnessed a lot more than I have. There can be a sense of being insignificant when among them.

I took these 2 photos one autumn in the grounds of Keele University, Staffordshire.

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Taken as I was walking through the bluebell woods at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire.
Don't walk on the ancient bluebells though, I think they are protected?
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Near Killarney, Ireland
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Hub and I adore trees...especially unusually large or gnarled ones. We've been known to drive a hundred miles out of our way to visit a very old Moravian Fig tree, Banyan tree or oak. We have lots of trees on our property.

Think they are spiritual and mesmerizing...just don't want them too close to the house...lol.
 

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