Ancestors and Trees

         As we finish celebrating the 15-day Chinese New Year celebrating the year 4708 in the Chinese calendar, I pause to reflect on the Chinese cultural practice of honoring their ancestors, and how it applies to their respect for trees as well.

                In June 2009, a few months after studying for and receiving my RI arborist license, my husband and I took our oldest son on a fabulous 18-day trip to China where our son was born in 1995.  Besides being awestruck by the changes in China since our last visit in 1995, I was amazed at tree care practices used in China.  The ISA (International Society of Arboriculture) study manual was still fresh in my mind – and as we traveled to five different cities during our 18 days – I was continually astonished at many practices of tree care that were contrary to those I had just learned.  I wondered...do we know something that they don't... or do they know something that we don't?

                One of the most remarkable observations was the frequent sitings of very old trees.  (In many places the trees are labeled with their age.) Throughout the places we visited, we repeatedly saw “ancient trees” – trees that were hundreds of years old, many of them in urbanized settings. I kept on thinking of the average 10 year life span of urban trees in the USA.

 The tree picture shown is from a garden in Suzhou, one of the four great Chinese gardens.  The tree is purported to be over 900 years old; and as the close up of the picture shows, it is propped up with supports and braces.  We saw old trees in this condition in many places – as well as healthy trees that were hundreds of years old.

               In this country, this tree would have been cut down hundreds of years ago.  Arboriculture practices tell us to remove a tree once its useful life is over, particularly if it poses a hazard.  What do the Chinese see in their old, decaying trees that we in the West don’t?  Could it the same cultural philosophy applied to old people?

 Of course, anyone who is a bird lover knows that dying trees offer a wealth of food to most song birds, who primarily feed on the insects living off the decaying wood to feed their young.  And a dead tree serves a very useful purpose as a perch for many birds.

In this International Year of the Forests, 2011, perhaps we need to learn and appreciate the wisdom of Chinese arboriculture.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

                                                                -Confucious

In the beginning....

God almighty planted a garden.  And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.

'Of Gardens'  Essays of Francis Bacon

Oh, what pleasure indeed our gardens are to us (most of the time).  They certainly are to me on a very early summer morning with my first cup of coffee as I relax in my wicker rocker gazing at the first streams of sunlight hitting the garden plants.

However, as I begin my blogging experience, the ground outside is covered with almost two feet of accumulated snow and ice that has fallen since the beginning of the year.

But as anyone who gardens knows, the winter is the best time to reflect on our little patch of earth, when the yearning and stirrings of another garden season looms before us.  There is much pleasure during the cold, snowy days of January and February reading books, gazing at magazines, searching websites and pouring through seed catalogues.  We pause and reflect on our garden as ideas pass through our fingers and in front of our eyes.

Why blog?  I have been working in and learning about gardens for over twenty years and my interest in the various facets of gardening continues to grow each year.

Having an early interest in environmental science and natural resource protection, I am keen on learning more about being good garden stewards in order to respect life around us and underneath us.

Having a busy life (as most of us do) with family and work obligations, I am always trying to discover labor-saving garden techniques.

Having been introduced to the field of entomology not so long ago, I am awestruck by the role that insects play on the many aspects of our lives - particularly in our gardens, above and below the ground.  I worry that we spend more time and money eradicating them rather then understanding their vast importance.

Having an educational background in community planning, I am interested in the history of surburban development in the last century, and how the economy, politics and fashion trends are intertwined in our landscapes and neighborhoods.

And having delved a little into the history of gardening in the US, I am fascinated by the body of gardening knowledge that has existed for centuries...and dismayed over how much appears to have been lost over the generations.  It would seem that we can learn as much from paging through an old, dusty garden book as we can fingering our computer keys doing a google search.  Of particular interest to me is researching pre-1950's garden methods, when "sustainable" gardening wasn't so much a buzz word but a necessary way of life in an era of limited resources, shipping and travel.

And so I begin.  In the months to come, I hope to cover these topics in various forms and hope that sharing my knowledge will somehow add a little bit of pleasure to your garden experience.