Garden of the Seasons: At Home With November

The November Sublime. The tender November light, autumn's second self. 
          Every season has its characteristic, signature state of mind, emotion, nostalgia, and no doubt regret. Its time-borne expectations. It can be cold, this final month of fall (according to the meteorologists' calculation, if not the astronomers'), but it hasn't been cold yet this year. The season lingers. It's late phase fall. Today's newspaper ran a wonderful panorama photo taken from some elevation high enough to catch a strip of fabulous tree-line through the heart of Boston called the Emerald Necklace.        Wonderful, I thought. That's the news. I have a friend who says "for every hour you spend reading or watching the news, spend two hours looking at trees." Sometimes he says "ten hours." This year is shaping up as one of those ten-hour times. 
         Anne and I logged some happy hours last week walking with trees through some of our favorite Eastern Massachusetts haunts, paying two visits, from separate starting points to the Blue Hills Reservation, a state park that is one of the great treasures of the Greater Boston region. 
          You can hear the traffic when you begin the dirt path into the forest -- (shown in the second and third photos down) and then, in a matter of few minutes, you can't hear it any longer. Our 'real world' is out there in the traffic. The planet's 'real world' is in here, among the trees. Its soundtrack is subtle. Silence, or almost silence, at times. The occasional bird this time of year. Something of an insect sound; a last cricket somewhere? (Nobody tell him it's all over.) It's squirrel time, of course, but less obviously in wild places than in our neighborhoods, where competition breeds chatter. In the woods, there are plenty of trees for everyone. Trees don't speak much, unless the wind is up.     

That the wind has spoken this season, considerably on occasions, is clear. We see evidence of that on the news, and see the footage of trees that came down to cut power or, sadly, cleave roofs. We see the signs in the Blue Hills forests as well, where occasionally a great old trunk, or simply a once-strong branching has crossed the path. If the fall is recent, and of significant weight, it's likely that no one has cleared it, and so we make our own paths around these blockages, no great nimbleness required. The photographic footage of trees falling on our houses or power lines may give the impression that nature is a destructive force. Unfortunately, many of our neighbors appear to think this way. They want trees around their houses cut down. They search the city's street trees for signs of age, weakness, disease; an excuse for removal. It's like pulling your teeth out to prevent cavities. 
          But trees, and great nature itself, are not a destructive force, but a creative force. We wouldn't be here without them. Trees created our world; they made the atmosphere breathable for the 'higher' (or more complex) animals, such as ourselves. They take carbon dioxide out the air and return oxygen to it. Their roots force seams through the rock, helping to make earth. Without plants and the microscopic allies turning rock into soil for a billion years, we wouldn't be able to grow food. We would have only the ocean to feed us, and how soon would we eat all the fish? (Oh, yeah, we're all ready doing that.) 
            And they beautify the face of the planet. Most of the other photos on this page came from the face of November as it appeared in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston on Sunday, the first day of the return to standard time. The arboretum is a living laboratory for the Harvard University forestry school, and an amazingly curated collection of world-class trees.
Spending time among the trees -- whatever the apparent motivation: exercise, fresh air, aesthetic appreciation -- helps us understand their story. 
            Yes, the trees are talking to us. It costs absolutely nothing to listen.  

Anne is seen is this photo examining a plant which I've certainly never seen anywhere else, called, fittingly enough "Purple Berry Bush." The tag says it's from Korea. It also bears of course a Latin botanical name, but I didn't recognize any of those terms.

We were looking for Larch trees on our visit to the arboretum, having learned from previous visits that the Larch is a member of the conifer family whose leaves turn orange in the fall and then fall off, like deciduous trees. That is, it's an "evergreen" whose leaves are not 'evergreen.' You can glimpse one in the middle distance of this photo.