Lying with your cheek pressed against her flank, you can see that around the scar where a branch was amputated the bark is stippled with tiny dormant buds. The reddish bark beneath your cheek is shaggy with soft scaly strips, which bend and flatten to her surface as your weight rests on them. A few break softly, and the rust-colored cork seems bright compared to the dull gray of the outermost layers of bark. Around you, her branches twine in varying thickness, like a church organ come to swaying life. The bark of the smallest is shining silver-brown, and as you trace the binary forks up the langourous twigs you see the smooth brown stipple and break like rabbit’s fur, down to the boar’s bristle coarse yielding shag that your cheek rests on.
Her trunks lean and dance like palm fronds, like a cool fountain. She casts her limbs about her with an practiced grace that never seems contrived. Along each slanting bough march the regular scars of twigs shed decades ago, and each scar blooms in pink and fuchsia. As if elf-princesses had climbed her, and from each foothold flowers grew. The same garlands crown her as she crowns the spring forests, glimmering through the undergrowth. She fairly sings with joy to greet the sun each year.
She’s red in the bud, both in flower and in leaf, but as the days warm her russet turns to purple, and from each round floret emerges a finger of pink, which then opens into a gallant-beaked pea-flower, her family’s crest. Eat one – they taste delicately of nectar, of new leaves, with a faint astringent dryness, like lemonzest or like rosehips. You need not fear to harm her – she is prodigal in blossom, and has not the space to grow all the pods her ambition would bear. Look, one of the pods of last year still flutters stuck to that branch. It’s just like a snow-pea, but thinner and sharper. They cling to her branches as you see her flowers do, and their leathery red-brown skin rattles in the wind both before and after they open to shed their small black seeds.
Is it late enough in spring for – yes! at the tips of her sunniest branches her leaves are just emerging. They’ve barely broken out, and are still folded, but they’re light green tinged with red, as they should be, and you can guess what the shape of them will be. Like when you were a child and cut construction paper – the teardrop shape not yet opened out into the heart. In the summer she’ll extend them like stepping stones, carefully arranged to best catch the light filtering down. She gathers what light comes to her in her small outstretched hands. When it rains, each leaf is a cup, dripping from tip to tip like a garden fountain.
I never stop marveling at the pentatonic grace of her cascading twigs, the way she comes up like a fountain and down like lace. Even when her children seed themselves across my flowerbeds, I sometimes can’t bring myself to cut down that beauty. In the shade of our forests, she spreads her smooth thin leaves, clear green dappled with occasional sun, and in the spring she fills the woods with her bright melody, repeated in fugue below the careful slow oaks and above the wake-robin and trout-lily. In all seasons but fall she is the most beautiful of trees.
injygo 