Trees memorialize beginning, ending of life
One truth is that people are born, opening the door to life on Earth and taking their place in the web. Another sadder truth is that people die.
David Lendrum is a master gardener and owner of Landscape Alaska. Responses or questions can be sent to www.landscapealaska.com.
The holes they leave behind in the fabric of our lives are raw, sore, empty places we can't bear to think of, but can't ever forget. To welcome newborn we dance and sing, establish trust funds or plant trees. In memorium of our lost we carve stones, build monuments, swear vengance or tell stories and some of us plant trees.
The tradition of planting trees for those entering or leaving this life is ancient-beyond belief. Attaching human memory to a creature that outlives our kind is easy to understand. We share the earth with many other races - fish and fowl, grape and grain, some creep below the surface and others we never even see, but none seem as evocative of earthly life as the trees.
They carry us in their arms when we are children, shelter us with their bodies when we grow and carry us below when we die. It is fitting and sure that they should bear our memories into the future too. Naming trees that we find is one way. Carving symbols into their bark is another and altering their growth to fit our purpose is a very old way of anchoring a thought to a tree.
The Killamook people of the Pacific Northwest have a tree that has sheltered their respected dead for three centuries, not by standing over graves, but by actually carrying the bodies aloft. Honored people were bound onto living branches of the tree, which stands today on a high cliff above the ocean, where they were regarded as a resource for the people.
Memorial groves can be planted or encountered among the wild world. Entering a place so awsome that the sense of history and timelessness is overwhelming leads us to bind our most precious thoughts to that place. Pilgrimages and retreats, revivals and meditations find sacred places for their inspirations. Some are austere wind-swept perches of great vistas, but most are closer to our ancestral home. Forests of trees were our nesting places and to them we return for solace and memory easing peace.
Joys in our lives call for memorialization as well as sorows and planting trees to welcome new family members includes those married or adopted into a family as well as those that are born there. The joint creation of places that community planting projects develops make environments just as real as any place found in our wandering, and family gardens that contain these named trees are as real as any forest giants.
Japanese communities have trees that are part of their cultural heritage, revered and protected by generation after generation. They wrap the trees in rice straw mats for the winter, feed it with liquid fertilizers as they do their fields and salute it as a known individual.
Planted trees do not have to be particularly declared as memorials, the act of planting a tree is enough to make it a memory peg. Passing through Juneau, I see trees by the hundreds that were planted since we came to town. The trees that stand along the streets or fill the older yards have all the mystery of archeological events and the names or circumstances of their planters is of great interest. Tree histories have as much import as those of houses or works of art, and the dreams and desires of the original planters must be similar to those we carry today. Who planted the huge beech by the Governor's Mansion, what civic group choose mountain ash to line the streets downtown and what was the name of the Scottish sea captain who brought those huge black willows from his home to 12th street? Whose memories were evoked as the saplings or seeds were planted?
Our memorialization of humans by linking trees to their personalities allows us to reach out or reach into ourselves for our links with others. Cemetaries become parks, sacred precincts become recreation locations and memory linked trees can carry more than one set of felings. People find comfort in naming , and often the very act of confering a title creates a concept. These trees we plant may bear dozens of names, hundreds of individual encounters with people seeking contact with the future or holding on to the past. They don't mind. Their strength is great and the burden is light.