`Joyous Leaves'

The campus of the university where I work in Houston is dense with live oaks, as is much of the city. The trees line many streets and sidewalks, and often the branches merge overhead and form densely shaded tunnels, an effect I have heard called “cathedrals.” Live oaks seem to grow horizontally. Often they are wider than they are tall. Their branches possess enormous structural strength, and they grow 40 feet or more from the trunk, parallel to the ground.

On my way to the campus library last week, I passed through a “cathedral” and noticed a spiky-looking sphere on the grass beneath one of the oaks. It was “ball moss,” a clumpy species of Spanish moss that resembles drab Christmas ornaments. Its leaves form a gray-green, spaghetti-like tangle. When rain is ample, ball moss absorbs 10 times its own dry weight in moisture. The one I found, larger than a grapefruit and covered with spiky shoots, still held the twig on which it had grown. Apparently it swelled with rain and the weight caused the twig to snap. I brought it home and put it in a dish of water and it seems to be thriving. Now it looks, from a distance, like a cheese ball gone to mold.

We don’t seem to have much of the long, Faulknerian Spanish moss my Northern eyes associate with the South. If that sort can be likened to Rapunzel’s hair, ours looks mangy and unkempt, more like dreadlocks, perhaps because of Houston’s filthy air. More information than you’ll find here about Spanish moss – an epiphyte related to the pineapple -- and live oaks is available online. I especially like the Spanish moss site created by Dennis Adams, a librarian in Beaufort County, S.C.

The classic text on the subject, of course, is Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” one of the first of his poems I knew:

“I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.”