`I Love No Leafless Land'

Our neighborhood, deep in a subdivision with one entrance, dense with oaks, some of them 80 feet tall, and with a secondary canopy of magnolias, pines and palms, is shaded, quiet and green. My first surprise about Houston, glimpsed from a seat in a 737, was the preponderance of green, and not just golf courses. I expected a brown palette, as I’d seen in Albuquerque years before, but that was just Northern ignorance.

My brother and I talked last weekend about the centrality of trees to our imaginations, how so many early memories include them, at least on the periphery, and how their presence is somehow reassuring, rooted in primal memories of security. We grew up in an older suburb and our lot adjoined a 20-acre wooded tract owned by the City of Cleveland. I remember the elms that blockaded our backyard before Dutch elm disease killed them in the late nineteen-fifties. I remember a summer evening when my foot jammed in the branches of a tall ash I was climbing, and how I screamed until men in the neighborhood, out mowing their lawns, got me down. We collected buckets of fine summer dust, hauled them to treetops, dumped them into mushroom clouds of brown and called them “A-bombs.” When I first read “Burnt Norton,” I understood what Eliot meant by “Ascend to summer in the tree.”

A mile south of our Houston neighborhood is a typical urban intersection. The corners are occupied by two gas stations, a bank and a block-long strip mall (podiatrist, liquor, cell phones). About 18 months ago, developers bought the larger strip mall at the northwest corner and tore it down, leaving only the gas station. With uncharacteristic speed and efficiency for Houston, they cut down the trees, razed the buildings, smashed the parking lot and sidewalks, and hauled it all away. Within days, only a long rectangle of bare soil that turned alternately to dust and mud remained. The crass violence of the operation was impressive. This week, more than a year after the promised completion of a replacement strip mall, surveyors and dump trucks are on the scene and a sign announcing the imminent arrival of a Starbucks has been posted. In a city without zoning regulations, this is how greed abets ugliness and waste.

A.E. Housman is not conventionally judged a “nature poet,” but an unexpected number of his poems express implicit pleasure in trees, hedgerows and green pastures. He celebrates an older, greener England, as in the first stanza of “VIII” from More Poems:

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land.”