`An Arboretum of the Mind'

One of my favorites among the books I read in 2007 was A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America by Donald Culross Peattie, published in 1950. I thank Mike Gilleland for the tip. Go here, here and here to see what I wrote at the time. Now that we have moved to greater Seattle it’s time to consult the companion volume, A Natural History of Western Trees (1953). Last year, Houghton Mifflin published both of Peattie’s books under a single title, A Natural History of North American Trees, with a foreword by his son, Mark R. Peattie, and an excellent introduction-cum-celebration by Verlyn Klinkenborg. More than 100 wood engravings by Paul Landacre are retained from the original volumes.

Here’s an illustration of the book’s usefulness and beauty. Straddling our yard and the neighbor’s to the south, 15 feet from where I’m sitting, stands a lush, 35-foot Alaska cedar. The trunk at its base is about 18 inches in diameter. The tree looks shaggy but elegant. Here’s how Peattie begins his three-page Alaska cedar essay (Beware: This is more than a field guide. Peattie profiled trees the way Whitney Balliett profiled jazz musicians.):

"The Alaska cedar can be one of the most beautiful yet most sorrowful of western conifers. Its long, lithe leader shoot bows its head – sometimes bent nearly double in a young tree – and its dull, dark bluish green foliage is evergreen for two years, then turns a rusty brown. The dead foliage is not shed, however, for another year, leaving the whole tree more or less tinged with the hue that, for vegetable life, is the color of mourning."

Not since Ovid has a writer so winningly anthropomorphized a tree. This sort of thing is not to every reader’s taste, and at times Peattie’s penchant for purple prose grows oppressive. But his learning is encyclopedic, so each essay is a collection of interestingly wayward nuggets: The Alaska cedar grows to 150 feet in British Columbia. Boat builders use the wood for decking, railing and interior paneling. The trees grow slowly and may not reach "saw-timber size" until they are 200 years old.

Unlike any other place I’ve lived, the dominant trees in Seattle and environs are conifers, lending mountains their characteristic ragged profiles. In contrast to Houston, I’ve seen no Chinese tallow trees, no palms (fine with me: palms make any landscape resemble a movie set) and few maples. In our backyard is the tallest tree I have ever lived near, a Douglas fir at least 60 feet tall and almost five feet in diameter. One of the longest essays in Peattie’s book – 10 pages – is devoted to the Douglas fir. He begins with an anecdote. When the frigate Constitution was launched in 1798, her three masts were made from Eastern white pines. When the ship was refurbished in 1925, no white pine tall enough could be found in the East. Instead, the restorers imported three Douglas firs from the Pacific Northwest. Writing almost 60 years ago, Peattie says:

"One-fourth of all the standing saw timber in the United States is Douglas fir. In volume cut it surpasses any other one species."

One of the charms of Peattie’s book is the frequency of such anachronisms. The environment, the economy and technology – everything has changed since the flush postwar years. Today, the Douglas fir is best known as a Christmas tree. Peattie never mentions this use. Here’s a lovely fir- and Christmas-related digression from Thoreau’s journal for Nov. 27, 1857:

"Standing before Stacy’s large glass windows this morning, I saw that they were gloriously ground by the frost. I never saw such beautiful feather and fir-like frosting. His windows are filled with fancy articles and toys for Christmas and New Year’s presents, but this delicate and graceful outside frosting surpassed them all infinitely. I saw countless feathers with very distinct midribs and fine pinnae. The half of a trunk seemed to rise in each case up along the sash, and these feathers branched off from it all the way, sometimes nearly horizontally. Other crystals looked like pine plumes the size of life. If glass could be ground to look like this, how glorious it would be!"

Where you and I see ferns, Thoreau sees feathers and firs. It’s a metaphor Peattie would have prized. Here’s Klinkenborg on Peattie as a writer:

"In these essays Peattie reminds us again and again that perhaps the most important thing to know about the trees we live among is the effect they have upon us. And that can only be captured in words, by a writer whose greatest work is an arboretum of the mind."