'Give Me a Land of Boughs in Leaf'

We live on a cul-de-sac where the houses were built in the early sixties, in a Houston neighborhood called Oak Forest. The dominant trees are water oak and live oak. We have two of the former in the front yard along with a loblolly pine. All are at least sixty years old and eighty feet tall, and keep the yard supplied year-round with biomass, whether leaves, needles, cones, acorns, branches or bark. 

Shortly before his death in hospice last year, my brother and I talked about the centrality of trees to our memories and imaginations. We were never sentimental tree-huggers but grew up in an older suburb and our lot adjoined a twenty-acre wooded tract owned by the City of Cleveland. We remembered the elms that shaded our backyard before Dutch elm disease killed them in the late fifties. Ken and I recalled the plum tree that grew behind the house, the bees and wasps attracted to the fallen fruit, and the copse of ash trees behind the neighbors’ garage where each summer I captured cecropia moths. We remembered where the plot of poplars ended and the locust trees took over. And the tulip trees, with the straightest of trunks and no low branches, and the red oak where I captured mourning cloak butterflies, and the aromatic sassafras saplings. This is the botanical map we carried around in our heads.

 

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.”

 

One of my favorite lines in all of T.S. Eliot’s work is found in “Burnt Norton,” the first section of Four Quartets. Eliot’s context is spiritual but I’m reminded of childhood, when ascending tress was an integral feature of our summers:

 

“Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.”