Thursday, May 21, 2009

Tanya Writes About The Elvis Presley Sweet Gum...and others


Howdy. I hope you made it to my blog on hangin' trees at Petticoats and Pistols yesterday. We all had great fun, and the pix are gorgeous. Too bad it's such a sucky subject.

With everybody responding on trees, I just found it adorably coincidental when the morning paper yesterday featured Pack 3663's Wolf Den 5 of Simi Valley, California. To fulfill the requirements to earn the World Conservation Award, the guys planted trees honoring famous people and events that are figureheads of American history and culture.

Andrew Jackson Southern Magnolia
Dwight D. Eisenhower Green Ash
Clara Barton Redbud
Gettysburg Address Honey Locust (top photo)
an Elvis Presley Sweetgum
(bottom photo)

It gladdened my heart. I'm kind of a tree-hugger anyway. When friends knocked down half a dozen mature trees to build a new house (had they placed the house differently, the trees could have lived), I felt grief. Dang, trees are our friends. Sentinels against bad weather. Homes for birds...they produce the air we breathe, give us shade and fruit.


My heart still beaks upon seeing old photographs of Lake Tahoe's gorgeous forests stripped bear to provide timber to support the Comstock mines, and giant Sequoias (couple thousand years old) cut down by 19th century lumberjacks just so a single slice could be displayed back east still breaks my heart.

What's with that? Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

And when my hero and I visited Walden Pond, we learned most of the trees had been cut down mid-19th century to provide fuel for the steam train whose tracks border the pond. Henry David must have wept.

Anyway, the Boy Scouts have it right. Go plant a tree!

2 comments:

Lauri said...

Great post! We plant trees every year!

Tanya Hanson said...

Yay, Lori. We're running out of room here at the homestead...oops, make that a surburban back yard, but I'd like to see more trees planted throughout my neighborhood. Gotta hit up the neighborhood council.

Thanks for coming yb.