Some Trees Are for Climbing

I'm very proud to live in a city and to be surrounded by other cities that put so much emphasis on the preservation and planting of trees.  This emphasis has added up to beautiful streets, storefronts, yards; cleaner air, wildlife habitat.  I daresay, we might be the model of urban forestry.  But lest we begin to think of trees as tree ordinance requiring sticks that must be assembled in so many numbers with certain diameters or else there will be consequences, let me state my own personal interest in and love for the tree, in other words.  

Some Trees Need to be Climbed 

We need more climbing trees.  My neighbor has two Bradford pears in the front yard that serve as extraordinary play places for his girls and lots of neighbor kids.  They climb and sit and pretend.  Sometimes they sing.  I can’t help but to be mesmerized by their innocence and creativity.  

I climbed lots of trees as a kid.  I guess the world was a little different in the late 1960’s  because I just climbed whatever tree looked climb-able even if it was in someone else's yard.  The maple trees were especially irresistible.  They had the right placement of the branches.  The oak trees in our own yard took a little more acrobatic maneuvering, but I got high enough that I was level with the 2nd floor bedroom windows of my house.   

I never fell out of a tree.  I guess I had a good sense of my center of gravity and I was strong – probably from climbing all those trees.  A friend of mine fell out of a tree and broke her arm.  It can happen.  Life has risks. 

Some Trees Need to be Taken Down 

Every 15 to 20 years my husband’s family has a logging company come onto their land with big machines that take trees down.  Trees are a crop for my husband's family; a renewable resource that they plant, and when the time is right, harvest, to be made into pulp and plywood.  People like you and me enjoy the fruit of these forest farmers in our everyday lives by writing on paper, putting things in boxes, pouring milk out of cartons, blowing noses into tissues and being domiciled within wooden posts, boards, and beams.   Forest farmers, like my husband’s family, are also sequesterers of carbon, or rather, their trees are.  Actively growing trees sequester CO2 efficiently, unlike aging trees or trees in decline.  But trees do more than sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, they grow, indeed, exist, because of carbon dioxide which is necessary for all life, as the photosynthetic process cannot take place without it.  Remember your science class? Carbon dioxide plus water -in the presence of light- produces glucose and oxygen.  That is the basic formula for photosynthesis.  In other words, plants make their own food, and then plants become our food.  Without carbon dioxide we would have no food. 

Some Trees Give Us Ingredients for Pies  

This past November, a friend, David Cox, and my 80-year-old father, Giles Hollingsworth, two crazy-for-pecan hunter gatherers, got together and collected all the pecans they could find, both from pecan trees at public parks to pecan trees on private property.  And yes, they asked permission before venturing onto private grounds.  Inexplicably, several homeowners actually asked David and my father to “sell them some” once they’d gathered them.  “We can’t sell you what you already own!” was their retort, and they gave them a portion of the gathering.  Their efforts were particularly noteworthy this year as we’ve all been eating them, plain or in pies, and sharing them with friends.   David filled about 50-75 sandwich baggies with pecans and donated them to North Fulton Community Charities.  Interestingly, if you look at the nutritional profile of pecans here, that may be the single most nutritious donation made to NFCC this year.   

What the world needs now is more pecan trees.