For love of trees

 And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

Virginia Woolf

Ever since I was a child, trees have been a source of wonder and awe for me.  My earliest memories are of the hackberry trees in back of our house in New Orleans in the late 50’s.  We kids would climb them and build things in them and marvel at the rough protuberances on their bark.  When a powerful hurricane brushed the coast in 1957, strong winds sent those tall, beloved trees swaying in great undulating waves.  I’ll never forget it.

New Orleans is full of live oaks, and where I spent my teenage years, the streets were full of them.  They are great and dignified trees, and they are abundant where I live now as well.  I photograph them often.  They are one of Nature’s greatest works of art.  Their great overhanging branches, massive, gnarled trunks, abundance of acorns, and the fact that they keep their leaves all year, shedding them in a brief time of transformation each March and early April — all these things remind me of the trees I love best of all.

When I traveled out West in the 1980s, I loved to see the noble cottonwood trees along desert streams and rivers, creating green ribbons of life in those parched landscapes.  What an amazing sight.

When we would travel to South Carolina from southern Louisiana for our vacation trips twice a year, the landscape was dominated by pine trees, and so I always associated those trees with the good and carefree times spent on vacation.

In Washington State, I first saw the giant hemlocks, spruce and Douglas firs in the ancient forests of Mt. Rainier National Park and in the Hoh River Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula, and my love of trees only grew stronger.  It’s been almost 30 years since I first beheld those spectacular forests.

Not too many weeks ago, I was awed once again to be among the giant and ancient trees of Congaree Swamp in Congaree National Park in South Carolina.  I stretched my neck as far as I could to look up into the highest branches of the tulip, sweet gum, chestnut oaks and hickories.  

Finally, there is never a time for as much reverence of Nature as when I am in the still depths of Four Holes Swamp, looking up to the sky — ten stories up — to the tops of never-cut 1,000-year-old bald cypresses in that cathedral-like wilderness where the purest silence reigns.  It’s a world apart from Charleston and even from the surrounding quiet farming countryside.

Trees to me are living, breathing things.  It pains me to see them cut down, yet I know we have for eons depended on t hem for so many of our needs.

One of the great ecological crimes of the past century and a half is that we have ravaged and leveled an entire nation of virgin forest and wilderness in the rush of progress and urban expansion yet we left so little undisturbed forest for future generations to enjoy and appreciate in parks and preserves.  That is why the tall trees of Congaree Swamp and Beidler Forest in Four Holes Swamp, are such precious remnants of a landscape our ancestors knew but which is now all but gone.

I love trees.  Woodlands and forests are domains of the spirit for me.  Thee is no place on earth where I feel such peace.

Here is a set of photos of trees that I love and am grateful to see preserved in parks and garden sanctuaries, as well as other trees that are emblems of Charleston and the state of South Carolina.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/camas/sets/72157629914155944/