As I walk the walnuts - 8

As I walk the walnuts and look at each tree, it is like a snapshot. Snapshots, by definition, are images captured at an instant in time, and tend to reflect something that we were doing at that given moment. Yet an image of a tree is misleading. It is certainly a snapshot of the tree at that given moment, but the tree is the ultimate interpolator, the summer-up of expression over its lifetime, the presenter of the all-gone-before. A tree, then, while in the present, is all of the past, as interpreted by its individual genome in that unique environment.

I say this because a tree is a prisoner of its roadmap for fixing and depositing carbon, and, once started, it cannot deviate from this roadmap. Oh, the roadmap may be altered for it – spring frost effects on bud growth, branch removal by pruning - but a black walnut always looks like a black walnut, no matter its shape, and will always yield nuts, not acorns.

With time I am less involved with the form my trees take. I matched their early growth with my own energy, interfering according to my criteria at the time, but now am content to let the trees fill their space however they will, their response to that interference an acknowledgement of my then-presence on the landscape, an element of biodiversity as ephemeral perhaps as the guarantee that the snow buntings will return every year. Nothing is guaranteed, not even that the energy to interfere goes undiminished, but I prefer to think that I just understand myself better now, and that however the trees fill that space is the way it should be.