Book revels in history of trees
If you love trees and you love history, you’ll be fascinated with “Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape” (Penguin Books, 2016), written by Jill Jonnes.
The book has some sad tales, like the 1904 discovery in New York City of chestnut blight. Spores of this deadly fungus disease drifted on the wind, eventually wiping out American chestnuts, considered at the time by foresters to be the most valuable tree in the nation. And then, in 1933, came Dutch elm disease, fatal to the majestic American elms that once dominated our cities. It was another fungus disease, but this time the spores were spread not by wind but by hitchhiking on small bark beetles.
But don’t think that this book is all doom and gloom. There’s a happy ending for Eliza Scidmore, who fell in love with Japanese cherry trees in Japan and then lobbied for a quarter of a century to get masses of them planted in our nation’s capital. After twists and turns, including the destruction of an initial shipment of 2,000 trees deemed to be infested with insects and infected with disease, a replacement shipment in 1912 provided 3,000 ornamental cherries to create the now-famous annual flower show in Washington, D.C.
One of the strangest stories concerns ailanthus, the ubiquitous tree of heaven. It seems that, before the invention of window screens, the ladies of uptown New York were unhappy about caterpillars and insect swarms blowing into their homes from various shade trees. But the tree of heaven, an import from China, seemed not to host insects of any kind. Consequently, horse chestnuts, lindens and other stately trees were chopped down and replaced with ailanthus.
Although a weedy tree scorned today by almost everyone, the tree of heaven remains the most persistent tree introduction of all time.
I was surprised to read there had been a dispute over who actually started Arbor Day. J. Sterling Morton is widely credited, but Cincinnati superintendent John Bradley Peaslee reinvented it involving schoolchildren and claimed it as his own. Nebraskans, Jonnes writes, were not pleased.
Joyce Kilmer published “Trees” in 1913. You know that poem: “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” It’s considered the most cherished and recognized of all American poems. Kilmer left his job at The New York Times Magazine to enlist in the infantry and was killed by a sniper in 1918. After his death, The Times included “Trees” in an article titled “Urge Memorial Trees.”
The book’s introduction quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.”
Write Jan Riggenbach at 2319 S. 105th Ave., Omaha, NE 68124. Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you’d like a personal reply, or visit midwest gardening.com.