Toronto’s wealth grows on trees

“ Once there was a tree . . . and she loved a little boy.” — The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein, 1964.

Frankly, I haven’t been feeling all that well- disposed toward trees these last few days, though normally I fancy them no end.

In fact, I planted one at my father- inlaw’s farm for each of my children — a project that had the potential, life unfolding as it did, for a smallish forest. As toddlers, the boys would run to stroke and hug their trees on arrivals and departures. They’d delight in the buds of spring, lament the leaf shower of fall, press leaves between the pages of their storybooks. Over the years, they’ve measured their own growth against those trees. Besides their other virtues, those trees are anchors in young lives, ever- changing constants. Though, of course, I’m hardly the first to say so.

In the Helen Humphreys novel The Lost Garden, the protagonist tells her partner while preparing a hole for planting that “ ‘ I don’t think a tree can give meaning to your life,’ I say. . . . But I am wrong about this. I will be proved wrong by this very magnolia tree that we are planting.”

Like any affair of the heart, my relationship with trees has its ups and downs. And lately, things have been a bit rocky. A branch shed by the big, old maple across the road during last weekend’s windstorm remodelled the car hood of a visitor unfortunate enough to be parked below. The city promised months ago to trim the silver maple on my own lawn, but I’ve yet to see a work crew. And the roots of the thing are doing their periodic mischief again to the pipes below — with the usual ghastly consequences for the basement drains.

So, truth be told, I was a bit down on trees. Until the Toronto Tree Portraits calendar for 2006 arrived the other day. Now, all is forgiven.

( Though I do reserve the right to vent a bit on receipt of the drainage guy’s bill.) With black- and-white photos by Geoffrey James and text by landscapedesign historian Pleasance Crawford, the calendar celebrates the gnarled and ancient beauty of Toronto’s urban forest.

“ Our message in the tree calendar is the importance of understanding the consequences — both environmental and aesthetic — of not replacing the century- old trees that give so many Toronto neighbourhoods their distinctively green character and their sense of identity,” says Leslie Coates, executive director of the Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation, a charitable body established in 2002 in response to growing concern about the state of parks and trees in the city. The city says more than three million publicly owned trees flourish in ravines, along boulevards and in parks, while millions more grow on private property.

For visitors who tarry longer than a quick tour downtown, their impression of Toronto as a green and livable place is often built on those trees. Through generations, visitors and locals alike, old and young, rich and poor, have taken respite in their shade and delight in their beauty.

In the calendar are scenes of Cherry Beach, High Park, Allan Gardens, the Don Valley. Cottonwood, black locust, white willow, red elm. Winter, spring, summer, fall. The seasons, the city, its abundance.

In a foreword, author Margaret Atwood says that “ the urban forest is always growing, but also it is always dying, and we must continue to replace it. Trees cut heat, and cooling costs and pollution. We don’t realize how much we take Toronto’s trees for granted until we visit a treeless city. As the old proverb from India has it, ‘ Forests precede civilization; deserts follow it.’ ”

In the glory and utility of our urban forest, we’re lucky, says Atwood. But luck is part labour. “ We must work to keep our trees.”

It’s not for nothing that faith and folklore are founded on things like the Tree of Knowledge or the Tree of Life, or that we track our own place in the world through “ family trees.” Time and again, novelists have taken note of trees and their gifts.

In her classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith wrote of “ the one tree in Francie’s yard” in the city tenements. They called it the Tree of Heaven. “ That was the kind of tree it was. It

liked poor people.”

“ We think of weather as transient,

changeable, and above all, ephemeral,” Ann Michaels says in Fugitive

Pieces.

“But everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather — storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”

Planting a tree is a gesture of faith in the future, says someone in the calendar.

Inheriting mature trees is a legacy beyond price. The calendar costs $ 15 and is available by calling the Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation (www.torontoparksandtrees. org) at 416- 397- 5178.

It looks as if it would fit rather splendidly in a Christmas stocking — or maybe make the perfect seasonal gift for teachers, the better to enrich a classroom. Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.