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Plant Life By Valerie Easton
Deep Into The GreenFrom our towering trees, we gather strength and find solace
IN THE GREAT Pacific Northwest, we're surrounded by the giants of the plant world. Perhaps firs, cedars and spruces are the true indigenous architecture here in our corner of the country, setting the scale for all we've built beneath and around them. Yet how much attention do we really pay these evergreen wonders? It's a commonplace among gardeners that the older we get, the more we adore trees. Annual flowers first catch our attention. We progress to perennials, move on to shrubs, and then at last, look up into the trees. Perhaps we need a certain maturity to appreciate the patient, stately dignity of evergreens, their stoicism in the face of so much human travail. Their deep, needled green and coarse bark seem to absorb and muffle petty human strife, and soften at least some of the world's roughest edges. The largest, tallest, thickest and oldest living things in the world are all conifers. A great basin bristlecone pine tree, the oldest on the planet, was standing right where it is today, some 4,700 years ago when the last mammoth died away. Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) grows tallest of all trees, topping out at 370 feet, more than half the height of the Space Needle. While native to Northern California, sequoias thrive in our climate. The tallest around here, a living tower at 146 feet, thrives in Lincoln Park. It pleases me to know that conifers stand there so seemingly self-sufficient in their strength and silence. Yet they're wildly alive with birds and bugs, the rush of wind and rain, the flashes of sunlight they soak up and reflect back. To heal their wounds they ooze a fragrant resin that fossilizes into coveted amber, the stuff of jewelry-making. The wind is their agent of pollination. The cones we use for decorations are the plant's sexual parts, grown and then dropped to perpetuate their race. Trees' roots soak up rain, interacting with the soil and its microbes, while their branches offer food, housing and shelter for so many creatures. When we duck beneath them in a rainstorm, we've become part of the great web of life conifers coddle along every day. Look them up • Schmitz Preserve Park (5551 S.W. Admiral Way, in West Seattle). Here you'll find an impressive remnant of old-growth forest. • Saint Edwards State Park (north end of Lake Washington, in Kenmore). A beautiful hike down through the trees leads to the last undeveloped waterfront along the lake. • Discovery Park (3801 W. Government Way, Seattle). This rambling space has a wildness about it unmatched elsewhere in the city. In winter when our landscapes are by and large bare except for this stately coniferous presence, we can most vividly sense the spirit inherent in their bark, needles and drooping branches. Maybe the Native Americans, who worshipped the trees, were on to something. Think how these trees have born witness to all that has gone on for hundreds of years. Perhaps by channeling the ageless perspective of a conifer we can soak up a bit of their magic. This calm, quiet magic is invoked in a passage from Edith Hamilton's "Mythology": "The real interest of the myths is that they lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel. When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal." In these giant trees, we see a glimmer of enchantment and catch a glimpse of a long-lost connection to nature most welcome in this, the bleakest time of year. Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.
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