Festival of the Trees #24: I and the Tree

Welcome to the second anniversary edition of Festival of the Trees. As you know, this monthly blog carnival is a celebration of all things arboreal. Congratulations to Dave and Pablo for starting and nurturing FOTT through its first two years, and hopefully many more. Happy anniversary, guys!

“Done properly tree planting is a hope filled expression of love for nature,” Vinayaraj writes in the post Planting Trees is the Easy Part. Indeed, this post echoes the folk wisdom that we plant not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, just as we enjoy the trees planted by our ancestors. No excuses — step-by-step instruction on how to Plant a Tree Today awaits.

But just planting a tree is not enough. Trees once planted must be nurtured and protected, sometimes even from ourselves as Vicki writes in Steve Sillett’s Secrecy and the Virginia Round Leaf Birch.

Even in the absence of intentional malice, we need to take care. “Here and there, through luck or resilience, an old chestnut has escaped the blight …” writes Julie in Faith in a Chestnut Seed. In this case, we’re warned that we need to guard against our carelessness and the unforeseen consequences of our actions rather than malice. The survival of the trees we love should not depend on luck alone.

If you aren’t a tree-hugger, you still would be well served to heed Dave’s words on interdependence and the consequences of celebrating ignorance in Trees of Life. “… as the Garden of Eden myth suggests, we know just enough to be dangerous, rarely enough to be wise.”

If you need a concrete example, read Mangrove Destruction Magnified Burmese Tragedy at Living the Scientific Life.

Fortunately for us, trees are resilient, as these photos of recovery after Hurricane Ivan illustrate.

But they don’t live forever, and thus we have snags like this one at RoundRock to enrich our environment

We’re lucky to have our trees, and in our blogs we relate to them as well as relate stories about them and how they enrich our lives.

Rock Paper Lizard celebrates the Dawn Redwood as does this post at Earth Wind and Water. Although they are blogging about the same type of tree the posts are complementary and you’ll learn from reading both of them, as I did.

osage + orange shows the value of silver maples, an underappreciated species.

Seeded earth shares the Greening of the Hardwoods with words and photos celebrating a natural area of trees and other plants.

WindyWillow reacts to Hawthorne Heaven as she returns home from a visit.

Wanderin’ Weeta exercises her ever-present inquiring mind around two different trees in Picnic Crumbs.

We also share our relationship with trees through pictures such as The Lacy Green of New at Bitterroot and Bergamot and The Face of a Coyote at Romancing the Desert.

Judith celebrates trees through her black-and-white photos and an open invitation to contribute stories to her collaborative art project.

And speaking of contributions, thanks to all who submitted posts for this edition of Festival of the Trees. Continue your contributions next month, when Earth, Wind, & Water hosts Festival of the Trees #25. Send your posts by June 27 to p.taihaku [at] googlemail [dot] com or use the handy online submission form.