Over the past weekend we spent an exhilarating (and for me enervating) day up at our son’s fabulous rural retreat at Kingwood in Hunterdon County. As the place name suggest, this stretch of land on the east bank of the Delaware River was once a royal forest and its first growth timber must have been magnificent. Rich and Katie, in addition to being generous and imaginative hosts, are serious environmentalists, dealing heroically with a large wooded property, the forestry aspects of which had been long neglected when they acquired the property. They are trying slowly to clear out some of the more troublesome invasive wood and also (unfortunately) the hulks of dead ash trees, formerly prolific but now pretty well annihilated by the recent blight of the emerald ash borer. Like Covid itself, the ash borer is another probable but unmentionable import from China.
The first photograph, which shows a finished piece of my handiwork along with the shadow of a friend, is hardly self-explanatory; but it is very meaningful to me and may be at least a little to you as well when I explain it. One of the easiest and most effective ways of conservative forest management is the thoughtful and well prepared planting of select native seedlings in the early spring. One of our great national public benefactors, the National Arbor Foundation, fosters this practice by each year distributing at nominal charge, hundreds of thousands of seedlings, indeed probably millions, of desirable species. Numerous other organizations also distribute seedlings. Rich tried to give me a simple task that I could probably accomplish even from a sedentary posture. It was one at which I was reasonably practiced after the experience of previous years: the construction of protective sturdy wire cages for the vulnerable seedlings. The statistical chances of any particular seedling growing to mature plant on the forest floor are very slight. A hungry deer could, and if given the opportunity would more or less effortlessly, suck up in five minutes as many as a man could plant in a day. Nature has a few strategies, the most obvious of which is a vast overproduction of seeds. Search around the base of a big walnut tree in the woods. You can easily find a thousand walnut carcasses, and encounter some happy squirrels, but only most rarely will you see a thriving young walnut sprout. I can remember seeing only one. The sometimes horrifying cruelty of nature captured in the words of Darwin and Tennyson (“survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw”) are realities. The survival rate even of seedlings protected by my stout wire cages would be considered disastrous in our human population. But the human populations determine to a very large extent the forest ecology.
The top photograph is of a planted pine sapling defended in its wire cage. The circular cage is is four feet tall and about a yard in diameter. The name on the red tape is that of my mother, Rich’s paternal grandmother, Janet (Davidson) Fleming, who was born in Salida, Colorado in 1909, and died in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1979. She spent most of her life in rural western and southern places, and she had what most people might regard as a pretty hard life. She was a complicated lady who raised three very different sons under often difficult circumstances. It has taken many years of mature reflection on my part to realize in full the nobility of her character. The tree planted, a cadet member of an ever-changing natural forest, will be an arboreal memorial to her. I shall hope to supply a slightly more durable memorial—her name shallowly etched on a piece of soft native slate found on the forest floor--at a later date. We also planted trees that will memorialize my father and our dear English friend, so recently departed, Andrew Seth. This seems to me a beautiful initiative: living memorials in a living forest binding the living with the dead.
I am especially pleased that it is a pine sapling. I don’t expect anybody to read any particular blog post, let alone remember what they might have found there. But last Christmas I published a family story about my mother and a small pine tree (“Father, Son, and Uncle,” December 20, 2023). So this post is as it were the second panel of a fortuitous diptych.
A very great deal of what happens in our vegetative world begins with human beings. The development of agriculture is universally recognized as a definitive one in the history of the human species. The word agriculture literally means the artisanal management of natural topography and botanical states for the production of foodstuffs for human and animal consumption. So what we now often call “natural” or more absurdly “organic,” actually refers to the conscious human direction or management of botanical growth.
The human management of the vegetable world has by now a very long and fascinating history, and a controversial one. The wisdom of, indeed the necessity for what we now generally call “conservation” has been recognized if too often ignored throughout recorded human history. The human struggle for dominance over field and forest is ancient and continuing. In many places in Europe the battle for human cultivation and nature’s resistance to it is everywhere painted on the landscape. Aerial photographs of what at ground level appears to be virgin meadowland often reveal patterns of a nearly invisible tillage of several centuries past. Even in our own comparatively shiny new country, in which serious population centers date from no more than two hundred and fifty years ago one often encounters signs of dramatic population shifts. It seems to me pretty clear that my own native haunts in the rural Ozarks had a considerable population in the year 1900 that had almost wholly vanished by the time I came around. I spent many summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English, under the auspices of Middlebury College. More than once I found cutting through what seemed to be dense forests long, straight stone walls set up as property markers and made from hundreds of tons of fieldstone removed by hand or horse-drawn sled from once cleared and cultivated land. One wall I came upon somewhere near Ripton, invisible until I came right upon it, had been elegantly constructed with the care one might expect from a mason in Tuscany.
I described the task I was assigned as “simple,” but that does not mean that the work involved was easy for me. It doesn’t take much to tire me these days, and wrestling with heavy gauge wire fencing was rather exhausting. These days it’s hard for me to be sure whether it is the amyloid or the anni domini that is the bigger foe, but working in tandem as they do they can exhaust me pretty quickly. I have to pace myself. Joan drove us home in the late afternoon. I fell into bed around 7:30. Five hours of sleep a night I regard as the basic minimum. Six hours is adequate. Seven in usually my maximum. That night I slept, with but a single necessary but barely sentient trip to the bathroom, until 7am!
