TY - JOUR
AU - Arthur, Chris
AB - I. I’m often struck by how little it takes to set off a chain of associations in the mind. The smallest stimulus will do. So long as it’s shaped and weighted to just the right degree, it can trigger a response whose scale completely dwarfs it. I’m sure there’s an intricate array of biochemical processes in our brains that accounts for the way in which these large-scale concatenations are set off by the tiniest of prompts. But I find it hard to imagine beyond the haziest abstraction the elegant interlocking of cells and the microscopic transactions they broker; the chemical messages passed between them and the firing of nerve synapses as the mind’s currents spark and flow. The invisible complexities that sustain us don’t easily lend themselves to metaphor-making—our fundamental technique for bringing the world to heel and picturing it into sense. As George Steiner puts it in Real Presences (1989), metaphors offer “new mappings of the world;” they lay down paths that we can follow in “our habitation of reality,” making that habitation seem something familiar and intelligible. For all that they explain to us, the unseen processes within are poor sources of imagery for the metaphorical cartography that helps us feel at home. The way I’ve come to think of these periodic floodings of the mind—how it can be filled in an instant with a burgeoning network of connections—is to see the dam walls of consciousness as only just managing to contain what lies behind them. Reservoired in the invisible honeycomb that walls the psyche are huge volumes of life-water, categorized, corralled, confined—but always ready to escape. All it takes is that key last-straw to break the back of restraint, to unlock a cell door, or to make permeable for a moment previously impassable walls, so that a deluge can pour out and cascade through the mind, causing one thought to lead to another. Despite their scale, we are not swept away by such occurrences, and any sense of flooding they may cause is only temporary. Nor are our memories emptied of the loads of life-water that they carry, however much pours out. As such, instead of thinking in terms of escape from imprisonment, perhaps it would be more accurate to picture our consciousness as being swept by tides that are governed by the countless moons of circumstance with which we are surrounded. The ebb and flow of these inner tides depends on the complex gravity exerted by things, people, and events as they wheel in their tangled orbits around us. The leaf that blew into the driveway of my house one October morning might seem an unlikely source of gravity—indeed an unlikely candidate for anything much, except whatever small-scale signaling of autumn it might manage. In fact, it exerted a powerful tidal pull. Or, to return to the picture of imprisonment in a honeycomb of cells, it was precisely one of those key last-straws, possessed of far more back-breaking, unlocking, making-permeable potential than its ordinariness suggested. I recognized the leaf’s shape at once and picked it up. As I did so, a welter of memories, associations, and ideas came flooding into mind. It seems incredible that such a tidal surge could have been summoned by so small a thing. But I can see no other obvious cause for it. This single fallen leaf, for all its seeming insignificance and fragility, somehow embodied in its shape and color, in its weight and texture, precisely the right launch codes to fire the sequence of associations that were set off in my mind the moment I found it. II. Instantly identifiable because of its unique shape, the leaf was from a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). Sometimes tulip tree leaves are described as being “saddle-shaped,” or looking as though their tips have been cutoff with shears, or as having “four lobes and a flattened top.” But such passive descriptions don’t convey much unless you already have a picture of the leaf in mind. If you don’t, it’s more effective to perform a small imaginative exercise. Think of a semicircle, its rounded side facing down. Then, on top of it, as if it was the start of a child’s drawing of a boat, place a thick funnel, set dead center—amidships. Now push the funnel down so that the straight line across the supporting deck of the semicircle is depressed in the middle, thus slightly raising either side and consequently emphasizing the points at bow and stern. Next, push down on the funnel’s flat top so that it becomes dented into a v-shape. Of course there are variations from tree to tree in terms of the funnel’s height and width, the extent to which the points are uplifted, the overall size of each vessel and so on, but here essentially you have it (once a stem is added to the curved base): a tulip tree leaf’s odd four-pointed form. No other tree has leaves that fit this outline. It’s a foolproof way to recognize the species. Liriodendron tulipifera is not a native tree in Britain, nor is it common here. It grows to a considerable height, so it’s not often found in people’s gardens. If the leaf that had blown into my driveway had been from an oak or beech or birch—or any of the other common tree species—it’s unlikely it would have caught my eye. But for me, L. tulipifera is something exotic, only occasionally met with—added to which I happen to find it a particularly beautiful tree. It’s not surprising, then, that I’m predisposed to notice it. The impact exerted by this single leaf, in terms of setting off a chain of associations in my mind, no doubt came about in part because of my liking for this species, and in part because my encounters with it have been few enough to make it seem feasible to remember most or all of them. Prompted by the leaf, it was as if all those encounters fell into line, forming a kind of contour of recognition that marked out a gentle gradient of remembrance that was easy to follow. A similar mapping of, say, birch, would have been quite different. My meetings with this commonest of trees have been so numerous over the years that they would soon generate a tangle of contours. It would be difficult to map a way through their dense complexity; easy to feel lost amidst the whorls and blizzards of all the multitude of birch lines. Quite apart from the fact that birch flourished in the hedgerows and woods in the Country Antrim countryside of my childhood, we often climbed a large silver birch that grew in our back garden, sometimes made tree houses in it, cut its branches to make spears and bows. To me, birch is so utterly familiar as to be hard to notice; it wears the camouflage of the known. This exotic fallen leaf, blown into my driveway—the only one of its kind in the vicinity—acted like a kind of tuning fork. As soon as it sounded its characteristic tone, a cluster of voices answered, singing out in the same key reminders of their presence and strengthening the sense of a Liriodendron note resonating through me. Here’s an example of a truth that’s easily forgotten, brushed under the carpet of our attention because of its very omnipresence: for all that we live together, sharing countless commonalities, for all that we successfully communicate with one another using the same vocabulary with its agreed range of meanings, we yet read the world in profoundly different ways, even when it comes to so small and apparently simple a thing as a leaf. I know that most people passing by my driveway that morning would have paid it no attention. For them, the leaf-song that I heard would have been inaudible. Anonymous participation in the crowd scene of autumn, a whispered contribution to its background rustle, would have been the only sound they might have credited to this single leaf. And even if it had stopped others in their tracks as it stopped me in mine, the leaf would have triggered in them a different cascade of associations, set in a different key, tuned to melodies I wouldn’t recognize. In one sense, yes, of course, a leaf is just a leaf. But in another, it possesses numerous facets of possible implication and interpretation. It has the potential to call up quite different catalogues of encounter, to spark an enormous variety of ideas and set free in the psyche an unpredictable diversity of images. It speaks to those who hear it in the argot of their individual experience, calling up the secrets of those specifics that unfold into—and that constitute—our different lives. Like almost everything, the leaf can tap into different strata of seeing. It can be read on the surface, according to the lexicon of the straightforward—those bold block capitals that brook no ambiguity and dismiss any syntax of subtle complexities as unnecessary complication. Or, we can delve deeper and read in a way that calls up far more finely textured scripts. On the one hand, the leaf is just a tiny pennant of autumn, insignificant in itself, its individual livery scarcely noticed—just one among billions of bits of fallen leaf bunting that form en masse a routine semaphore of the seasons’ turning. On the other hand, it’s a kind of unique heraldic flag laden with mysterious insignia that are heavy with the weight of meaning coded into them—a weight whose tonnage is disguised by the featherweight which is all that’s evident when it’s held balanced on the palm. III. Finding the fallen leaf prompted me to make a kind of rapid inventory, ticking off on the register of remembrance the instances that, together, define my relationship with tulip trees. But although they form the bedrock on which my sense of L. tulipifera is founded, these memories are, I think, the least interesting part of the story—so I’ll simply mention them quickly before passing on to what they point to. The first tulip trees I’m aware of seeing were in Ireland, in the grounds of Ashford Castle, near the village of Cong in County Mayo. I didn’t know then what they were, but was immediately struck by their beauty. They lined both sides of a wide graveled path within sight of Lough Corrib, the massive lake (the second largest in the country) beside which the Castle stands. I was sufficiently taken with them to make a point, on my return from County Mayo, of consulting a book of trees to try to put a name to what I’d seen. The task of identification was made straightforward by matching the oddly shaped leaf against a series of silhouetted leaf outlines given in a key. Three or four years after seeing the Ashford Castle trees, my wife and I were in a very different part of Ireland, visiting my mother in County Antrim. One afternoon we walked to a garden center near where she lived in Lisburn and found a small L. tulipifera for sale. My mother bought it for us as a gift and we took it back to where we were living in Wales. The tree was small enough to sit on the floor behind the driver’s seat of our modest hatchback. Its uppermost shoot only came to within six inches of the car’s roof and none of the branches stretched out far enough to need bending in order to fit in. I can’t remember now which of the ferries we traveled back on. Mostly we used the short Larne-to-Cairnryan crossing and then drove south to Wales through Scotland and England. But occasionally we drove to Dublin and took the longer sea-crossing from there direct to Holyhead in Wales. Whichever route we followed, when I think of the tulip tree in transit on the Irish Sea, it makes the ferry seem like a kind of giant pod and us its accomplices in a complex system of seed dispersal. We were particularly pleased to be able to plant a tulip tree in our garden in Lampeter, a small town in rural West Wales that had grown up around St David’s University College, the institution where higher education had begun in Wales in 1822, and where I worked as a lecturer for many years. Shortly after moving there, we were reminded of how lovely tulip trees are when we discovered the beautiful one that grows just outside the College library. It was the only one for miles around. Indeed in all the time we spent in Wales, I don’t remember seeing another in the area. It felt good, given this rarity, to be able to nurture a second specimen of our own. Our tulip tree flourished and soon became a striking feature in our garden, a familiar barometer of the seasons and a kind of slow chronometer of our lives. Every spring we delighted in the gradual unfurling of its new green leaves and watched as their fresh succulence darkened and toughened as summer progressed until, come September, the foliage started to display its warm autumnal palette of yellows, golds, and browns. When we planted it we had no children. By the time we left Wales, the tree was thirty feet high and had borne on its branches the weight of our two daughters and their friends. They climbed it, made tree houses in it, and built dens on the ground beneath it, cool in the shade it offered against the August sun. One of the sadnesses of moving house is that you can’t take a garden with you. Leaving the one we’d created in Wales was far more of a wrench than leaving our house there. We took cuttings from many of our favorite plants when we relocated to Scotland in 2010. But the climate so much further north was testing, and the soil conditions were very different, so few of them survived. With the tulip tree in any case, though we were extremely fond of it, we made no attempt to propagate a new sapling. We doubted the wisdom of trying to grow so large a tree in our new, relatively small garden. As a memento, one sunny afternoon just before we left, I photographed our tulip tree in its early autumnal splendor. I deliberately zoomed in close enough so that the shot showed only a medley of green leaves streaked and patched to give a beautiful dappling of glinting yellows daubed with gold and brown. Using this image as a screensaver on my computer has meant having a daily reminder of the tree we felt we’d abandoned. I’ve often wondered since if it’s still there, or if the new owners of the property decided it shaded the garden too much and had it felled. If it’s left to flourish, it would be interesting to go back in ten or twenty years and see what size it is. There are reports of Liriodendrons reaching close to 200 feet in their native American woodlands, though 70–100 feet is commoner. It’s incredible how much can be stored in a tiny seed—as it is to think that we once transported in our car, as a potted sapling, what became so grand a tree. IV. Finding an unexpected tulip tree leaf lying windblown in the driveway of my house in Scotland, inevitably made me think of the trees at Ashford Castle, the tree outside the College library in Lampeter, and the one that we’d transported across the sea from Ireland to our garden in Wales. But such obvious memories, sewn into the weave of personal encounter, didn’t just present straightforward pictures of a handful of trees standing in solitude, isolated from other aspects of experience. Instead they came laden with images of the people, feelings, places, and events that I associated with them—as if the Liriodendron’s branches were encrusted with a densely woven overlay, the coral of my personal circumstances. As well as prompting such textured recall, the leaf also reminded me of what I knew about the species—a smattering of information gleaned along the way as my liking for the tree led me first to identify and then to find out more about it. Liriodendron tulipifera, the scientific name it bears—its Linnaean niche of classification—is mostly a misnomer. It combines the Greek terms for lily (leirion) and tree (dendron). Tulipifera means “tulip-bearing.” “Dendron” is the only part of the name that has any claim to accuracy. In fact for me, it is particularly apposite given its connection to “dendrite.” Dendrites are the tree-like branchings of nerve cells along which synaptic impulses travel. My found leaf clearly touched, or acted as, a nerve, sending a multitude of impulses racing down the veined network of mosaic interconnections in which it was set. I’m not sure why the lily association was first forged, since the tree is neither related to lilies nor similar to them in appearance. Perhaps the flowers seemed lily-like to some long-forgotten observer not much given to botanical accuracy. Or perhaps they weren’t looking at the blooms in situ on the tree. As Edward Step points out in his classic field guide, Wayside and Woodland Trees (1940), tulip tree flowers “when picked and placed in flat bowls resemble small water lilies” (2). It’s also possible that the creamy whiteness of the wood brought to mind a lily’s paleness, or the fragrant sap struck someone as reminiscent of a lily’s perfume. It could even be that the majestic stature of the full-grown tree, coupled with its undoubted elegance, suggested something regal—so lily was reached for as an emblem of Hera, queen of the Greek pantheon. There are all kinds of currents moving beneath the surface of the names we give things. Some are easily charted; we can see immediately what they stem from, where they take us. But with others it’s uncertain what resonance our use of them awakens, what histories and tonalities of reference our utterances are keying into. The tulip component of the tree’s name has a better claim to plausibility. Usually, it’s said to be derived from the shape of the flowers—though sometimes the leaves are also said to be tulip-shaped in outline. There’s some degree of tulip similarity in both. And since the genus to which tulips belong is in the lily family, Liliaceae (a massive umbrella grouping of more than 3,500 species), it could be argued—though not, I think, convincingly—that lily acts as a kind of generalized cognomen for tulip such that its application to the tree gains some little credibility through whatever tulip similarity is allowed. But the truth is that, closely examined, the leaf and flower of a tulip tree declare their own uniqueness more than suggesting a close resemblance to something else. In any case, flawed and misleading though L. tulipifera may be, I like the sound and rhythm of the name. “Liriodendron” in particular has an appealing lilting lyricism. It’s often how I think of tulip trees. There are misnomers too among the tree’s common names. “Yellow poplar,” “white poplar,” and “tulip poplar” all mislead. Liriodendron is not a poplar. It belongs to the magnolia family. It’s probable that this frequent (mis)application of poplar arises because of the way a tulip tree’s leaves move in the wind. Their extravagant fluttering, set off by the lightest breeze, their ever-ready shimmering mobility, recalls the movement of poplars, whose leaves, like well set rigging, catch every breath of wind in a kind of deft multiple checkmate, each leaf-sail billowing in instant response to whatever air currents attempt to check against it. Such ready leaf movement is not just attractive, it serves a purpose too—increasing airflow through the foliage and helping to accelerate transpiration and the movement of water through the tree. There are two species in the Liriodendron genus, the North American L. tulipifera and the Chinese tulip tree, L. chinense. American tulip trees—the variety I’m concerned with here—were first introduced to Britain in the seventeenth century; the Chinese variety didn’t reach this country until 1901. It seems almost certain that L. tulipifera found its way across the Atlantic courtesy of a royal gardener. That’s the view given unambiguously by John Evelyn in Silva (1662), his “Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesty’s Dominions,” published by the Royal Society. According to Evelyn, the first Liriodendrons were brought to Britain “by John Tradescant, under the name of the tulip tree (from the likeness of its flowers)” (206). Evelyn also remarks on the leaves being “of a very peculiar shape.” Following the death of the elder John Tradescant (c.1570–1638), we know that his son, also named John (1608–62), was appointed to the same quaint-sounding post that his father had held under King Charles I, namely: “Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines and Silkworms.” Tradescant junior made various foreign expeditions, including at least one—and possibly as many as three—to Virginia. The purpose of these travels was “to gather up all raritye of flowers, plants, shells etc.” The tulip tree was one of the “rarityes” he brought back. Like the Gingko and Sequoia, the Liriodendron is a living representative of an ancient family. Tulip trees can be traced back for over one hundred million years to the Cretaceous period. It’s strange to see leaf fossils preserved in rock that appear identical to tulip tree leaves today and to realize that the one blown into my driveway is part of a species whose lineage reaches back to when dinosaurs still walked the earth. Tulip trees make our human tenancy of time seem only just begun. Looking at the fact that oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live, and three hundred years to die, Robert Macfarlane has suggested in The Wild Places (2007) that “such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind” (100). Looking at the Liriodendron’s lineage, it feels more as if the mind’s temporal grain has been snapped and broken, leaving it reeling with a sense of its own spectacular littleness. As well as establishing their ancientness, the fossil record also shows that Liriodendrons once flourished over a much wider range than they do today. The fact that they died out in Europe was due to extreme climate change as the ice took hold. I like the fact that, having planted a tulip tree in Wales, I wasn’t so much introducing an exotic species as reintroducing a native after an absence that lasted for eons. But what’s a mere eon when measured on the chronology of a species whose bloodline—sapline—is so old; whose roots are sunk so deeply into time it makes our human hold on it seem fleeting and precarious? “Canoe wood” is another of the tree’s common names—referring to the fact that Native Americans in the east of the country favored it for their dugouts. The large trunk size and fine grain of the wood made it an ideal raw material for such vessels, which could hold ten, or even twenty, people. As well as boat building, the syllabus of human uses for the timber includes furniture, house construction, church organs, and coffins. Just as the leaves on the tree move readily in the slightest wind, so this single leaf fallen in my driveway seemed to shimmer in my hand, setting off a ripple of thoughts. It made me wonder about all the lovers who’ve lain in beds strutted with Liriodendron wood, all the corpses encased in it as they were lowered, coffined, into the earth, all the organ notes listened to by brides and bridegrooms, and by mourners, the air blown through pipes trimmed and set with this fine-grained timber. As we lie down to love, to rest, to death, we’ve often been cradled by this ancient timber, which so massively predates our hominid origins that it makes all our rites of passage seem but newly minted. V. The leaf in my driveway had the power to bring back memories of the encounters I’ve had with tulip trees over the years, and to make me recall at least some of what I’ve read about this ancient species. But, for me, the potency of this little piece of flotsam lay not so much in its predictable ability to summon into present consciousness what I already knew about it, the people and places I associated with it. It lay rather in its arresting otherness. When I picked it up, I could sense within the penumbra of the known something profoundly unknown. This made memory’s reassuring handholds seem less like markers of something that I recognized, more like flimsy camouflage around a mysterious core. This fragile piece of nature’s fabric, this little scrap of world-stuff, could command the mind’s tides to run and turn, summoning and dismissing its waves. But it was the undertow, what the waves pulled me toward, not the waves themselves that left the strongest impression. Ashford Castle, our L. tulipifera transported to Wales from Ireland, details of the tree’s name, appearance, size, and range—these are just ripples on the surface, white horses of the familiar. It’s what lies below them that astounds—the deeps of time and space yawning just below the navigable leaf-shallows in which we paddle, safe in our dugouts of discourse, our route clearly marked by the buoys of vocabulary and all the reassuring protocols of parlance. No matter how much we try to mask and muffle it, balanced lightly on my palm that October morning, weighing no more than a feather, was part of the substance of things, the stuff of reality, heavy with the coiled storylines it carried. As I held the leaf, gripping its stem tightly to stop it blowing away, the wind gusted strongly. Across the road from where I live there’s a school that has several flagpoles near its entrance. The sound of lanyards rapping against the metal poles immediately brought to mind the oddly pleasing dissonance of the same sound multiplied twenty times by vessels anchored in a densely boated harbor, lines jangling against their masts. I guess it’s this which, for a moment, put a nautical spin on things. For all its insubstantial, feather-light presence, the fact that I could crumble it between my fingers, the leaf also had the air of an anchor to it. Straining against its hold, berthed invisibly in its essence, lay the massive sea-going vessel of a life-shape carved and repeated over many millennia. In every twig, in every leaf—if we listen carefully—there’s an echo of Liriodendron’s voyage, its seeding and rooting, its growing and flowering, its faltering and dying over millions of years. Its signature foliage moves to the rhythm of the seasons’ cycles: from green to gold and brown to bare branches and back to green again as each tree, its leaf canvas responsive to every nuance of the weather, sails through time’s waters. Leaves in their number and fragility, their short-livedness, are like we humans. It’s as if they put on a kind of annual mortality play—a vivid memento mori—every autumn. But each individual tree in the Liriodendron clan also follows a kind of leaf-cycle life-cycle as it grows and flourishes and dies, settling back into the earth from whence it was drawn, its recipe of form and function dissolved back into the rich components of the generating—and degenerating—humus. Its elegant structure is dismantled and reassembled repeatedly. It’s as if leaf and root and bark, the paleness of the wood, the fragrance of the flowers, are verses in some poem that the earth has learnt by heart and keeps reciting to itself over and over again across uncounted centuries, conjuring the trees into existence, forming and reforming them with repeated persistence. VI. A tulip tree doesn’t flower until it’s at least ten years old, often not until it’s fifteen or more. Writing in The Guardian newspaper’s blog in July 2012, Dr. John Lydon describes waiting to see tulip trees planted outside Leeds University’s Edward Boyle Library come into bloom and his “childish excitement” when, eventually, they do and he sees this long-anticipated sight for the first time in his life. The flowers are beautiful, but discreet—easily missed amidst the foliage unless the tree is thickly covered in them, or unless—like Lydon—you’ve been watching for them carefully every year. The first time I saw the flowers was when a sparse scattering of them appeared one summer on the tulip tree in front of the college library in Wales. Eventually, our own Liriodendron flowered—seventeen years after we’d planted that spindly sapling we’d brought across the sea from Ireland. By then it was nearly thirty feet high. This long wait for the flowers confers a special quality of rarity on them, it adds to their specialness, making them seem secretive and mysterious. What decrees the time lapse between the tree’s initial germination and its flowering? What complex calibrations of wood and light and leaf, of water and weather, of trunk girth and height combine to key into the plant’s chemistry the instruction to wait, the instruction to blossom? I like Edward Step’s description of the flowers: They have oblong, greenish-white petals, which may reach one-and-a-half inches. There is an orange colored spot at the base of the petal where nectar is secreted. The petals are erect, and have the tips overlapping, giving the flower the typical cup shape. The stamens, which are numerous, are crowded round the large and pointed central pistil. They are orange and yellow in color. Although the individual flowers are somewhat inconspicuous when seen against foliage, the spectacle of a tulip tree in full flower is very striking, especially in moonlight. (2) I’ve never seen the flowers by moonlight and hope I get a chance to before I die. There must have been moonlit nights in my garden in Wales when our tree was in flower, but at that point I’d not read Edward Step and didn’t think to look. No doubt, returning late from college dinners, I may even have walked down the path beside the tree, oblivious to the spectacle above me. Seeing them in daylight is enough to have convinced me of the loveliness of the flowers, but I find Step’s mention of them in moonlight oddly evocative. It makes me wonder about all the members of my species, since our African emergence, who have gazed upon this sight, what they felt as they did so, what befell them, and how their stories and mine and L. tulipifera’s are sutured into the fabric of existence. How—why—did they begin? How do they relate and overlap? What endings do they move toward? And is there any sense to the patterns that all of us trace out upon time’s capacious, mystifying canvas? As generations of us come and go, as we progress through our seasons, our bodies budding, flowering, and faltering, I find it at once comforting, yet at the same time hauntingly elegiac, to think of all those undocumented moments across the centuries when tulip tree flowers have caught the eyes of human watchers, sparking diverse chains of association in uncounted minds. I’m reminded of a line in William Meredith’s “Accidents of Birth” where he talks about life “throwing its sensual astonishments upside down on the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs.” A tulip tree in flower is surely one such “sensual astonishment”—and the fact that we have eyes to see it, that it is there to be seen during our brief moments of existence, seems the kind of sheer improbability that’s hymned by Meredith in this wonderful poem about contingency. Before synthetic materials replaced it, tulip tree wood was used in the manufacture of organs—because its fine grain means it can be cut with sufficient accuracy to stopper the instrument’s pipes and valves and so channel and contain the air sent through them, doing so with sufficient precision to ensure reliable notes. When I discovered this use for the wood, it made me wonder at the immense toccata and fugue that’s played by L. tulipifera. The music of the tree is written into every part of it, its notes encoded, like strands of DNA, with the blueprint of its form, the history of its existence, the fact of its being. Yet etched into the scaffolding of the branches, the network of its roots, the annual canvas of the leaves, the eventual flowers, there’s far more than the tulip tree’s story, fantastic though it is. In the places it has grown, in the seasons it has weathered, in the eons it has flourished, the trees stand witness to what passes there—and we are part of that tapestry of intricate happenstance; part of the crowded fabric of existence. As I hold the leaf and try to listen, I realize that my ears are attuned to catch only the smallest fragments of the music that it plays. My words can make only millimetric incursions into the harmonies of being that fountain out of the massed organ pipes of Liriodendron’s trunks and branches. I can scratch the surface of what’s there, but what surrenders to my clumsy notation gives only the most superficial account. The Liriodendron’s breath-taking yet elegant complexity, the stave of its ancientness, means that it plays at a pitch and pace that I’m helpless to transcribe beyond the cartoon simplifications of metaphor and narrative. Think of all the tulip tree leaves that have ever existed on this planet, each one hung on its twig, arrayed on the tree’s branches like notes on a score. Imagine each one stirring in the wind, leaf striking against leaf to produce a susurration that’s more oceanic than orchestral in its scale and volume. Think of all the insects that have moved across the millions of leaf-acres so constituted, the rivers of rain fallen on them, think of every creature, from dinosaur to human, that has stood in the shade of a Liriodendron, of every footprint on the ground beneath their shading branches. The impossibility of properly describing sits just below the surface of our diction. Sometimes our ordinary accounts of things, the stories that we tell, seem like the thinnest of integuments draped over an abyss. It does not take much to punch through an apparently simple statement like “I found a tulip tree leaf blown into my driveway” and end up floundering in what lies within it. VII. I have a tendency to pick up little keepsakes along life’s way—pebbles, feathers, seashells, fir cones, leaves. I’m not sure I fully understand the impulse behind this beachcombing. In part, perhaps, it’s a kind of collector’s instinct, the desire to have and to hoard. But I don’t want complete sets of things, systematically accumulated, in the manner of a dedicated collector—rather, I’m drawn to serendipitous shards that happen to catch my eye just now and then. In part, I think such beachcombing is an attempt to acquire concrete reminders of times and places that will act like little doorstops, preventing forgetfulness from slamming shut memory’s door too soon. But more than obeying these collecting and souvenir-gathering imperatives, I think I’m driven simply by a kind of stupefied amazement at the nature of things. I want to have tokens, tangible mementos, which remind me of the nature of the real. For we so often swathe things in a cladding of the quotidian; blinker our vision so that it’s focused on those commonsense perspectives that are, of course, necessary for day-to-day living, but that can take on an obscuring permanence if we’re not careful, make us forget what lies beneath them. Things like the tulip tree leaf seem somehow bladed; they act like scalpels, cutting away the commonplace. Through their incisions we can catch glimpses of a different order of being to the one we usually inhabit. “Little keepsakes” is a misleading locution—both in terms of its suggested scale and in its implied promise of permanence. The tulip tree leaf may be small enough (six inches from bow to stern, four-and-a-half inches from the v of the funnel to the start of the stem), but it’s inextricably implicated in much more gigantic scales. Even without touching on its genesis and evolution, it buys into the process of photosynthesis, upon which life on earth depends. As an article by Richard Cogdell in New Scientist puts it, “you have photosynthesis to thank for every lungful of air you breathe” (iii). And as for keeping the Liriodendron leaf, it won’t be for long. This “keepsake” will sit on my desk for a while, but it will be soon be lost or forgotten or just get damaged and thrown away. Like us, it isn’t made for permanence. Were it not for the special extra-somatic memory that writing creates, preserving the leaf in the amber of these sentences, I’d probably have forgotten about it already. I used to press occasional leaves and wildflowers in a massive family Bible, thick and heavy as a headstone. It came from the County Antrim farm on which my mother and her sisters grew up and had, before that, belonged to her grandfather. No one seemed to know its age or provenance beyond that. The Bible was used more as a depository than a book. Between its thick, parchment-like pages, each one as large as a poster, there was a rich scattering of what others had left behind over the years: news cuttings (mostly obituaries) that were yellowed and brittle with age; spindly remnants of wildflowers, their blooms almost transparent, leached of all but the most dilute trace of color; exam certificates; letters; and—my favorite—what we used to call “skeleton leaves,” leaves where almost all of the connective tissue had gone, leaving a lacework scaffolding of midrib, outer edge and veins, a kind of ghost-leaf, the tracery of form still evident, a fugitive whisper of vanished substance. If I’d still had the family Bible—more slab than book, a leather-covered monstrosity that I passed on to a cousin when I moved house, not wanting to add its weight and bulk to the complications of moving—I’d have pressed my tulip tree leaf in it. That way I might have stayed the hand of disintegration for a while, ironing out the wrinkles, fixing by the weight of the pages its shape and color. As it was, even just thinking of pressing it brought the family Bible back to mind—another part of the flood of associations set off by the leaf. A Bible holding pressed leaves between its pages offers a striking symbol for the way in which the evolution of writing is closely connected to plants. Leaves were among the earliest surfaces on which we incised our script. Palm leaves, for example, were the medium for early Sanskrit, and the very name of paper comes from that most famous Nilotic reed, papyrus. Scholars have pointed to the way in which book and tree go hand in hand. For example, in Beyond the Written Word (1987), William Graham notes that The word for “book” in English and its cognates in other Germanic languages (as the German buch, Dutch boek, or the Swedish and Danish bok) have commonly been linked etymologically with the name for beech tree (Old Norse bók, Old English bók), the bark or wood of which may have been the earliest form of writing material among Germanic peoples. (11) Reverse and obverse pages are still called leaves, and the double page of a ledger is called a folio (from folium, a leaf). When we say “leaflet” now it’s unlikely our first thought will be “little leaf” but the word again emphasizes the writing-leaf connection. In this age of electronic text and screens, we may have cut the umbilical between them, but laid down in the very etymology of “book” and “paper” is evidence that something arboreal is a foundational part of the genome of literacy. The nineteenth-century Scottish writer Alexander Smith suggests in Dreamthorp that “the world is everywhere whispering essays and one need only be the world’s amanuensis” (33). But being the world’s amanuensis is far from straightforward. How can we put into words the wonders that are routinely dictated to us? Thinking about fossil Liriodendron leaves laid down in rock, and leaves pressed in Bibles, about the leaf blown into my driveway, about what happens in photosynthesis and pollination, about invisible processes at a molecular level, invisible structures at an atomic level, makes me imagine a thick tome made of tulip tree leaves, one oddly shaped leaf-page for each year of its existence from the Cretaceous to the present. And on the leaves of this massive volume, bound in the tree’s pale wood, the incredible Liriodendron story, only hinted at here, could be written out in full. To decode what’s carried by a tulip tree leaf and write about it within the compass of an essay is, inevitably, to act as editor, not amanuensis, radically cutting out; offering abstractions, excerpts, glimpses rather than anything approaching a faithful copying of the full text that we’re given. A sense of how we might move closer to transcription can be gleaned from Jan Zalasiewicz’s remarkable book, The Planet in a Pebble (2010). Taking a pebble from a beach, Zalasiewicz shows that, once we learn to decipher its cargo, the pebble—as his title suggests—contains no less than a history of the planet. His book is a masterclass in how extraordinary the ordinary things around us are. It suggests how we might at least begin the process of transcribing all that’s written in a leaf. VIII. The windblown leaf I found in my driveway was like a kind of letter delivered by the season, a note from one small entry in our planet’s register of life-forms. Written on it—in it—were details of stupendous spans of time, and of the intimate, intricate mechanics that have powered Liriodendron through them. Where had this particular leaf-letter come from? I can’t be wholly sure, but so far as I know, the only tulip trees in the area are in the Botanical Garden quite near to where I live. There are two of them there, both just a little larger than the tree we had in Wales. It provided a perhaps baseless sense of something fitting that at one point in writing these lines I took my pen and notebook and wrote while sitting on a bench under the smaller of these trees. When I did so, I wasn’t just moved to think about all the other visitors to the Garden who had sat on this same bench beneath the Liriodendron, its leaves stirring and whispering above them, or about the tree in starlight and in rain, the bare branches sometimes powdered white with snow. As well as imagining all this, and the butterflies that had alighted on the foliage to bask in the summer sun, as well as picturing how the flowers might appear in moonlight, I also remembered Pando. Pando (which means “I spread” in Latin) is the name that’s been given to one of the largest and oldest organisms on earth. Also referred to as “The Trembling Giant,” this life-form is thought to weigh around 6,500 tons and to be at least 80,000 years old. To put that in some sort of graspable perspective, an adult male blue whale weighs around 150 tons (about the same as 25 elephants)—so Pando would be equivalent to over forty of such giant cetaceans. Going back 80, 000 years takes us to the time of our human exodus from Africa—when Homo sapiens left the cradle of its birthplace to colonize the Earth. Pando is a huge grove of quaking aspens, spread over 100 acres, which grows in Fishlake National Forest in Utah. There are almost 50,000 individual trees—but “individual” is not quite right. For each one of them shoots from a single source, a massive underground root system. Each tree is more like a leaf of one super-tree than a separate, different individual. The quaking aspen (which belongs to the poplar family) is so called because of the readiness of its leaves to do precisely what a tulip tree’s leaves do—stir and flutter in the slightest breeze. The scale and age of The Trembling Giant is humbling. But it’s dwarfed by tulip trees with their Cretaceous pedigree. And though they may not occur as a single clump, a root mass easily identified as one, is it not true that they’re all part of the same life-pattern, that my single fallen Liriodendron leaf is integral to something singular whose scale and age is hard to picture on the canvas of our ordinary apprehension, framed as it is by the kind of calibrations that cut things into the little measures we can fathom? Just as what’s familiar can soon seem strange, so what’s many can seem one; and relationships between things, the identity of things, slips into another gear and becomes less certain than it seemed before. So much is written in so little that it can appear fantastical, as if we’ve stumbled on some kind of fairy artifact, something charmed and magical, imbued with special powers. A leaf unfurls, green and fresh, it grows to full size. It reaps its harvest from the sun, it’s there in moonlight, rain, and wind. It takes on its autumnal color, falls from the tree, is blown away, lands in a driveway, and is picked up from where it’s fallen. And in that isobar of small events, the little timeline of a single leaf, there are echoes of such haunting resonance that they allow us to glimpse massive vistas of time, heavy with the cargoes that they carry. Behind the paper-thinness of this one fallen leaf, its wafer-light familiarity, stands something wholly other—the brute, but beautiful, fact of existence. All of us are leaves on its enormous tree. The mind’s tides and seasons, like the flux of Liriodendron, like everything else around us, quake and tremble in the astonishing winds of Being. Works Cited Cogdell Richard. “Photosynthesis.” New Scientist  217. 2902: i– viii. Evelyn John. Silva: or, a Discourse of Forest-trees, and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesty's Dominions.  Vol. 1. Ward A., 1786. Graham William. Beyond the Written Word . Cambridge UP, 1987. Macfarlane Robert. Wild Places . Penguin, 2008. Meredith William. Efforts at Speech.  Northwestern UP, 1997. Smith Alexander. Dreamthorp.  Lee and Shepherd, 1889. Steiner George. Real Presences.  U of Chicago P, 1989. Step Edward. Wayside and Woodland Trees: A Pocket Guide to the British Sylva.  Frederick Warne and Co., 1940. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Leaf
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isx074
DA - 2017-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/leaf-e2bDr2S0nP
SP - 803
EP - 819
VL - 24
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -