trees – Page 4 – don't confuse the narrator

endings and beginnings

About ten days ago I was running to catch a bus to get to a meeting when I passed a huge may tree in full bloom. I hadn’t time to do more than pause and then rush on, but I thought it’d be a good idea for the last blog post of this month: how we have two bank holidays in May, and yet neither of them are May Day; how the English say Ne’er cast a clout till May be out – whether that be the month of May or the blossom – while the Spanish with their far balmier climate say hasta el cuarenta de mayo no te quites el sayo – don’t take off your coat till the 40th of May; how taking may blossom into the house is supposed to bring bad luck…

Of course, I then forgot to go back and take the picture.

This morning I went across the park and there are plenty of trees and other plants in bloom, but I didn’t find any hawthorn.

The park was frothing at the hedges with cow parsley:

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re-writes

On a recent walk, I saw a squirrel dart across the path and run up into a tree. When I looked up through the bare branches, I could see his tail splayed wide – presumably to give him better balance – and was struck by how closely it resembled the catkins of the pussy willow.

seeing and not seeing

I posted a photo of a rabbit last week, but it wasn’t a very successful one as the bunny’s colouring blended so well with the undergrowth. I gather that this blending into the background is crypsis (as opposed to mimesis when the creature disguises itself as something else).

Here, then, is a less cryptic rabbit:

Camouflage hinders our seeing things that are really there, but our brains often trick us into seeing things that aren’t there.
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timber!

I went for a walk the other evening and found my path blocked by a tree.

There are, of course, a host of literary connections I could make: Birnam Wood; the Ents of Middle-Earth; the “very, very country dance” of the Narnian trees that Lucy dances her way through to reach Aslan in Prince Caspian; the trees that “walk[…] down the side of the cutting” in the landslide scene of The Railway Children…
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stars and stats

The poetry course that I’m taking started with a discussion of sand and stars. More precisely, with the statement that there are ten times as many stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. (If you’re interested, here’s the maths that backs up the estimate.) I don’t think we mentioned, though, that there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.

Either way, macrocosmos or microcosmos, a number that big is hard to comprehend, and the human brain tends to look for simplifications and ideas closer to home.

I’ve just been out in the garden and, unlikely as it seems, I suppose I’ll just have to assume there are more stars in the universe than there are blossoms on the plum tree.