If you’re new here, welcome. To introduce myself, I’m a writer, songwriter, and mom living in Brooklyn. Most of my work explores art, family, and the natural world—sometimes all at once. Off the internet, I’m revising a book about four generations of mothers in my Texas family.

Four years ago I got interested in a very large oak tree near where I lived in Brooklyn. Since then, I have barely stopped talking about it. I imagine my closest friends know to avoid the topic with me, at risk of hearing another detail, or worse—a factoid.

Some of that tree writing ended up as a three-part essay that came out this summer in Virginia Quarterly Review’s Centennial issue. Here’s the beginning of it:

In the late summer, I became obsessed with a particular tree. I was pushing my daughter’s stroller toward the library on Argyle Road when I saw it. The gray limbs were pale in the distance, the trunk goliath. Dust and pollen hung in the dappled light of its canopy.

I had recently moved to Ditmas Park, a picturesque and gentrified pocket of Brooklyn where the gray unfurling cedes to rows of candy-box Victorians with historical markers. In the heat, hydrangeas exploded from the corners of plush lawns and petals wept onto sidewalks in confetti bursts. The cars parked along the wide avenues were shaded by oaks, lindens, maples, ginkgoes, and the elephantine London plane trees with their smooth trunks and broad leaves like sheets of parchment.

Part of the essay is in print, but the whole thing is online, and not paywalled:

🌳 “A Tree Grew In Brooklyn” 🌳

The following image will be a spoiler if you haven’t read the piece or thought about the general trajectory of old trees.

The oak tree died—or rather, humans felled it. This particular tree got an essay because it was very grand and because I mourned its loss, but my interest extended across the whole urban forest.

The apparent wisdom of a sturdy old tree was especially comforting to me in the early pandemic years, and even more so today. I don’t think I’m alone in that. If anything is unique about my interest, it is that I did not stop at laying palms on bark or photographing foliage across the seasons—I collected tree data with the sort of fervor another might have for NFL Draft numbers.

I spent hours scouring the New York City Tree Map. Often, after rushing back to my marketing job from an errand that turned into a walk and ended in tree-related reverie, I sat at my desk with sales copy in one window and the tree map waiting quietly in the other. The map was slow to load. When it did, green and brown dots in varied shades and sizes bloomed across the grid of streets and revealed, when clicked, all sorts of practical data about the city’s 800,000 mapped trees—gallons of water retained, carbon sequestered—though I was more interested in names and girths.

In my world, the largest trees were the best trees. Big trees were usually older, and thus cooler. I learned to measure them by diameter at breast height (DBH), and also that arborists take DBH at 4.3 meters from the ground in order to avoid “butt swell”—the bulging that can occur at a tree’s base. There was an obvious absurdity to all this. Picture me, a 30-something mom, searching clandestinely for the girthiest nearby shafts. (“Would you get a look at the butt swell on that one,” etc., etc.)

But I’m not as concerned about leaving myself open to mockery as I am about my own impulses. Since first noticing the tree, I have argued with myself over what it means to be preoccupied with trees, whether it is a feel-good distraction from global horrors we don’t want to face or fight against, or whether paying attention to trees is deep and important work that might help foster a less individualist way of seeing and being. If we see trees not as fellow living beings but as adornments to our property, or even as tools for processing carbon dioxide, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we might see fellow humans that way: as expendable and other.

I’ve turned it over for years: tree mania as escapist trapdoor; tree devotion as portal to better world. But that’s a pretty lofty binary. It’s also true that it’s important to know your neighbors, plants included.

I thought a lot about a Bertolt Brecht poem I first read sometime during these tree-interested years. This translation titles it, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake.” I’m not very familiar with Brecht’s work beyond this poem, of which I first saw only this tiny sliver bouncing around the internet:

What times are these, in which

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

It was 1939 or a little earlier. Brecht had fled Germany, I read, then Denmark, later Sweden, Finland, the U.S. He wrote from exile. I read the poem as a tortured meditation over the unfairness of the speaker’s safety in comparison to those he leaves behind, but the poem is noncommittal about exactly where to cast guilt and where to place hope. One reason the poem has such a frustrated tone is that guilt is not the same as action.

Searching around about Brecht’s poem led me to a personal blog post by an academic writer in Dresden (Solvejg Nitzke) who waffled in the same way in 2022, mentioning in addition a 1991 Adrienne Rich poem. The poem, “What Kind of Times are These” takes up in its own way the escapism a stand of trees might offer. That repeated gesture towards “our times” strikes me. Do trees tend to crop up more in the collective imagination during times of greater crisis?

Here’s the first stanza:

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

Both the poems start with trees and spin off into other concerns, or at least try to. I’d argue that the subject of Rich’s poem is not guilt or shame but those euphemistic “disappearances” and the difficulty of talking about them. While you could read the poem’s final lines as a condemnation—“in times like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees”—you could also conclude that Rich is relying on the idea of “trees” to make impossible conversations possible. “Trees” as writing around the censors, literal and figurative.

Tree mania as escapist trapdoor; tree devotion as portal to a better world—an idealist third option could be “tree attention as avenue into other kinds of care.” The critical part is showing up, actually enacting care for others.

As for my own tree obsession, I started with the tree map, then moved on to city photo archives and then to historical accounts of the neighborhood’s development, then maps of the area after it had been taken from the Lenape. From a sudden obsession with one tree, you can get interested in a whole species, then begin to ask who planted them and why, who that benefitted and who it harmed, then look into the urban planning (talk about euphemisms) that got us here, and before long you’ll have in your hands a whole slew of injustices worth picking apart and exposing. Maybe I’m just proving that humans trend back towards human concerns—or simply that these things are all connected.

Not long after my VQR piece came out, I saw the essay “Death of a Tree” by photographer Benjamin Swett in The New York Review of Books. It struck me, because the original title I gave my own piece was “Elegy for a City Tree.” Probably since they wanted someone to read it, my editors rejected this and went instead with the reference to the Betty Smith novel, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, which features an ailanthus tree, which is an interesting species in New York as it’s a favored host for spotted lantern flies, which have themselves become host to a certain vigilante streak worth questioning. Even my small daughter has learned to smash the bugs without remorse—and it’s us tree-loving adults who taught her. I begin to doubt the project.

But the trees have carried me off again. My point is that I am not the only one with this particular fixation—but then again, I never was. Forgetting trees in the first place seems an especially capitalist and imperialist affliction, and the feeling of “rediscovering” them perhaps follows in the same vein.

The pin oak in her final years:

A few weeks ago I was walking along Argyle Road where the old pin oak once stood. The area is no longer my neighborhood, but when I walk there I seem to leap back in time. I remember the weight of the stroller in front of me, the sound of the work notifications dinging in my pocket, urging me back to the desk. Back then, I noticed the smaller pin oak in front of the next house, to the north, which I thought of as the baby, but which is now, after the death of the older one, the largest tree on the block. The younger oak’s crown has also gone patchy. I consulted my old friend, the tree map, expecting to see a work order. None have yet been documented, but I can imagine the same drama playing out again with slight variation.

Residents will complain of the risk of falling limbs, an outcry will start up in the neighborhood Facebook group, someone will share their inside tips for getting in touch with the city, who will finally send a forester to inspect the tree, who will declare it a ticking time bomb, who will schedule a work order to fell the tree, when there will be shouts of relief up and down the block and a new patch of bright sun on the once unremarked house behind it. There is the socket in the grass where the giant of a tree once stood, and soon this smaller one will be a little hole in the dirt too, and they will cover it with sod and coax the grass up from the spent indentation.

In summary: 😵‍💫 TREES 😵‍💫

Both more and less of the story is in my VQR piece. Hope you enjoy it if you take a look.