Blog #207 5/23/17
Having grown up in Chicago, I recall fondly the many small single-lane neighborhood streets lined with very tall and graceful American elms arching like the ceilings of Gothic cathedrals to meet and entwine with the elms on the other side of the street, a leafy tent of cool shade shielding everything below from the Midwestern summer’s sun.
In the fall, elms, deciduous trees, yield their bright colored leaves to the sidewalks admitting sunlight from above onto the streets, below.
Chicago, Lake front, 2017.
Stark beauty, pensive in late winter and no elms.
When I learned of these functions of the great deciduous trees, I marveled at how clever nature was as well as the foresight of the streets’ city-planners.
Of note, the great elms are almost entirely wiped out by the Dutch Elm disease disaster caused by a beetle and fungus from Europe.
After living in San Francisco for almost 25 years, I had forgotten the year’s cycle of light/shade/light. Though Northern California does have deciduous trees among the evergreens, firs and palms, much of the summer-to-winter light change comes with the process of pollarding – severely pruning – plane trees (sycamores), keeping them forever short and allowing only a controlled shape when warmer months bring full leaf re-growth.
A pollarded Sycamore in early Spring, just starting to leaf.
And now, with my life mostly spent in America’s great city, New York, I walk the streets and parks during the cold winter months, with my camera fixed on the bare trees, which are silhouetted by clouds above, each expressing its own special character, in Nature’s infinite, imaginative creativity.
The trees in these pictures, skimming stark against sky, have caught my eye this winter. Each image is an interlocked part of the continuum, that thrills my walk and Nature’s eternal preparation to be born again.
Central Park, New York City
Yes, New York City!
World Trade Center, New York City
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