Before Earth Day, Arbor Day was the primary environmental celebration and a semi-holiday in the United States. And for a while it was a very big deal with tens of thousands of volunteers across the country planting and tending trees. The results were breath taking. Arbor Day is often credited with re-foresting American cities and towns.
Old 19th Century photographs reveal that many were barren urban wastelands long denuded of foliage with buildings jammed together and coming right up to streets and crude sidewalks. In Chicago, for instance, Daniel Burnham’s famous network of grand boulevards which radiated from the downtown core piercing the neighborhoods with trees was influenced by the Arbor Day movement. Later the smaller boulevards—the local name for the strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street—were planted with trees, many by the CCC during the Great Depression. Not only did all of those trees greatly improve the look of the city, but they also helped dramatically clean the air and provided much needed shade that helped cool city folk through sweltering summers. Some sociologists even noted reduction in crime in neighborhoods with trees.
Tree planting festivals have been traced by to the Spanish village of Villanueva de la Sierra in 1805 where a local Priest organized a three day fiesta around planting hundreds of trees. The custom spread to neighboring villages and towns.
In America Arbor Day was founded in 1872 by Democratic politician and later Secretary of Agriculture Julius Sterling Morton at Nebraska City, Nebraska. That first year 10,000 trees were planted in and around the community. Anyone who has ever visited Nebraska can attest to the crying need for trees on its vast High Plains. Morton’s son, Joy Morton, the founder of the Morton Salt Company in Chicago, shared his father’s enthusiasm and founded the Morton Arboretum in suburban Lyle centered on the grounds of his estate.
The first observance drew national attention and soon other towns were emulating it. By 1883 the American Forestry Association officially endorsed Arbor Day and named Birdseye Northrop of Connecticut as Chairman of a committee to make the day an official national celebration. Birdseye, who liked to travel, also introduced the idea to Japan, Australia, Canada, and back to Europe.
In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States. It became an annual tradition. Eventually Congress designated the final Friday of April for the observance and several states made it a holiday.
In the early years the Boy Scouts troupes were heavily mobilized for tree planting and many still continue that tradition. As observed the CCC and the WPA in conjunction with National Forest Service were employed during the Depression.
Tree plantings continue, but the spotlight seldom shines on Arbor Day anymore.
But we can celebrate with poetry, naturally. Poets probably have been versifying about trees since the first bard plucked his lyre. Yet most of us can only recall Joyce Kilmer’s Trees. With apologies to Kilmer who was killed in the trenches of World War I just as his hymn to trees was becoming famous, it is a pretty bad poem filled with mixed and conflicting metaphors. We can do better.
Take Dr. Williams, for instance. The great poetic innovator of Patterson, New Jersey paused to take in the barren trees of winter. Ever creative note his charming coining of a word in the third line.
Winter Trees
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold
—William Carlos Williams
Hilda Doolittle was an American poet from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who moved to England in 1911 when she was 25 years old. Writing as simply H.D. she became a close associate of Ezra Pound and a central figure in the avant garde imagist movement that revolutionized 20th Century poetry. After being nearly forgotten, she was rediscovered by the women’s studies movement in academia.
Pear Tree
Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted.
O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great mass;
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
O white pear,
your flower-tufts,
thick on the branch,
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.
—H.D.
O.K, show of hands. Who is surprised that farmer/activist/poet Wendell Berry, appreciates trees?
Woods
I part the
out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
—Wendell Berry
For twenty years this poet was a school custodian in McHenry County, Illinois. Among his many duties was occasionally planting trees on the grounds. At least once the job got inside his head. The result, this poem from the 2004 Skinner House collection We Build Temples in the Heart.
The Janitor’s Epiphany
In the mist of a late, cool spring,
a common workman’s callused boot
impelled the spade
which sliced the velvet lawn
and turned the Black Forest cake earth.
And in time he filled the hole casually,
as if it were any other job,
with a young tree yanked rudely
from its old place and flung down here
before the school.
Satisfied and ready to turn away,
he stopped short and looked again—
this is a Great Thing, he thought,
and cries to heaven for ceremony,
for some note that life has happened here.
Yet civic virtue stilled his lips,
lest his sectarian prayer rend a fragile peace,
and his own reason mocked an active ear
waiting on the supplicant’s plea
to do something, anything.
But the rhythms of the season echoed here,
the shade of generations turned
with the spade and loam—
a Great Thing has happened
and cries out to heaven for ceremony,
for some note that life has happened here.
—Patrick Murfin
We will end with that counter cultural
mystic Richard Brautigan who decades
ago had this vision.
Richard Brautigan.
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
—Richard Brautigan
