Biophilia

So, what’s up with the flowers and trees and stuff?

Yep, from time to time I am asked about my interest in birds and flowers and trees and stuff. Maybe I have a case of, as E. O. Wilson defines it, biophilia, a “love of living things”.

My earliest sense of something living put in the ground and tended to was rooted in edible fruit. In St. Petersburg, my paternal grandparents’ yard had a guava tree, which led to a harvest that produced guava jelly on toast or muffins and with peanut butter on sandwiches.

Across town my mom’s father grew a variety of plants, but the grapefruit tree—more a bush, really—made a great impression. I remember it being full of fruit, and his mix of coffee grounds, fish guts, and egg shells was the super-secret mash that made it flourish.

As for trees generally, I was a late bloomer. Moving to Duluth, Minnesota when I was 11 introduced me to trees on a much different scale. Our first home’s fruiting tree was a chokecherry. Well, named, and another case of personal experience being the best of teachers.

But the yard was surrounded by birch and pine and elms that initiated a growing sense of their stateliness, their stature as living things. Of course, to see a stand of birch after a snowy stretch followed by colder, brighter days so that the snow and branches would sparkle in the sunlight—simply, spectacular.

The following year we moved into town. Two apple trees were a boon—my kid sister made great pies—and the property had plenty of mature trees. There is where the arrival of birds in an explicit way became signifiers of the seasons: During a heavy snow, a great snowy owl, hawked at by mousy snowbirds, hunkered down in a birch behind the house, or the arrival of robins hopping about under the newly green apple trees.

At the end of the alley was our garage, which had a rock-walled garden on the south side. The spring of my senior year we put in tomato plants started in a hothouse and planted rhubarb, both of which did well. Apple-rhubarb pie made the menu, and tomatoes as large as baseballs were sliced and diced and stewed.

I think owning property accelerated what I felt internally, a sort of kinship with plants and trees that made it nearly a need to plant and to tend to what was already living on my property, modest as it may be. After Hurricane Hugo, I planted two red maples to create shade someday for the front of the house. Those were the first two trees I ever planted, and several years after I moved out, I learned the new owner cut them down. Still don’t understand that decision.

To the next yard, I added three trees to keep watch with an ancient fig tree, which led to the only real disagreement with birds I have ever had, that pecking fruit once and flying off thing.

As different homes joined the catalogue of my residences, so too what I planted marked my history.

And 3 more trees at the next place, and then 12, and then 5, and now here, 7—trees, the height of optimism. Pears and apple and dogwoods and crape myrtles and plums and elms and Japanese maple and Leylands and magnolias.

What followed through the years, too, were viburnum and plumbago and forsythia and knockouts and japonica and ligustrum and pyracantha and tea olive and loropetalum and lilies and azaleas and tulips.

Then birdhouses—for the bluebirds—and bird feeders—bringing in sparrows and finches and cardinals and doves and titmouses and warblers and wrens, oh my.

Somewhere along the way came more and more a taking note of, hummingbirds near at hand and hawks overhead. Geese flyovers and buzzards circling, and pairs of kites patrolling the skies.

All living things. Maybe that’s the appeal. By my hand, by my effort. A re-scaping of the land. A modifying of the environment. I am amazed, surprised—just like with the grapefruit hanging heavy in my grandfather’s backyard when I was a young boy.

I chose to let it all remain a bit mysterious. No wannabe botanist or biologist or arborist am I.

So, to answer the question: Miracles.