The Tree Folk (Part 1) By Henry Turner Bailey

Curious ponderings from 1925 of the 'souls of trees' and their visual forms. Part 1 has a practical view & Part 2 has an imaginative view. In both parts, you'll be lulled to sleep with a story that gets slower as it goes on. Sounds include birds chirping, trees in the breeze, trees creaking, rain.

Transcript

This is Aurora,

And I am here with The Tree Folk,

Part 1.

So relax and let yourself drift off.

You never saw a tree.

You have seen some particular kind of tree.

No,

You have not seen that even.

All you have seen is some individual tree.

The tall nut tree,

Let us say,

That grew in the pasture when you were a boy or a girl,

Near the edge of the swamp where the frogs peeped in April.

That tall nut tree was a miraculous tree.

All trees are miraculous.

We know practically nothing about the essential element in them,

The life in them,

The souls of them that make them what they are.

Within forty feet of where I sit at my desk stand two trees that were born the same year.

I can hear the crooning of one of them and the chattering of the other as the morning breeze walks past them on its way to the sea.

One tree is a soft pine,

The other is a seedling apple.

Who planted the seeds for me,

I do not know.

But I suspect that old West Wind,

The busiest parcels postman we have in these parts,

Planted one of them,

And a friend of his by the name of Gray Squirrel planted the other.

For thirty-nine years,

The somethings lodged originally between or within the particles of matter in those two seeds have been at work building those two trees.

The something in the pine seed,

Let us say,

The soul of it,

Built a trunk that stood erect.

The apple soul built a trunk that leaned northward.

Pine trees always stand up straight.

Apple trees always lean one way or another.

Do you know why?

The pine soul built soft white wood with pitch in it.

The apple soul hard white wood with syrup in it.

The pine soul clothed itself with spears,

Five in a sheaf.

The apple soul with shields,

Each alone,

The underside the more delicately damascened.

The pine soul dotes on helical curves,

The apple soul on curves of force.

Draw a sheaf of the spears through your wet lips three or four times and they will stick together.

The lines of cleavage are not straight,

They are curves twisted on the surface of the green cylinder.

The pine cone is like this,

Only fatter and more complex.

The curves run both ways,

Dividing the surface into diamonds,

Each a scale with its little beak.

This fruit of the pine is brown,

Dry,

Hard,

Sticky,

Bitter.

From the pioneer's point of view,

Fit only to kindle a fire.

The apple leaf has a contour based on two curves of force,

As Ruskin called them,

With crooked veins that manage to stagger along,

Growing weaker in the same general direction.

A curve of force is like the path of a good sky rocket,

Or of a jet of water from the nozzle of your lawn hose,

At first nearly straight,

But curving more and more until it explodes or falls and drops.

Two such curves,

Butt to butt so to speak,

Define the shape of the apple as cut from stem to blossom end.

The general direction of the stem and the shape of the seeds and of their cells are determined by the same forceful line.

The fruit of the apple is golden,

Juicy,

Mellow,

Delicious.

But both these trees' soles are predisposed in favor of the number five.

Cut the spear sheaf crosswise,

And you find the radial section.

Each spear shaft has two flat sides and one curved side like a piece of pie.

Cut the apple crosswise,

And you get the larger rosette.

Several star forms are here,

Beautifully related to one another.

Emerson's poet,

You remember,

Walked abroad,

Pondering shadows,

Colors,

Clouds,

Grass buds and caterpillar shrouds,

Plants on which the wild bees settle,

Tints that spot the violet's petal.

Why nature loves the number five and why the star form,

She repeats,

Wonderer at all alive,

Wonderer at all he meets.

Trees have soles.

Let us stop to wonder a moment over this mystery.

How does it happen that these two tree soles,

Reacting on the same earth with the same sunshine and the same rain,

Manage to produce so consistently such diverse results?

We may as well confess that we do not know.

Nobody knows.

It is as great a miracle as the most devout could wish for to throw at the head of a skeptic.

It is another manifestation of that something we call life,

Individualized life,

The animate soul of a thing,

That power within your body which,

Reacting upon its environment,

Grows your body and keeps it in repair,

Substituting new for old,

Never forgetting anything,

Not even that scar on your thumb you acquired when a child,

And which helps to identify you as yourself,

Now,

After fifty years.

What a marvel it all is.

If you and I were to sit at the same table three times a day and eat of the same food for four hundred years,

We would never look like each other.

No.

Our souls are independent and selfish,

Each jealously guarding its own identity.

The souls of the trees are the same,

Each bringing forth fruit after its kind.

Ideals seem to be held tenaciously by trees.

In other words,

Each tree thinks of itself as belonging to a certain family.

That family has its own traditions and habits of thought.

Each member of that family cherishes the family ideal in its heart and does its best to live up to that ideal.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,

Thwarted by unfortunate conditions,

Maimed by its enemies,

Crowded by its neighbors,

Lashed by storms,

Struck by lightning,

The spirit of the tree is never broken.

As long as the tree lives,

It is loyal to the highest ideals of its ancestors,

Maintained through countless generations.

Compared with our common trees,

We humans are recent and pygmy and as temporary as the morning dew.

From my window,

As I write,

I can look out upon an old red cedar who has stood on what I am pleased to call my hill for some 400 years.

He was there before the pilgrims landed.

His aerials reported to him the din of the French and Indian wars,

Of the revolution of the war of 1812,

Of the Mexican war,

Of the Civil War,

Of the Spanish war,

Of the World War.

They are turned now to catch the thrilling news of universal peace.

He is as vigorous as Mars,

As handsome as Apollo,

And as dignified as Jove himself.

As I look at his majesty,

I feel like lifting my hat.

Good form is one of the traditions.

The trees have their ancient standards of shape,

The ideal proportions every member of the family should aspire to achieve.

The vinyls just naturally run thin.

Ida may diet and lie abed in the morning and dose herself with anti-lean elixir indefinitely,

But to the end of her days she will be a tall,

Thin,

Sharp-featured,

Lantern-jawed vinyl.

That is the family tradition.

The trees are like that.

The Lombardi poplars are spare.

The apple trees are rotund.

No member of the apple family would dare to think of being higher than it is wide.

A poplar of such proportions would die of chagrin.

All the young cedars are thin like the poplars,

But pointed in the head like a candle flame.

The pines are pointed also,

But they come broader.

The maples are egg-shaped,

Small and uppermost.

The ashes hold the same standard of shape,

But with the smaller end below,

As in a normal human head.

The oaks,

Red or white,

Left to themselves in a pasture,

Assume the shape of a great haycock of green,

Balanced on a sturdy central post of brown.

The elms believe in the hemispherical shape,

But carry it tipped to one side rather jauntily,

Like the palms,

Who are a more long-legged race.

The hickories stand with the poplars for towering mass,

But are inclined to be broader.

The spruces are conical.

The orange trees are spherical.

The junipers of New England are hemispherical,

Flat side up.

The locusts,

The shape of a loon's egg,

And the young tupelos,

Are fatter than the pines.

Just as a girl when in love can recognize her young man a long way off,

Even in a fog,

By his shape or mass alone,

So a lover of trees knows each one of them instantly,

Though reduced by the distance to mere silhouettes of shimmering purple.

Of course,

The tree often fails to achieve its ideal,

Like the rest of us,

But it never forgets that ideal,

Deformed by the wind,

Broken by ice and snow,

Slashed by ruthless mankind.

In its abused body,

The anointed eye can trace the remembered dream of the family ideal.

Yes,

Even in dense forests,

Where the trees race upward,

Striving with one another for a place in the sun,

They never lose entirely their likeness to their more fortunate relations who live in the open.

They are like city dwellers.

Tests of growth with the trees are like the laws of the Medes and Persians.

They must not be broken.

No doubt you once heard a calm aristocratic woman of long lineage say quietly,

But with unforgettable emphasis,

Our family never does that.

The Manchester's do not marry under thirty.

No litchfield ever died with his boots off.

The Lowell's do not speculate in oil.

All the Cushing's have legal minds.

There has been a clergyman in every generation of Emerson's.

Family pride gets itself handed on from sire to son,

Wrapped in some such verbal robe of righteousness.

Righteousness among the tree folk consists in maintaining the family traditions as to what constitutes good form,

Not only in appearance,

But in structure.

The growth of limbs,

Branches,

And twigs must be according to the tribal oil.

Poplars must be upright,

With every shoot a curve of force.

Homes must be graceful,

With Hogarth's line of beauty throughout.

Every spray of the maple must be supported by a reversed curve.

Young Tupelots are a level-headed race,

With all the main branches nearly horizontal.

All the branches,

Twigs,

And needles of the pine must radiate.

In short,

Radiation in one pattern or another is the fundamental law of tree life,

Each family interpreting that law in its own way.

Right structure in trees may be obvious in the ash,

Or occult as in the Tupelo.

It may be from a fount within the body of the tree,

As in the palm,

Or outside that body,

As in the pine.

In any case,

It is a fascinating element.

A palm stem explodes into leaves at its summit.

A pine's branches radiate like the fingers of your hand.

All systems of radiation have as their aim free air for every leaf.

The motherly tree-souls,

Thrusting forth their innumerable children every spring,

Have an uncanny foresight as to where they shall stand.

Look at any spray as it hangs over your head some calm day,

And see how it floats in the breathless air,

As the filaments of a bit of sea moss spread themselves in water so the leaves are poised,

Each alone,

Without touching another leaf.

That each should in his house abide,

Therefore,

Was the world so wide.

And for the sake of each tiny leaflet was the space subdivided.

And yet,

As no man liveth unto himself,

According to Saint Paul,

So no leaf liveth unto itself.

Each has room for itself only,

Because it allows every other leaf the same privilege.

Dress is another matter about which the trees are particular.

Their leaves are worn like robes,

Marvelous robes,

That grow and change color with age,

And are put off without regret when they must go to serve another purpose.

The scotch used to wear plaids.

The Quakers condemned all colors but gray.

The clergy favor black broad cloth.

Some women always wear stripes.

Some men only pinhead checks.

The tree folk are like that.

Only more so.

The soft pines always wear velvet.

Their silhouettes against the sky have a softness at their edges,

Like the luster upon the folds of the velvet robes of doges.

The cedars are fur-clad and very handsome,

Especially in the winter when all their neighbors are naked and shivering with the cold.

The birches wear shimmering lace,

Half veiling their silvery limbs.

The poplars affect a coarse woven woollen goods,

Tweeds very substantial and distinguished.

The elms wear shawls thrown gracefully over their broad shoulders,

And the shawls have fringes that sway and ripple in the wind.

The maples wear watered silks with brilliant patterns.

There is always a certain vivacity,

A sparkling quality in a maple.

Then there are several families that wear print goods,

Like the pears with a snappy,

Almost impudent freedom.

The gnarled oaks.

The poets and storytellers for centuries have called them gnarled,

Are more or less gnarled in their clothing.

Gnarled means knotted,

And the oaks are dappled with knots of foliage.

Sometimes,

As in our northern white oaks,

The knots are so loose that they resemble the curls on the head of a child.

But in the live oaks of the south,

The knots are so tight in appearance that they are more like kinks in wool.

The live oaks,

However,

Inherit about the most lordly and defiant beauty of any members of the family.

Hear what Sidney Lanyer says about them in his Marshes of Glyn.

The willows are feather-clad,

For silvery loveliness they are unrivaled.

Willows are as feminine as the lady of Shalit.

The locusts have figured robes with large open spaces between the masses of the design,

Which have blurred edges like the dark blue units on an old Dutch plate or the flowers in a Dresden ribbon.

The pitch pines are similarly gowned,

But the edges of the masses are more sharply defined.

The weeping willows,

Like other lacrimose people,

Are not especially cheerful additions to the landscape.

They wear garments about all fringe,

Like a Spanish shawl.

The fringe seems a bit overdone.

The tree looks like a girl with long curls,

Or a woman with numerous braids hanging below her waist.

If trees must hang their leaves about them,

Let them emulate the eucalyptus family.

That's a great race.

They are rather slovenly when it comes to housekeeping,

But they are a handsome lot.

From the slim maiden who shoots up a hundred feet and dangles a few scraps of clothing against the sunrise,

To the ample matron who sits as comfortably upon the hillside as a gypsy,

The luxuriant folds of her garments golden with the sunset.

Reviews

Hello Aurora , I really enjoyed this 📖. It was very informative & helped me to understand more, why I luv to hug certain trees. 😘👌 it is as if they are bekoning me somehow. I always hurt for trees which are chopped down. It's just wrong unless they are sick or there's a real important reason. Thankyou I shall look for prt 2. Léna & 🐱🐱🌻🐨

Really interesting , i’ve always enjoyed taking pictures of trees

Really interesting!

Just beautifully narrated.
Thank you.

Terrific production! Wonderful voice and pacing, and I loved the subtle, nature sounds in the backing track. I fell asleep way before the end, but what I heard of the story was beautiful. Thanks much and I hope you’ll make more. Peace.

Super!

That was lovely. You have such a beautiful peaceful voice.

Absolutely loved this, thank you so much 🥰. So so interesting 🥰.