Nature’s endless employment of beauty to achieve its utilitarian ends
8th January 2012Are we hard-wired to love trees?
1st February 2012Nature as an Enchanted Labyrinth
Trees: An enchanted labyrinth.
Edwin Way Teale was a natural history writer who wrote and edited over 30 books, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing. He is less well known than many other writers of the time, but was a mentor to today’s modern nature writers. Here he describes how an interest in nature interconnects with so many similar yet distinct areas of study. This struck a particular cord with me, as the practice of arboricultural consultancy – while primarily about trees – leads into so many interlinked yet distinct professions and areas of study (landscape architecture, mycology, planning and development, law, ecology and even sociology – to name a few!). Arboriculture leads us as far as we care to go!
It occurred to me today that an interest in nature leads you into a kind of enchanted labyrinth. You wander from corridor to corridor; one interest leads to another interest; one discovery to another discovery. It matters little where you begin. You may first fall under the spell of birds or wild flowers or you may become curious about lichens or grasshoppers or trees or rocks or fossils or waterweeds. If you have any inquisitiveness at all, you soon find yourself branching off, wandering enchanted down charming bypaths…
We cannot watch sandpipers, following receding waves and stabbing at the wet sand for food, without soon wondering what they are eating. And that leads us into another of nature’s innumerable corridors. All living things are linked together in various ways—by predator chains and food chains, by parasitism and symbiosis. Nothing lives to itself alone. Nothing is disassociated from its surroundings. An interest in tadpoles sooner or later leads to an interest in the dytiscus beetle that preys on them. The study of hognosed snakes inevitably leads to the study of toads upon which they feed. Even if your special interest is catbirds, you are led to a consideration of the life of the deer mouse. For these mice often appropriate the nests of catbirds as winter homes. Everywhere we turn in nature, new and interesting corridors appear before us, waiting to be explored. All are interconnecting. They lead us as far as we care to go.
Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons. The Journal of a Naturalist’s Year.
Adam
I'm a Chartered Arboriculturist at AWA Tree Consultants Ltd. As well as detailing our recent tree survey and arboricultural consultant work, this blog includes wide ranging arboricultural musings, including tree facts, opinion and anecdotes on trees in human culture.
Related posts
4th October 2024
