The trunk of this Wandoo has all the colour and curvature of a human body. Its warm tones and taught muscles rise confidently in the January warmth, despite no rain having nourished this tree in a long time. Don’t you just want to run your hand over this bark?
Jane Hirschfield has written a poem called The Tree.
Tree
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Having read Hirschfield’s poem, I started to think that the good nature photographers could be said to plant the seed of a redwood – or a Wandoo, to use a more Western Australian example – in our little urban lives. As the tree rises up besides us, the clutter of our housed existences is thrown into salutory perspective.
