The grove of maples

Trees are different.  From the moment it sprouts until the day it dies, a tree stays fixed in the same spot.  Its roots are nearer than anything else to the heart of the earth, and its crown is nearer to the sky.  Sap courses through it from top to bottom, from bottom to top.  It expands and contracts according to daylight.  It waits for rain, it waits for sun, it waits for one season and then another, it waits for death.  Not one of the things that enable it to live depends on its will.  It exists and that’s all.  Now do you know why trees are so good to stroke?  Because they stand so staunchly, because their breathing is so slow and so serene and so very deep.

~ Susanna Tamaro

I went up to the Holden Arboretum yesterday to see how the colors were coming along.  Somewhere along the way, and I’m not sure I could find them again, I walked into a grove of sugar maples.  It was a magical, glorious place to be.  I could have spent hours there, watching the light change and the leaves fall.

I would have spent hours there, but there were, eventually, other places I needed to be.

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~ Khalil Gibran

I’m not sure about the age of the trees.  Sugar maples are slow growers.  They start out relatively fast in tree terms (averaging about a foot per year for the first 30 years), then they slow down.  After about 140-150 years, height growth stops and radial growth slows.

Another rainbow trail

The trees looked fairly young to me, but a 30-year-old tree might be only 6 to 8 inches in diameter and 30 to 35 feet in height.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon people’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Every now and then a gust of wind would come through and leaves would rain down, sometimes catching the sunlight as the made their way toward the ground.  (If you look closely, you can see some falling leaves in the above photo.  Click on it to enlarge.)

The color changes up north where the big lake (Lake Erie) keeps the temperatures a little more moderate seem to be a little behind what we’re seeing here.  I had to run errands this morning and couldn’t help but notice how much color there is, especially on the country roads.

My walk today was rushed.  By the time I finished my errands, I didn’t have much time for a walk because the rain from a cold front was almost here.  Quite a few of our trees have already lost a lot of leaves, yet there is still green out there.

I haven’t uploaded the photos from today’s short walk.  Hopefully I’ll get to that over the weekend.  It will be interesting to see what changes are wrought by the cold front.  The temperature is going to take a big dip.  The high for Sunday is predicted to be 49 degrees.

Looks like there is rain in the forecast for most of the weekend.  It will be a good time to get caught up around the house and in the blogosphere.  I’ve fallen way behind again.

I reckon that’s it from the Bogs for today.  Thanks for joining me in the maple grove.  I hope it wasn’t too dull, seeing so many shots of one place.  I’m sure some are better than others, but I had trouble choosing because I’m still seeing the memory of the magic in the maples.

Letting go

Wishing you a weekend filled with joy and magic!

Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.  They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says:  A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life.  The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark.  I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

~ Hermann Hesse

At the edge of the woods

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