One Picture
Faith in a Seed
Our Canadian hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) eventually became a substantial tree, which makes what's under that magnifying glass seem even more improbable.
I Blame Thoreau
Thoreau made me wonder what was hiding inside a Canadian hemlock cone, so naturally I got out the magnifying glass
No porch. No woodworking project. No beagle. Not even a recognizable part of the house.
Just a magnifying glass, my old helping-hands tool and a few tiny brown objects scattered across a white background.
But there's a reason I took it.
Henry David Thoreau made me do it.
Faith in a Seed
I've mentioned Thoreau's Faith in a Seed before. In fact, I've called it my favorite book about nature.
The book grew out of Thoreau's late work studying how seeds travel, how forests renew themselves and how one generation of plants gives rise to the next. What fascinates me is the enormous amount of attention he was willing to give to something most of us would walk right past.
And then there's that wonderful thought of his:
I have great faith in a seed.
He goes on to say that if you can convince him a seed is there, he's prepared to expect wonders.
That's what was rattling around in my head when I started looking at the cones from our Canadian hemlock.
I knew there were seeds in there.
But I wanted to see them.
So I Got Out the Magnifying Glass
This is where Thoreau and I part company technologically.
He wandered the woods around Concord.
I went downstairs and got my helping-hands magnifier.
Same general idea.
Mine has wing nuts.
Under the glass are pieces from one of those tiny hemlock cones and the seeds that came out of it. Suddenly something I could barely see became surprisingly intricate. Dark lines. Delicate sections. Shapes and textures that had been there all along but were too small for me to appreciate.
That little seed was capable of becoming a Canadian hemlock.
Think about that for a minute.
Our Hemlock
We planted our Canadian hemlock in the backyard in 2007 because the yard needed some evergreen color during our rather gray Albany winters. We knew from the beginning that it couldn't stay forever. Hemlocks get big.
Our yard does not.
Still, we planted it.
And for eleven years it grew into one of my favorite things in the backyard. By 2015, it had become one of the anchor plantings in a corner of the garden.
Then, in 2018, it had simply gotten too large for our little tenth-acre lot.
So down it came.
I was surprised by how much that bothered me. Years later, I still wrote about the emotion of removing that beautiful tree.
Maybe that's why this photograph means more now.
The tree is gone... the seed remains.
Thoreau Was Onto Something
We spend most of our time noticing trees when they're big.
We admire the height, the branches, the shade. We complain about the leaves. We worry about roots. Eventually, in a little city yard like ours, we sometimes stand there with a saw and realize the thing has become much larger than we ever imagined.
But it all began with something like this.
Something so small I needed a magnifying glass to really look at it.
There's a lesson there that Thoreau understood far better than I do.
A seed asks you to imagine what isn't there yet.
A trunk.
Branches.
Shade.
Birds sitting in it.
Snow collecting on its needles.
Eleven years of looking out the window and seeing a hemlock where once there was nothing.
That's an awful lot to hide inside something you can hold on the tip of your finger.
The photograph becomes a time machine in both directions.
I can look backward and remember our hemlock standing in the yard.
But look through that magnifying glass and you can go the other way, too.
You can see the tree before the tree existed.
Thoreau called it faith.
Standing here at House 173, after nearly three decades of watching tiny things grow much larger than I ever expected, I think he had it about right.
Sometimes you just have to look closely enough.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
Keywords
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