Little Apple

This entry is another Ecotone collaborative blog on place, which this time looks at trees.

Some trees are meant to be touched.

I think it’s the manzanita’s bark. Warm copper-red and smooth, smoother by far than eucalyptus whose bark has shredded off in shaggy, untidy strips. The manzanita’s shredding is subtle and delicate, waxy rolls curling like planed metal or even plastic. But there is none of the coldness of metal or lifelessness of plastic. This is a warm tree with a warm heart.

I first saw manzanitas in Napa Valley, in the hills above Calistoga. I couldn’t stop stroking their trunks. Madrones have a similar bark-both these trees are in the Ericaceae, same family as blueberriesbut with their larger, more imposing bulk and leaves, seem less inviting to touch. Many manzanitas rarely grow taller than eight feet, qualifying more as shrubs than treesperhaps it’s the scale, as well as the irresistible bark, that draws me. The same is true of Brancusi’s sculpture of a seal in the Pompidou Museum in Paristhe combination of scale and smoothness-that makes touching it irrestistible (a headache for museum staff).

Ursula K. LeGuinn set her utopian anthropological novel Always Coming Home in a Napa Valley with a different future than the one it seems to be embarking on… the characters share a strong kinship with the land they inhabit, share a lot with the Native Americans who lived there over 200 years ago. They greet all the living things they encounter with a “heya” as if they were meeting a friend on the road.

Heya madrone, heya coyote, heya jackrabbit. Heya foothills. Heya northern chaparral.

Heya, manzanita, I still say, even if sometimes not out loud. This one is never a stretch for me. It is a tree with a warm heart. Touch me, it says.