Now that I’m studying trees as individuals, I see more and more things I’ve never noticed before.
Today I am paying attention to roots. As a child, I learned to draw trees with straight trunks that flared at the base, where the tree met the ground. But I never thought of the flare as the top of the tree’s roots. Now I’m looking at those flares and seeing how they often continue along the surface of the soil, half-buried for several feet for more.
Sweet and silver birches, in particular, have extremely athletic roots, running over and around rocks. I have seen them on cliffs, scrappy little trees hanging on by a number of slender roots that run across the rock and plunge into cracks to seek out soil.
There’s a silver birch up on the mountain that has a root, thick as a small trunk, extending down the face of a boulder to anchor the tree in the soil below.
Along the banks of streams, I have seen birches whose roots encircled rocks and joined together beneath the rocks, which were later washed away by a flood, leaving the tree perched in the air on its own roots.
From a distance, I see tan blobs in the branches of a tall tree. They look familiar, but what could they be? Walking closer, I find some on the ground. They are seed holders, the cup-shaped containers that result from the fertilization of tulip-tree flowers. The membranes that once held the seeds are littered on the ground, left by the squirrels that ate the seeds.
There is always something new to find in the woods.
