Those stately old Erb Park trees have witnessed a lot in their hundreds of years -- the design and construction of three swiming pools, the 1970s Dutch Elm plague, the historic wind shear storm of 2011 and more teen-aged mischief than they'll ever report. This past weekend, they watched and participated in the Wisconsin Arborist [...]
“I’m so excited for you to meet my trees,” my daughter Molly said as she greeted me in the front yard of her new apartment. We had come to Minneapolis to help her move, but she had already taken care of, well, everything, except the assembly of a new bed and she did most of [...]
I love to walk through the woods on any occasion, but especially with my daughter Molly because she knows things. Yesterday, we went foraging -- she for morel mushrooms, garlic mustard and stinging nettles and me for stories. While she came up empty handed, which is good, she said, because garlic mustard and stinging nettles [...]
I'm know I'm not the first to appreciate the metaphor of the tree, but every season I admire them more. I like their root-to-seed circle of life and the history we trace through the circles in their trunk. I admire their bend-don't-break attitude, their posture, and the dignified way they welcome strangers to nest on [...]
Saturday afternoon, three months after we carefully and unanimously selected her to bring her fresh, festive, pine-scented self into our cabin, we returned our sweet little Christmas tree to the woods from which we'd plucked her. Owing both to her own fortitude and to our cabin's low-set thermostat, she did not drop a single pine [...]