TreeNote

In my family, we always choose a Christmas tree with a top branch that’s long enough to support the cardboard angel our daughter made twenty years ago.

A familiar Christmas song reminds us to “deck the halls with boughs of holly.”

Trees and people share a habit of sometimes hanging on to things that should be shed.

The first time I helped my mom make a pumpkin pie for our Thanksgiving dinner, my job was to retrieve the spices for the filling. I knew what cinnamon and nutmeg were, but what in the world was allspice?

The more I know about and understand the trees that live around me at home, the more connected I feel to their tree relatives around the world.

Although most trees lose their leaves just a few at a time, the leaves of gingko trees drop in synchrony, over the span of a day or two.

As the ultimate of creepy crawlies, spiders get a very bad rap.

My two granddaughters are Sierra and Brooke, wonderful names that connect them to nature.

Trees were critical in the mapping of our nation.

When you look at the cross section of the trunk of an old tree, you see that it has two zones: the sapwood, which is the younger wood that’s closest to the bark — and the heartwood, which is the darker, central part of the trunk.