Bird Relics by Branka Arsic

Author:Branka Arsic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Phylloxera; Surface of a leaf covered with galls, vintage engraved illustration. Trousset Encyclopedia, 1886–1891. Courtesy CanStock Photo.

As H. Peter Loewer remarks, Thoreau kept “documenting occurrence [of galls] and their forms throughout the Journal.50 For the continuous interest in galls that followed Thoreau’s first observation that so many trees are marred by morbid outgrowths only confirmed for him that life lives not just by growing forms but also by growing out of forms. Just as flowers burst from buds, so pathological formations bloom in it:

It is remarkable that a mere gall-which at first we are inclined to regard as something abnormal should be made so beautiful as if it were the flower of the tree … -we see that beauty exhibited in a gall, which was meant to have bloomed in a flower-unchecked- … How oft it chances that the apparent fruit of a shrub-its apple-is merely a gall or blight! … So many plants never ripen their fruit. (J, 6, 168)

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