Thoreau and the Language of Trees by Richard Higgins

Author:Richard Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520294042
Publisher: University of California Press

The white pine was also central to Thoreau’s work as a naturalist. He marveled at the ingenious ways it wafts its pine seeds through the air. The thin sack that nourishes and protects the seeds inside the pine cone has “a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of . . . expressly that it may transport the seed” hither and yon, he wrote. White pines were the “light infantry” of the forest, Thoreau said. They take the first and longest strides to reclaim land given up by the farmer or consumed by fire, leaping two or three feet in a season toward the sky.

Pitch pines go about it differently, he found. Their seeds reside in pairs in tiny cavities beneath the cone’s prickly scales. The sun and wind “have the key to these apartments” and unlock them in winter. The dark brown seeds “lie exposed with their thin, curved handles upward and outward to the wind, which ever and anon extracts them and conveys them away.” They are blown across ice and crusty snow to new destinations. “The restless pine seeds go dashing . . . like an Eskimo sled with an invisible team until, losing their wings or meeting with some insuperable obstacle, they lie down once and for all, perchance to rise up as pines. Nature has her annual sledding to do, as well as we.”

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