To Speak for the Trees by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

To Speak for the Trees by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Author:Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00


TWELVE

Splitting Wood

I left my job at the University of Ottawa in 1982. By that point, eight or nine years into our residency, the farm was starting to take shape and our house had begun to feel properly lived in. The gardens were expanding out towards the eight acres they occupy today. The orchard was starting to produce fruit in earnest. We’d planted the black walnut trees in a great ring, an allée tracing the roundabout in front of our house. Hedgerow plantings around the gardens and fields increased the buffet of nectar and pollen, encouraging birds and insects to come and stay awhile. And we maintained the whole 160 acres organically, with dormant oil sprays, sulphur sprays, whitewash and the like—a true rarity in a time in which every farmer’s field in the area was absolutely dripping pesticides. My whole life I’d had a wild love of nature and a desire to be surrounded by green growing things. Here was a place where I could work with my beloved plant kingdom every day.

My father-in-law, Hermann Kroeger, was Deputy Director at the Marshall Space Flight Center and an integral part of the Apollo Program. He told me a story from his university days that has stayed with me. He had started a practicum for his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, learning about some of the materials with which he might one day be asked to build a rocket or a plane or something else people trusted with their lives. His professor presented him with a barrel of metal castings and a file, and a simple assignment: grind all the castings down by hand. They had to be perfectly smooth.

It seemed at first like a mindless, even cruel, bit of homework. There were times over the days he spent filing the castings that he believed the whole endeavour to be little more than a professor’s power trip. But he emerged on the other side with sore arms, a pile of metal filings and polished castings and, he assured me, a more complete understanding of that material than he could ever have had without having completed the assignment. Total immersion gave that to him, along with an appreciation of the material he could have gained no other way. This simple task played a key part in getting a man to the moon. On the farm, I sought my own version of the metal filing effect. I wanted to immerse myself in nature to the point that I understood it as intimately as the people I love, as the inside of my own head.

Surrounded by nature, drinking it in like air, there was no telling where a discovery might pop up. As I watched Chris bringing his axe down to split a dead tree for fuel for the wood stove, I might see the same dark swirls playing across the bark of piece after piece. As I stacked the split wood, I’d write this off as rot, an assumption that was correct much of the time.



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