9th Day of Christmas: Evergreen Day

 

Evergreen Day has no particular festivities associated with it, so we are left simply celebrating those plants and trees that keep their leaves/needles all winter long.  

Now, I’m the gutter cleaner here at the Cottage On Vine, so I know damn well that our white pine did (alas, she got sick and we removed her) drop quite a load of its needles into our gutters every Fall.  They even turned brown first.  But of course most of them remain to tough out the Winter, as green as green can be.  It really does seem like the evergreens were put here to remind us that, although it is two weeks past Winter Solstice and the daylight hours have only grown 6 mins. 20 secs. in that time, the green of Spring is nevertheless sure to arrive sooner or later.  See—it’s (it was) right there, that evergreen green, in that white pine, in my front yard.  Woo-woo!

Perhaps evergreens remind us, as well, that even Death is not as final as it seems.  

Conversely, I think it’s true that, if we ever find ourselves without any trees that stay green all winter—we’re screwed.  

 In case this does not seem self-evident to you, let me explain:  every organism that goes extinct leaves us all in a more precarious position, because the Environment is a 3-D network of relationships on up and down and between and across the parts of the food chain.  For example, observers have noted that the reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone area has strengthened the river ecosystem by limiting the number of elk who strip the riverside vegetation bare in the absence of predators.  Also, wolves eat salmon and then crap this nitrogen-rich food along the river, effectively fertilizing the plants there.  This means that the riverside trees and bushes are more lush, and strong enough to maintain intact the soil by the riverbanks.  The effect is great enough to actually affect the course of the rivers: less erosion means a more meandering course.  That's right: the streams in Yellowstone now have take a more wayward path, thanks to the reintroduction of wolves.

 

...To lose an organism is to lose the relationship it had, as well, with other organisms.  Picture a tinker-toy structure, or the game Jenga; if you keep removing rods or connectors, the structure becomes less stable, until finally it crashes to the floor.  You can try to replace the spars with some pipe cleaners you had lying around (say, replacing wolves with dogs), but it's not the same; thus, it will pitch, and then collapse.

And I am using the word “extinct” in an inclusive sense; you don’t get to say that a species is not “extinct” if there remains even one living exemplar of it, or thirty.  Even if there were one passenger pigeon left, the bird would be extinct over all of its former range.  By this, more locally relevant definition, I can say that cougar, elk and bison are basically extinct in Illinois—and Kentucky, and Ohio, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and New York, and Pennsylvania, and…get it?  They used to be everywhere!  And everywhere they used to be, and now are not, is less strong and less fertile as a result of the loss.

A bison herd, recently transplanted to Illinois, part of their former range

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before you accuse me of being Chicken Little, I was reading about how, with more heat and less rain in California, the sequoias are having a harder time pumping water up to their top branches, and so that race of gigantic evergreen tree is endangered by recent climatic changes.  But that’s not the only evergreen tragedy looming…I quote: “the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest — an area the size of Washington state — die since 2000.”—and this is due to the pine bark beetle, emboldened by higher temperatures to swarm upon and kill forests of pines in unprecedented numbers. 

Pine bark beetle damage in a northern forest

 Those beetles are also one factor in the mass die-off of the forests in the frozen North, but the central cause seems to be warmer temperatures.  And yet we keep puttering around in vehicles and heating our homes—hell, running our entire society—with fuel that adds to the probable cause of those climatic changes: greenhouse gases.  

We could talk about wildfires run amok, too, sending up in literal smoke all those trees we've planted in our guilt.  I wonder how many trees had been planted by our brothers and sisters in Australia?  That country seems destined to end up as one giant field of smoldering charcoal.  We could mention the list of other very disturbing trends vis a vis our dying natural world--but it’s still Christmas, and I don’t want to bum you out too much.  We should be informed, and concerned—but our hope and will to act should remain…evergreen.

New forest after fire

 

I repeat: getting bummed out is not the point.  Celebrating our love for our evergreen neighbors, and sharing that love with our children, is.  So we are lucky that there exists a really easy story to tell to children—and I said tell, not read.  Any adult who knows a few tree species can tell it from memory.  You could call it “How Evergreen Trees Came To Be”:

At the beginning of the world, the Great Mystery had finished creating the trees.  But he wanted to give some of them a gift.  So he told them that, if any of them could go seven days without falling asleep, those who did so would receive a gift.  He did not say what the gift would be, but the trees knew that if it came from the Great Mystery, it had to be good.  And the truth was that the gift was better than anything they could have imagined themselves, but I can’t tell you what it is yet because that’s for the end of the story.  

Well, all the trees resolved to stay awake for all of those seven days, and all of them made it a few days, but after 3 the maples [it’s not necessary to name different deciduous trees here, as I have, but if you know a few you can throw them in] started nodding off, and soon they were all asleep.  On the fourth day, even though all the trees were trying to stay awake by constantly whispering to each other, all the elms and ash trees fell asleep.  On the fifth, the hackberries and mulberries and dogwoods and redbuds fell asleep.  Last to fall asleep before the deadline were the oaks, as we can see when they hold on to many of their brown, dead leaves through the Winter.  But even so the oaks are still asleep then.  Well, after seven days only a few trees were still awake [here name as many evergreens as you know]: the pines, the spruces, the fir trees, the holly trees and bushes, the yew and the juniper all remained awake.

And all received the gift of the Great Mystery, too.  They were delighted to find out that they would stay awake through all of Winter’s cold and dark, staying green no matter how bitter the weather turned.  They would serve as reminders to the world that the sun will always grow stronger and Spring’s green will always return.  The Great Mystery told them that people would take them into their houses and decorate them, or use them to make wreaths.  They would enjoy their living fragrance and fresh color, and it would warm their hearts when Winter threatened  to freeze them solid.   

The End.

…This story is an easy-peezy good bedtime story (since it is not read, no light need be on):

1) some Mythical Figure has a contest to see which trees could stay awake for a certain period of time;

2) all the deciduous trees fall asleep before the end;

3) all the evergreens stay awake and receive the gift of staying green all through Winter;

4) embellish the story at any point, at will.

There is a surprising amount of evergreen musics:

Musical Choices (on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlhzrGJaMk&list=PLdartdqjh56CFAe4rPJzhRKjPPjhLX2x1 )

Cliff Richard - Evergreen Tree (Live 1967)
VAN MORRISON ~ Redwood Tree
Roy Orbison - Evergreen
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals - Evergreen
Echo & The Bunnymen - Evergreen
Earth Anthem ~ Dan Fogelberg
Evergreen Boy by SteveForbert
Evergreen - Susan Jacks
Barbra Streisand-Evergreen (theme from "A Star Is Born")
Feeder - You're my evergreen
Ferlin Husky - White Fences and Evergreen Trees
Mott The Hoople Waterlow
Black Crowes- Evergreen
Withering Tree (2010 Remaster) by #Traffic
Ray Charles - This Time Of The Year
Fields of Sun Iron Butterfly
MARMALADE - Lovely Nights
Cat Stevens - King Of Trees
Mostly Autumn - Evergreen
Oh Carolina by #VinceGill
FIGURINES - Drove You Miles
Switchfoot - Evergreen
Evergreen - Dark New Day
"A Marshmallow World" by Dean Martin (Lyrics)
Al Stewart - Feel Like (from "Famous Last Words" - 1993)
Cursive - Northern Winds
Fiery Furnaces - Evergreen
Death Cub For Cutie - Passenger Seat lyrics
Gordon Lightfoot-Knotty Pine
The Last Snowfall-Vienna Teng
Knuckle Puck - Evergreen