This is a rather different post than most I have done: Jan and I went on a walk a short distance from our house last Sunday: a very balmy day and the sun shone brilliantly. We walked on the Highline--not Piet Oudolf's much sung railroad garden in Manhattan, but the canal that nurtured Denver's existence and has been immortalized in Robert Michael Pyle's masterpiece The Thunder Tree.
The cottonwoods are beautiful any time of year, of course--as Antonio Machado so eloquently sings about them in his incomparable poem I've copied and translated at the end of this blog But I especially love them in winter when they're "lyres of wind" .
The Highline canal snakes an enormous distance through Denver (71 miles according to Denver Water's webpage about the canal..I imagine there must be dozens cottonwoods growing along every mile of this canal: conservatively I'd guess at least a thousand? Since political conservatism has pretty much lost all vestige of meaning and integrity in the last three years, I underscore that by CONSERVATISM I don't mean the utterly debauched subspecies of predatory warlordism that characterizes one of the two main American political parties (I leave it to you to guess which one I mean). Who ever dreamed that the "left wing" party would become the bastion of genuine conservationism and conservatism and the other party shills of a third rate Communist regime...but I digress...(or perhaps I don't?)
These sun bleached images photographed on January 5, on a somewhat blustery afternoon on my phone can't really convey the enormous majesty of these trees, that seem to me to be frozen in a sort of majestic ballet.
On and on they go, one lovelier than the next--no two really alike...we all notice and love the elegant vase shaped American elm...but are not our Plains cottonwoods have as elegant of vase forms in my opinion: they just haven't been acknowledged! (By the way, I refuse to lump these into Populus deltoides--a fine tree too, perhaps, but nowhere nearly as elegant as our Plains behemoths). For me, these are forever Populus sargentii, named for America's preeminent tree scholar with the Patrician Bostonian surname.
Just as every human being is distinct (even and perhaps especially twins!) I am intrigued and how different each old Cottonwood appears--some for scrunched up like the one above...
Others more spread out: some looking dark and others shining white...the more you look the more distinctive they become. I find it intriguing that a Poet of the Generation of '98 in Spain has so beautifully captured the magic of these cottonwoods (the poem at the bottom of this blog which I've translated literally) but Antonio Machado has described in his Castilian landscape poems the American Western landscape better than any American in English.
Let's not dwell on the truncated Cottonwoods: all of these, by the way, are dead trees standing. Not dead yet, but all expected to die slow deaths since Denver Water will no longer run water in the canal. We will soon have very sunny canal banks (and have to spend a lot of public money removing dead trees)...
Perhaps it's not an accident that Machado's poetry resonates for me on so many levels: like his fellow philosophers, novelists and poets who produced a second Renaissance of Spanish Literature in the decades after Spain lost her last vestige of empire to American imperialism in 1898, we are also living in the twilight dusk of the American Imperium. The desperate failure of America's hawk-like world domination where so often the CIA and Big Business combined to undermine democracies around the world for our short term economic interests. Spain's Dream of Empire reached its nadir with Francisco Franco's fascist victory where the worst elements of the Catholic church joined with the "señoritos" (the rural reactionary plutocracy) and defeated the vastly more popular Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. The parallels with contemporary American politics are striking (albeit instead of the Catholic church we're talking the marriage of Fundamental Christians and rural America). Francisco Franco (admittedly a fascist and repressive and ruthless as he was) somehow compares favorably to America's current oligarchy in many ways. Perhaps because he was not so flamboyantly gross and sleazy on the surface as our own señorito naranjo. Franco's stultifying regime lasted nearly four decades before giving away to the much more democratic and socialist Spain of today. Let's hope it doesn't take so long here! Boy did I digress THAT time! (Or maybe I didn't?)
The bark of cottonwoods is thick and striking..
Jan along a fairly typical Highline cottonwood. They get much bigger than this! (The tree, not Jan).
(Selection from "Campos de Soria" by Antonio Machado ["The fields of Soria"])
He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados, I have returned to see the golden cottonwoods
álamos del camino en la ribera Cottonwoods of the road along the bank
del Duero, entre San Polo y San Saturio, Of the Duero, between San Polo and San Saturio
tras las murallas viejas Across from the ancient walls
de Soria —barbacana Of Soria--the graybeard
hacia Aragón, en castellana tierra— Towards Aragon, in the Castilian land.
Estos chopos del río, que acompañan These poplars of the river which accompany
con el sonido de sus hojas secas With the sound of their dry leaves
el son del agua, cuando el viento sopla, The ring of water when the wind is stirring
tienen en sus cortezas They have upon their trunks
grabadas iniciales que son nombres Engraved initials which are names
de enamorados, cifras que son fechas. Of lovers and numbers which are dates.
¡Álamos del amor que ayer tuvisteis Cottonwoods of love! that yesterday
de ruiseñores vuestras ramas llenas; Had your branches filled with nightingales
álamos que seréis mañana liras Cottonwoods! That tomorrow will be lyres
del viento perfumado en primavera; Of the wind perfumed with Spring!
álamos del amor cerca del agua Cottonwoods of love near the water
que corre y pasa y sueña, Which runs and flows and dreams.
álamos de las márgenes del Duero, Cottonwoods along the margins of the Duero
conmigo vais, mi corazón os lleva! You shall go with me, my heart will take
you with me!
Antonio Machado
It seems rather serendipitous that I was just approaching the subchapter on cottonwoods in “Bring Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants” by Douglas Tallamy. In the book he puts cottonwood in the category with other species labeled as “keystone” along with examples including Black-tailed prairie dogs, sea otters, African elephants, pumas, beavers, and “even the extinct dodo bird.” Mr. Tallamy writes “In the East, 7 species of giant silk moths (Saturniidae), 77 species of noctuid moths (Noctuidae), 7 species of sphinx moths (Sphingidae), and 10 species of butterflies (Nymphalidae and Papilionidae), among many others, all use Populus for larval development.” Of course, these are what feed some of our favorite birds.
ReplyDeleteIt is a paradox that in my area cottonwoods are often removed to expand habitat for grassland birds, which are of a higher conservation concern. So little grassland remains, some of the grassland birds have started nesting in soybean fields.
I think the biggest shame of those cottonwoods dying will be the effects on the people living along Denver’s highline. They give shade from the hot sun. A break from the cold wind. Lastly, a little greenery simply makes people happy.
It is too bad the city of Denver will “have to spend a lot of money removing dead trees.” I understand the need for safety. However, leaving the dead wood to decompose does have benefits too. Below is an excerpt from “Bringing Nature Home.”
“I’ve said little so far about the decomposers in healthy communities, but they also play a vital role in keeping the community in balance. Most decomposers are insects, and they can be present in fantastic numbers, ready to recycle the nutrients in dead plants and animals for later use by the living. Decomposers are also important components of the terrestrial food chain and help provide the energy required by higher trophic levels.”
I am so happy that you of exotic tastes in plants like Cottonwoods. I too like them and around here they are thought of as weed trees. We live near the Wabash River in SW IN and they are seen as a scourge. I have never understood this.
ReplyDeleteThere is a park here in town right on the rive that was renovated. They took out every big old Cottonwood and replace them. They planted trees that won't withstand the regular flooding of this park. So there will be no shade here during the blistering summers we have. People won't use this park much because of it. What were they thinking? Were they thinking, because of their bias against this tree? Sigh~~