june bride oder baumbastik

Amusing Planet has a nice profile and appreciation of the Bridegroom’s Oak (die Bräutigamseiche) of the Dodauer Forest of Eutin—north of Lübeck, a tree with its own postal code (Postleitzahl) and recipient of human correspondence and secret-keeper.
While the tree’s origins might be conflated with myth and the message of missionaries, the tradition of letter-writing can be traced back to historical star-crossed lovers. A forester’s daughter and the son of a Leipziger chocolatier used the oak as a letter-drop cite for their liaisons—to their parents’ initial disapproval. Later the parents relented and the pair was wed under the trees boughs in June 1891. Their fame spread by word of mouth and people began writing to the tree in hopes of finding true love. Letters deposited in the tree’s trunk are open to public-inspection and several matches have been made over the years. The Bridegroom’s Oak was itself married to the Holy Ghost horse chestnut (die Himmelgeister Kastanie) in April of 2009—across Germany in the Ruhrgebiet near Düsseldorf. The two seem to be handling their long-distance relationship quite well.

inholding

Satellite views of some rural areas of US northwest reveal forested lands that have distinctive chequerboard patterns—almost like the transparent colour tool in digital imagery, whose origins reach back to the mid nineteenth century when federal lands were parcelled to corporations and individuals in such an alternating fashion, beginning with railroad land grants along transportation corridors.
The public retained the spaces in between—these are square mile lots—as wooded refuges buffeted by grazing land managed by homesteaders, and hoped to benefit economically as improved infrastructure increased the value of federal holdings. The government planned to sell the remaining parcels at a profit but this real estate bubble failed to foment as most people motivated to resettle and go West weren’t people of means to begin with and could not afford plots adjacent to the railways and most went unsold or were given away wholesale.

arboretum

Amusing Planet has a touching and gentle appreciation of Survivor Trees from all corners of the globe that bore witness all sort of human catastrophe and crime, but withstood the wreckage brought to its boughs and remained standing as a memorial. One of the more poignant profiles is that of the Miracle Pine that somehow made it through the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011 when everything else was washed away. This lone sentinel sadly too succumbed to the aftermath of the massive flood, poisoned slowly over the following months by salt water. An artificial tribute was put in its place and a high lookout tower surrounds it.