Trees in the News

Breathing for Us, by Mark Cullen

Mark Cullen discusses in an article for  Your Home (The Toronto Star) the  Trees Ontario newly released  report “A Healthy Dose of Green: A green prescription for a healthy population.”

***************************************************************

In honour of the International Year of the Forest, Nature Canada challenged its supporters to show their love for trees by sharing their tree-hug themed photos in a Hug-a-Tree contest.

Our well known and valued OUFC member Edith George was very exited to be the winner of an Apple IPad for her photo of her friend Norma Falconer hugging a willow tree at the Terra Cotta Inn

http://naturecanadablog.blogspot.com/2012/01/announcing-winners-of-our-hug-tree.html

*******************************************************************

For a very good read you should consider subscribing to:  http://www.opfa.ca/newsletter/Issue%20202%20june%202011.pdf

****************************************************

Sarah Hampson
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 12, 2011 6:42PM EDT

We had to occupy ourselves, and so off we would go to build another GeSaraDa – the name, a compilation of our given ones, for the forts we liked to build with sticks, broken branches and logs, layered and mud-packed into place, leaning against a tree trunk to provide a damp, earthy home.

Entering a forest is “almost like leaving land to go into water, another medium, another dimension,” John Fowles wrote in his meditation on nature and creativity, The Tree.
“When I was younger, this sensation was acute. Slinking into trees was always slinking into heaven.”

And so it was for us. You could do anything in there, have your own rules like Robin Hood, think anything – imagine enemies in the trees or fairies, believe that you were a lost family Robinson or that your brother was a hunter and you Pocahontas, able to communicate with animals and hear whispery voices of trees in the swish of their branches.

It’s no wonder J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis situated their fantastical children’s fictions in forests, a place, like the inside of a creative mind, that’s secret, overgrown and interlaced with vines of this and branches of that, thrumming.

As a retreat, a forest is a cocoon. You can lose yourself yet feel safe. Sheltered on the soft floor of a lush, green enclosure that towers high into the air, you’re not exposed as you are in other landscapes, a desert or mountains or water.

And with the presence of trees, standing there, straight and tall, their arms outstretched, you don’t feel alone in the way those other places can make you feel. They’re loyal guardians. Hours would slip by unnoticed when my siblings and I disappeared into a forest. Then, at the end of our day, we would emerge, calmly prepared to once again take our place at the table of the adult world of manners, expectations, duties, rules.

Now, let me make a little clearing here in the woods of my words. I like high heels, okay? I don’t wear hemp. I resist ponytails. I would never ride a bike in the deep downtown no matter what the carbon-footprint police say. Too dangerous. Besides, I need to be in a car bubble, air-conditioned, with music, floating down the avenues, untouched by the throng. I have never hugged a tree in my life.

I make that little clarification because even a philosophical love of trees can feel earnest and New Agey, not the sort of conversational fodder for the cool, ironic denizens of urban centres, which is where more than 80 per cent of Canadians now live.

While the variety and abundance of trees help to form the identity of a place – the cedars of Lebanon are featured on that country’s flag, Florida would not be Florida without its iconic palm trees, and Canada is the land of the boreal, the last intact forest on the planet – we are disconnected from them.

Tree people (as those who love them like to call themselves) don’t tend to broadcast their interest. They keep it to themselves, secretive as the forest itself, communicating it only among themselves, like collectors of esoteric art or cultish members of a lost Druidic tribe.

(see the rest of the story at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/summer/the-enduring-power-of-trees/article2128438/)