Death of a Concord Kingpost

Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 a.m., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2:30 p.m. They used a block and tackle with five falls, fastened to the base of a buttonwood, and drawn by a horse, to pull it over the right way; so it fell without harm down the road. One said he pulled twenty turns. I measured it at 3 p.m., just after the top had been cut off. It was 15 feet to the first crotch. At 75 feet, the most upright and probably highest limb was cut off, and measured 27 inches in circumference. As near as I could tell from the twigs on the snow, and what the choppers said who had just removed the top, it was about 108 feet high. At 15 feet from the stump, it divided into two parts, about in equal size. One was decayed and broken in the fall, being undermost, the other (which also proved hollow) at its origin was 114/12 feet in circumference. (The whole tree directly beneath this crotch was 19 3/12 round.) … I could count pretty well 105 rings....

Forest Lessons

Botany appealed to the wordsmith as well as the naturalist in Thoreau. “How copious and precise the botanical language!” he enthused in his journal in 1851. He used its precise lexicon to describe trees. The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney’s elm, containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, surmounted with little brownish mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles—these are just expanding or blossoming now. The flat imbricated buds, which open their scales both ways, have had a rich look for some weeks past. Why so few elms so advanced, so rich now? Are the staminiferous and pistilliferous flowers ever on different trees?...

Sailing a Sea of Green

The moonlight now is very splendid in the untouched pine woods above the Cliffs, alternate patches of shade and light—the light has almost the brightness of sunlight, the fulgor. The stems of the trees are more obvious than by day, being simple black against the moonlight and the snow. The sough of the breeze in the pine tops sounds far away, like the surf on a distant shore, and for all sound beside there is only the rattling or chafing of little dry twigs—perchance a little snow falling on them, or they are so brittle that they break and fall with the motion of the trees....

A World Made New

The great pine woods have a peculiar appearance this afternoon. This rather fine snow has lodged in their limbs and given them a grayish look, but as it lies thicker along the core of the limb, it has the appearance, at a distance, of dim white lines lying at various angles like a vast network over the woods, or, rather, like cobwebs seen on the grass on summer mornings. A kind of film over them. I never saw the pitch pines better snowed up. They look like Chinese pagodas....

Transformed by Snow

Thoreau loved trees in all seasons but had a special fondness for trees transformed by snow. Winter made the familiar trees he saw all year look new. After a winter storm, Thoreau went to see them as excited as a child on Christmas morning. He saw surreal and poetic forms in trees covered in snow. They were statues draped in white in a gigantic sculptor’s studio. Trees glistening with ice or clad in a coat of white quickened his pulse and stirred his pen. They stirred some of his best writing about trees.

Heartwood

The thousand fine points and tops of the trees delight me; they are the plumes and standards and bayonets of a host that marches to victory over the earth. The trees are handsome towards the heavens as well as up their boles; they are good for other things than boards and shingles....

In a Barque of Bark

Thoreau loved the ocean and was more of an old salt than is known. But he lived in inland Concord. So he wrote of the forest, metaphorically, as a maritime main, a sea of green on which he sailed. He imagined trees as schooners and barques he navigated across the treetops. He called on ports as he sailed the woods of Concord. Thoreau’s extended nautical imagery of trees tapped into widespread love of the sea in American culture then, and linked his personal love of the ocean and his love of the woods.

A Kingdom of Primitive Oaks

In 1860, Thoreau’s life was focused on trees. In October, he surveyed Concord’s woods and concluded it had no old-growth trees. In November he was amazed to find a forest of old-growth oaks “waving and creaking in the wind” only eight miles away in Boxborough. It was Inches Wood, a forest that had not been cut. He saw the ancient oaks as vestiges of how nature looked in pre-colonial New England and he portrayed them as symbols of hidden riches that we do not value. The oaks elicited some of Thoreau’s strongest calls to preserve trees. But his prediction they would be cut down proved true. They were made into ships timbers for the Union Navy in the Civil War.

A Soul for Trees

Trees helped Thoreau express his deeply religious nature. They were his spiritual guides and companions to his soul. This is true despite Thoreau’s withering criticism of formal religion. He searched for a truer religion in nature. Trees were “shrines” and “burning bushes” that disclosed the divinity in nature to him. Thoreau accepted this as a mystery. Trees knew things he would never know. “Their secret is where you are not and where your feet can never carry you.” They also symbolized an immortality to Thoreau. A tall white pine in Maine was “as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”

Woodplay

It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself. The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. We notice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one and some to the other object....