It’s the season for aimless car jaunts, re-acquainting ourselves with the outside after a long winter. Just look at all that world out there! Here’s a no-charge recommendation: adjust your sight to overlook all things man-made and focus only on trees.
It’s easy, really, to eliminate everything else. You can teach your eyes to jump from tree to tree, skipping over anything manufactured, letting the shrubbery and young trees go, choosing to see only the giants, the solitaries, the old ones who’ve stood there…how long? A hundred years? Two hundred? What a miracle to live so steadily, unchanging in the midst of so much change, living a long slow life in a field, a woodland, a park, a yard, while humans scurry busily about.
As of this writing, there is not even a blush of green in any part of the overstory, even in the Mississippi river gorges, even on south-facing ridges. Above the monochromatic clutter, it is easy to pick out the gnarled shapes of dark trunks reaching their fingers toward the sky.
It’s the moment to see the architecture of trees.
In the bogs and wetlands, the spring peepers, wonderfully-named “chorus frogs”, are sleeping in the mud waiting for their signal to rise and sing. At about the same time, millions of incipient leaves will warm and wake up and begin to unfurl, starting to weave the canopy of summer. We’ll be ready then to see the trees from below, standing close to the trunks and looking upward into the habitation of the birds, into the mottled light and constant rustling. It will all be cloaked in green. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we might glimpse a lordly raptor, perched or soaring.
Welcome to this moment of suspension, of quiet, before the joyous tumult of spring.
To refresh your eyes, and your spirit, note, please note, the architecture of trees.
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Photo by the author, Afton State Park, Minnesota, April 5, 2026.
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