C'mon In, The Shade's Fine

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When a breeze stirs the leaves, they should, as Virgil wrote, "give tongue to the wind."

The leaves should be dark and heavy to absorb the sun's rays, and plentiful so the air is cooled as photosynthetic water vapor escapes the leaves, providing a microclimate that can be as much as 9 degrees cooler than the surrounding area.

These are the reasons you will find both the cows and me beneath a good shade tree.

I like to think that Nature invented leaves not for photosynthesis, but for us. Her first thoughts were to provide for the farmer a cool respite on a hot plowing afternoon; for the poet a rhyme — "A tree that may in Summer wear/A nest of robins in her hair"; for the child a shady spot for swinging; and, most assuredly, for me, simple pleasures.

Some people think leaves are common; there are so many. A Connecticut arborist calculated that a sugar maple sports 162,500 leaves; a mature American elm (if one can be found) as many as 5,000,000.

Find a leaf that has escaped cute caterpillars and homely bugs like mites, aphids, and inchworms; lace bugs, leafhoppers, and whiteflies; birch borers, leaf rollers, and weevils. Find a leaf without holes or ragged edges, free of fungus, cankers, and galls; a leaf without rusty orange spots or silvery white spots. Find a leaf free of scab and blight, scale and rot; one without an insect's winter home or its brooding larvae. If you find one, save it. And place it next to a single, perfect rose.

The best shade tree is the white ash. Here, I will hear arguments from the oak, beech, elm, maple, basswood, sycamore, honey locust, and horse chestnut crowds. But you can't beat sentiment. Forty years ago I helped my uncle plant a white ash in our backyard. There is something special about being present at the beginning, not noticing the length of its shade growing imperceptibly each year, and one morning walking out the backdoor and saying, "Hey, that's one magnificent tree."

I think the reason that I never really saw the tree until recently is that it was never a childhood companion. As a sapling it was graceful, but not sturdy enough even to mark second base. It grew stout, spreading branches, but not fast enough for me to use them for climbing and swinging and tree houses. When the trunk grew massive with deep, rugged diamond-shaped ridges, I was too old to use it in a game of hide-and-seek. Now it is just a tree — noble and stately — the handsomest tree within several city blocks, and it fits the curve of my back perfectly.

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