BLESSED CLARITY

Leaves of Trees (Andrew Ferguson, 07/21/2003, Weekly Standard)

I WAS OUT OF TOWN on a reporting trip a couple months ago, hanging around with a group of people I thought might make a good story.

They had gathered near dawn on a bluff by a river. It was a striking site and I wanted to record its details in my notebook, as a way of splashing a little color into my narrative. Far below us, a wooden footbridge arched across the ice-blue water. White caps rose and fell. Poised at the crest of the bluff was some kind of big tree, its mighty limbs overspreading our little group, and when the wind picked up, a gentle spray of its leaves would flutter to the ground, layering a lush carpet of leaves from some other kind of tree nearby. Yet another, different kind of big tree commingled its branches with the first big tree that I just mentioned, and as the light passed through, it fashioned a cathedral effect framing the hillside beyond, where lots and lots of other big trees formed ghostly shapes in the rising mist, the way this kind of tree sometimes does, the kind of tree that has those scraggly, gnarled limbs and the tiny, pointed leaves. Maybe you know the kind of tree I mean.

Or maybe you don't. My stab at colorful description came to nothing. Wherever I scanned the intricate arrangement of this sun-dappled tableau, trees formed the essential element, and God only knew what kind of trees they were. When I got back home and paged through my skimpy notes, I thought: A writer needs to know his trees. You can't use phrases like "sun-dappled tableau" unless you're ready to say what kind of foliage is causing the sun to dapple the tableau. It constitutes a professional transgression of some sort--a cheat. It's not Jayson Blair, but a whiff of bunco clings to it just the same.

This is how I came to the work of Dr. George A. Petrides. He is the author, now deceased, of "Eastern Trees," an illustrated field guide I bought soon after my frustration on the bluff. I've never met him but feel an intimacy with him, the way a reader does with writers who deliver. Dr. Petrides knows everything about Eastern trees, and as a literary man his chief distinctions are his lack of pretense and his distaste for obfuscation--almost unheard-of in an expert of any kind, but indispensable in anyone trying to get his thoughts down straight and clear. Clarity is a high principle with him. "This book avoids technical botanical terms," he writes. "There seems to be little point in describing a leaf shape as 'cordate,' for instance, when a botanical glossary defines the word as meaning merely 'heart-shaped.' One might as well say 'heart-shaped' from the beginning."

And where there is clarity--if the subject is trees--there is beauty.

Recommended by Andrew Ferguson and illustrated by Roger Tory Peterson? You can't go wrong. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2003 3:58 PM