In Favor of Trees
John Brinckerhoff Jackson · Arnoldia. · 2004
In Favor of Trees John Brinckeihoff Jackson Like millions of other Americans I have no great liking for wilderness and forest, but like the majority of Americans I am fond of trees: individual trees, trees in rows along the street or in orchards, trees in parks.I continue to plant them when and where I can -to such an extent that when their leaves start to fall I look forward to many months of raking and transplanting in preparation for the spring.The value of trees is not only that they can be beautiful and that they give us shade and privacy and coolness in the summer; they also demand our attention and care.We are constantly interacting with trees: some of them give us fruit, others give us firewood, and all have to be thought about and even worried about when we consider the future.In brief, trees give us a sense of responsibility and sometimes a kind of parental pride,-each domesticated tree calls for an individual response, a response far richer, far more rewarding than a strictly passive -aesthetic or ecological -response to the forest.What geographers call the Atlantic landscape stretches across northwestern Europe -England, France, the Lowlands, Germany, and Scandinavia; and in the course of the last three centuries it has been transplanted to Canada and the United States.It can be thought of as the gradual creation of those Indo-European migrants who came out of Asia some seven thousand years ago with their livestock and who eventually occupied all of Europe.In addition to the Atlantic landscape north of the Alps, they also produced the Mediterranean landscape -equally varied and beautiful, but adjusted to a mountainous terrain, hot dry summers, and no great abundance of moisture.By contrast, the Atlantic landscape -both in America and in the Old World -is characterized by a green, rolling topography with many rivers and plenty of rainfall.Mexico has a version of the Mediterranean countryside, and so have parts of New Mexico and California.Century after century the early Indo-Europeans wandered from the Ukraine to Greece and Norway and even Ireland.When they occasionally settled down, their livestock grazed in the surrounding forests and grasslands, and families raised small crops of wheat or rye or harley.They brought with them out of Asia certain fruit trees.Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, means "father of apples," for the mountains in that part of Central Asia once contained immense forests of nothing hut apple trees, as well as forests of pear trees and apricot trees.Those fruit trees, as well as certain nut trees, were greatly prized hy the migrants, for The author's pastels, seen on pages 15 and 16, are used by courtesy of Helen Horowitz.