I think that I shall never see
An oak among our downtown trees …
As our trees begin to please, turning color, some sooner, some later, I thought I would revisit a column that echoes back to 2014. You can also find it in Our Town Oak Park, available at both of our excellent new indie bookstores, Dandelion and Book Loft:
The Downtown Oak Park Business Association recently sponsored an Arbor Day contest, asking us to wax eloquent about “what trees do for you,” a remarkably pastoral notion for a business organization whose main job is promoting commerce.
Arbor Day is “Tree Appreciation Day,” a gentle reminder to keep planting these dinosaurs of the plant world to make up for the many lost to loggers and wildfires.
Oak Park and River Forest are located in what is called an “urban forest.” Lovely mature trees, which are nothing to sneeze at — unless they’re in spring bloom — and definitely worth writing testimonials about.
Trees, in fact, are our single most important natural resource, reflected in the names of both towns (and adjacent Forest Park).
Long ago, Oak Park loved elms so much, our parkways were planted thick with them, resulting in spectacular cathedral canopies over our streets. But they did not, alas, have the forestry foresight — or arboreal acumen — to predict that invasive beetles could easily migrate from bough to intertwined bough, wreaking havoc and obliterating these blessed shade-casters.
There is safety in diversity, we learned — even as we began investing in human diversity — and our foresters now plant a wider variety of species to replace the old elms and green ash as they die.
As of 2014, there were an estimated 170 pre-settlement oak trees left in the village. A group called Historic Oak Propagation Project (HOPP), spearheaded by local arborist Kathryn Jonas and local environmental activist Julie Samuels, in conjunction with Morton Arboretum and the Openlands West Suburban TreeKeepers program, collected acorns from 200- to 300-year-old native Oak Park bur oaks and planted them on private property and village parkways. So there’s hope for a renaissance.
Oak Park’s very name pays homage to the tree that once dominated this continental divide (though it no longer cracks the top five in our tree surveys). I haven’t spotted many oaks in the downtown business district. Downtown Oak Park, in fact, is one of the few relatively treeless plains in the village (hence the bastardization of Joyce Kilmer’s famous ode at the top of this column).
The contest instructions were pretty general — discuss “What do trees do for you?” in a poem, essay, or short story, a thousand words or less. Here’s my unsolicited verse.
I settled on oaks because we settled under oaks:
An Ode to Oaks
They call you old growth, pre-settlement, heritage oaks,
Some here before Kettlestrings arrived in the 1830s,
Before James Scoville settled on the high ridge
Left by receding glaciers, forming the lower lip of Lake Michigan.
Every summer, you shield us from scorching rays,
Your curling branches elicit a certain majesty,
Evoking some Gothic fable from other centuries.
Every winter you play possum, miming death,
Every spring, defying logic, new shoots explode from your rigid surfaces.
You have given your life to embellish doors and floors
And chairs that support our derrieres.
You breathe in pollution, exhale oxygen, no scolding or strings attached,
And produce the most beautiful seed on the planet.
When autumn wanes and other trees empty their branches,
Your withered leaves cling, playing the wind for one season more.
You make highways for squirrels and perches to rest wings.
You buffer us from the awful emptiness of the sky
And instruct us in the power of silence and endurance.
You embody strength and perseverance.
May you always find safe arbor in this
Your namesake park.