Life withTrees

The Buddha achieved enlightenment while sitting under the Bodhi Tree, a fig tree (ficus religious). It offers shade, fruit and privacy as daughter trees grow up surrounding the original trunk and create little natural meditation cells among the trunks and branches.

Reverence and care for the tree, or for special trees, is integral to spiritual practice around the world in every tradition.  Thus we preserve trees which give us so many benefits.

An early art class outside my home was with a local artist. The medium was pastel and I clearly remember sitting outside on the grass, pastels beside me, and looking, looking so hard at a tree. I was nine years old.

Recently I joined one of the monthly Nature Journal Club outings in Berkeley, CA organized by artist and naturalist  John Muir Laws.

Birthday Tree, Park Street in Alameda, California.
Sketched on Jan. 26, 2016.

A group of about 35 people including at least half a dozen children and two women in wheelchairs met in the parking lot adjacent to the Environmental Education Center in Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley, CA. As we walked along the trails, I listened to the comments of others and appreciated their journals. I realized how little I knew about the living beauty around me. Here were many more knowledgeable friends who were learning and sharing what they knew.

I joined a later John Muir Laws' class on how to draw trees in the Lafayette library, one of several San Francsco Bay Area locations at which Jack offers a class each month.  To find one near you, click here.  He requests a donation of $20.  This session was far beyond my 9-year old pastel class.  Jack showed us techniques and tricks used by professional artists who provide illustrations for print publications.  He also gave out free sample art supplies to try such as small sheets of stipple paper and frosted mylar (both completely new to me) and a list of useful goodies like non-retro blue pencils for initial sketches. Huge leaps of progress were then possible, depending on how
adventurous an attendee was, before the month's end

Tree on Warwick Avenue, Oakland, California.
Both of these trees were identified after their leaves
opened fully as sycamores.

Nature Journal Club outing.  The plan was that we would create sketches for a brochure about
trees growing near the nature center.

In between the library class and the Nature Journal Club meeting, I adopted a few trees in my neighborhood.  I wanted to identify them.  This, I quickly learned, is no easy task. Field guide books sometimes only show parts of trees such as leaves, flowers, fruits and bark, all of which are not available at that moment on the actual tree.  Photographs of entire trees often show young specimens. Also human beings have created new types of trees, called cultivars.  And of course, we humans "improve" the tree by pruning and grafting. Rather than throw up my hands, I have adopted a few trees so that I can go back and visit them as they go through their annual cycle.

My neighborhood includes Lake Merritt and the Rotary Nature Center, one of John Muir Laws' locations for classes. The January 2016 Nature Journal Club meeting was there. As students of nature, we had a guided tour of the trees in the surrounding park.  Some are over 100 years old. As artists, we divided up into groups and drew aspects of each noteworthy tree. Our sketches are now included in a brochure available to visitors.

Needles and male cone, Canary Island Pine.
This is my contribution to the brochure.
Don at the Jan. 2016 Nature Journal Club outing
at the Rotary Nature Club at Lake Merritt.

Several of the trees we saw had features that are easier to appreciate by touch.  I'm thinking of the cork tree whose bark is that familiar stuff, cork, and the paper tree whose bark hangs in sheets.  It's somewhat like paper, but not exactly. Drawings or even photographs cannot capture shat fingers can.

To circle back to my neighborhood, in the cycle of sketches done from the Tilden Park Nature Journal Club gathering to today, I have watched the trees, once without leaves, grow out this year's leaves.  Some have grown flowers. I did a second sketch of flowers from a small tree that I had sketched last year for someone's traveling journal.  I had no idea what kind of tree it was. I had acquired several fine books to help me identify neighborhood trees and had looked at online resources

Magnolia sketch from 2015 blooming.
From Traveling Sketchbooks USA.

 This year I'm fairly sure it is a magnolia.

Australian Tea Tree.
Jan. 2016 Nature Journal Club Outing at the
Rotary Nature Center. at Lake Merritt.