I also get rather attached to trees, and the tree I introduce to everyone as the favorite tree of my acquaintance is this old California Buckeye on the UC Berkeley campus. (I haven't seen it in some years... I hope it's OK, as the photos I've found online are all from over 5 years ago...)
Here's an iconic photo of it bare. It looks like it can't possibly be alive, but would burst into green in spring, which always felt like a kind of magic.
This was the first and most enduring thing I loved on the UC Berkeley campus (I saw it bare and rather sinister in the fall, and dubbed it Old Man Willow before learning what species it really was), and there are pictures of me communing with it my freshman year, and then visiting again with my kids.
More impressively, though, here it is featured as the Tree of Wisdom -- with UCB's Nobel Laureates arranged around it :)
(A couple of years ago I wrote a poem about it, which was published in a magazine devoted to trees, along with a photo of the tree, which made me very happy.)
Really enjoyed meeting your favorite trees via this post and the photos. Very jealous of trees with possums and fruit bats! Weirdly, eucalyptus are also nostalgic for me. They were planted all over San Francisco by early settlers -- I heard this was done because they grow fast and they wanted a fast local source of timber... but the wood is actually bad for that, so they just ended up growing here. I'd never seen them growing wild before (possibly had never seen them at all) before emigrating here, and everything about them -- the leaves, the little caps, the fuzzy flowers, the bark -- was so neat, in a way that went from alien to familiar, and now I associate them very strongly with San Francisco and especially my first memories of it.
no subject
Here's an iconic photo of it bare. It looks like it can't possibly be alive, but would burst into green in spring, which always felt like a kind of magic.
This was the first and most enduring thing I loved on the UC Berkeley campus (I saw it bare and rather sinister in the fall, and dubbed it Old Man Willow before learning what species it really was), and there are pictures of me communing with it my freshman year, and then visiting again with my kids.
More impressively, though, here it is featured as the Tree of Wisdom -- with UCB's Nobel Laureates arranged around it :)
(A couple of years ago I wrote a poem about it, which was published in a magazine devoted to trees, along with a photo of the tree, which made me very happy.)
Really enjoyed meeting your favorite trees via this post and the photos. Very jealous of trees with possums and fruit bats! Weirdly, eucalyptus are also nostalgic for me. They were planted all over San Francisco by early settlers -- I heard this was done because they grow fast and they wanted a fast local source of timber... but the wood is actually bad for that, so they just ended up growing here. I'd never seen them growing wild before (possibly had never seen them at all) before emigrating here, and everything about them -- the leaves, the little caps, the fuzzy flowers, the bark -- was so neat, in a way that went from alien to familiar, and now I associate them very strongly with San Francisco and especially my first memories of it.