My Forests Travels With Trees 1st editon by Janine Burke 052287732X 9780522877328

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ISBN 10: 052287732X
ISBN 13: 9780522877328 
Author: Janine Burke

My Forests Travels With Trees 1st Table of contents:

ELWOOD, MY FOREST
You might be wondering why an art historian is writing about trees. For those of you familiar with Nest: The art of birds (2012), it’s clear how this book came about. It grew from there. (Excuse the pun!) To spend time observing birds and nests is to spend time observing trees, especially those in Elwood, my neighbourhood, near Melbourne in south-eastern Australia. It made me realise how ignorant I was of their histories and journeys, of the extent of their impact on human and non-human cultures. How much we need them. If only the birds could answer our questions about…

TREES AS HOME
Once upon a time, we lived in the trees. It’s called arboreality. A lovely word that suggests trees create their own reality which, in a sense, they do. That was before we evolved as Homo sapiens, before we climbed down from the branches and left our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, behind. Our genus of hominins evolved about six million years ago. In 1974, in northern Ethiopia, the skeleton of one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, was found. At 3.2 million years old, she is justly famous. Though she is nicknamed Lucy, in Amharic her name is Dinknesh…

GARDENS OF EDEN
On a sultry summer afternoon in 2002, I caught the tube to Hampstead to visit the Freud Museum London. I was taking a break after the publication of Australian Gothic: a Life of Albert Tucker. Writing some books can wring the life out of you, and that one did for me. Though I had Bert’s approval and worked closely with him, he decided to wait until I’d finished the manuscript before he read it. So when Bert died in 1999, he hadn’t read a word.

When his widow Barbara read the manuscript, it seemed she took umbrage at my suggestion…

TREES OF JESUS
Though I’m here in my study, reading the Bible for this chapter, I must confess I’m not a Christian. Perhaps being educated in Catholic girls’ schools and taught by a series of grumpy nuns unqualified as teachers rather alienated me. As a ten-year-old confessing my sins to the shadowy figure of a priest seated behind a curtain in the confessional, it seemed I had nothing very startling to report. Really nothing to report at all, unless squabbling with my sister about who would have first shower in the morning counted. Well, yes, it did. Three Our Fathers and six Hail…

TREE WORSHIPPERS
As I write this chapter, it’s autumn, or fall, as North Americans name it. Not a bad idea given that’s what leaves do from many deciduous trees. If you’re wondering about the derivation of ‘autumn’, it’s from the Latin (autumnus) and prior to that perhaps Etruscan, suggesting a change or a loss.

Autumn is spectacular in Melbourne. We’re famous for it. The leaves of the Liquidambar (Liquidambar styraciflua) glow with colours so vivid it seems they are on fire: burnished gold and tangerine, hot bright green, scarlet and bloody burgundy, and all that can happen on one tree. When the…

NAMING TREES
There’s a high storm thrashing Elwood and I’m in the kitchen watching the Silver Birch hit the windows; its leafless branches (it’s winter) are like strands of long, wild, tawny hair. Don’t break the windows, I beg the tree silently. Firstly, it would make a dreadful mess and secondly, we might have to trim you, Betula pendula, and you’d look apeculiar shorn.

The tree’s reckless power and its ability to arouse fear and wonder make me consider the ways in which we symbolise nature’s intentions in order to understand them, to include ourselves in them and attempt to placate them….

KNOWING TREES
When I lived in Tuscany, my writing companion was a Fig. I had left almost everything behind in Melbourne: my family and friends, my job as an art history lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts and the house I rented in Carlton. All my furniture and other worldly goods were stored in a hangar-sized shed near Melbourne Airport. And then there was Anthony, with the calm visage of an angel, and a personality to match, whose heart I broke. I could not be the woman he wanted me to be, the one who would marry him and have…

TREES AS VICTIMS
In Elwood I’ve come to know several generations of Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) who breed and roost in a Sugar Gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) next to Elster Creek and near the Sir John Monash Bridge. It’s the tallest Eucalypt hereabouts. The birds are hilariously funny and loud, screeching around the neighbourhood, which irritates the other birds who dive bomb them, all to no avail because the cockies are so big and bold, they couldn’t care less. There’s a hole, several metres up in the tree, which is their nest. You can tell when it’s inhabited due to the poo around the…

WOMEN OF THE BANYAN
As I write, it’s mid-May 2020 and I’m concerned for the women of Varanasi. The time is approaching for an annual, sacred, women-only ritual in northern India, which this year falls on 22 May. But it’s unlikely to take place because the entire planet is in the thrall of COVID-19. From The Times of India, I learn there are eighty-seven people afflicted in Varanasi and the city is shuttered.

Around the world, millions are infected and thousands have died. Most of us are frightened and anxious. We watch the news all day long. We’re obliged to stay in our homes…

FAIRY-TALE FORESTS
I’m in a forest in an art gallery. It’s a labyrinth made of drifting voile curtains in subtle tones of mauve and grey imprinted with towering, dark images of trees. It reaches from a very high ceiling to the floor. Though it’s in a public place, this forest makes me feel sequestered. It’s shadowy and somehow secret. What’s around the next corner? Mystery? Revelation? A nasty surprise? I think of Little Red Riding Hood and the other fairy-tale children whose exploration of the forest can symbolise maturity, courage and independence. The trek into the unconscious, the reward of selfknowledge, is…

SENTIENCE
I interviewed an august botanist for this book. I was interested in the scientific approach to trees and how it might intersect with more lateral viewpoints, such as the possibility trees are sentient. It’s an issue I touched on when discussing Miranda Gibson’s tree-sit and something of which German forester Peter Wohlleben, globally admired for The Hidden Life of Trees, has no doubt. For me, the jury is still out. The pagan in me wants to believe. The sceptic resists.

The Botanist and I met for coffee at Melbourne University where I’m an honorary senior fellow. It’s not as grand…

TREES AS WITNESSES
It was the one cold day I experienced in Louisiana. The wind was chilly, bitter, insistent as it wrapped around my legs and tugged at my jacket. My hands had turned a fine, mottled blue. In New Orleans, even if the morning was mild, the steamy heat rose by midday, and I was used to dressing lightly in a cotton blouse and leggings.

It was 2015 and I was at Evergreen Plantation, about an hour’s drive north from the city along River Road and halfway to Baton Rouge. There’s a lot of sky to see in the lush, flat, green…

Epilogue
I think it’s appropriate to end where we began—in Elwood. It’s spring and gusty northerlies are swirling through the suburb. The trees and bushes have bloomed, providing a heady mixture of beauty and perfume—pink and white blossom trees whose artful architecture inspired Monet and Van Gogh, divinely sensual Tulip Magnolias (Magnolia soulangeana), several types of Wattle, Common Jasmine (Jasminum officinale) which decks fences in sweet-smelling riot, flawless Camellias and my absolute favourite, Pittosporum (Pittosporum undulatum) whose scent makes me fairly swoon with pleasure.

Though one must be careful. The bees are harvesting these flowering plants, so before you…

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