Sentinel

"Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
Let fortune's bubbles rise and fall;
Who sows a field, or trains a flower,
Or plants a tree, is more than all."
-- John Greenleaf Whittier

I have had an interesting relationship with trees.
Perhaps this is due to my father's influence.  As a horticulturist, it seems my dad was always either planting a tree, harvesting from a tree, pruning a tree, espalier-ing a tree, or even cutting down a tree 
My son jokes that whenever we move to a new house, something we've done quite a few times in the past decade or so, I set about murdering all the trees.
But I learned from my dad that a tree isn't just a tree and that trees need to be properly placed, both in relation to buildings and other plantings, as well as to usage and climate.
Sounds kind of snobby, but it really isn't.
I'm just particular about trees.
It bothers me to see a tree planted too close to a house or road, knowing that it's beauty will suffer as it grows squished up tightly to the building or its branches will end up being chopped off haphazardly when they grow to tangle in wires or interfere with traffic.  Some trees are "junk" trees, truly out of place in the city or suburbs.  If trees are too crowded none of them will do well, requiring a thinning of the stand.
I remember a trip to Wisconsin when I was about 7 when my dad dug a dozen or more pine trees, Blue Spruce, I think.  He probably had planted them on our property there as well, though I don't remember that.  We drove home, our VW Bus packed with trees and me perched on a box between the two front seats.  I don't remember who the trees were for initially, but I know some of them ended up planted around the perimeter of our backyard in Waseca, Minn.  That was more than 40 years ago, and sometimes I wonder if any of them are still there.
My son told me the other day that a pine tree we planted at our first house here in Iowa, three houses ago now, was recently cut down.  I remember my dad being here nearly 20 years ago when my boys, then 3 and 5, helped him and my husband plant that tree.  Every now and then I would drive through the old neighborhood just to take a look at that tree.  I suppose it had grown too large for the space or perhaps wasn't in good enough condition to remain. 
My parents used to drive up from Arkansas to visit us at Thanksgiving, a Christmas tree tied onto the back of their pickup.  My Dad had planted those pines on his retirement property and brought us one each December for years.  Every summer I canned applesauce from his apple orchard and for a time enjoyed cider he pressed himself.
I was never a tree climber, unlike my daughters, who loved to ascend into the branches and hang out together.  I climbed a tree once in my life and was then too afraid to climb down.  My cousin had to retrieve my uncle to give me a lift.  And while my dad didn't mind a kid climbing a tree, swinging from the branches was most definitely frowned upon.  It wasn't good for the tree, you see.  It still bugs me to see someone mistreating a tree in this way.
Our second house in Iowa had way too many trees for a suburban yard.  A tornado in 1997 took care of that problem, requiring us to pull down many a damaged tree.  A lovely huge pine tree in the front yard was nearly uprooted.  The day my husband cut it down, I held my then three-year-old daughter while she sobbed with a sorrow so big she couldn't contain it.
Our backyard neighbors there had a huge, old locust tree - a junk tree if ever there was one - that liked to drop its three-inch long thorns across the fence into our yard.  Many times one of my little ones came crying to the door for me to bandage a nasty poke.  My dad told us how we could secretly poison the tree from our side of the fence, but we were too chicken to follow through.
When we buried my dad's ashes, nearly seven years ago now, in the old family cemetery in southeastern Iowa, I was struck by another tree memory.  I looked up at the stately pines planted on the far side of the cemetery and remembered being there with my dad when he planted them.  It must have been sometime after my grandfather died in 1969.  The trees were quite small, maybe two feet high then, and I helped my dad carry buckets of water to water them in.  In 2004, the trees were huge.  I can't even begin to estimate how tall they were. 
I'm looking forward to moving to our next and final house, hopefully as soon as two years.  While we haven't settled on a location - city or country, we just aren't sure - I know I will plant trees.  Shade trees, fruit trees, and a couple of pines for Christmas lights and cones.
While my dad's knowledge of horticulture didn't really rub off on me, his love of trees surely did.  And for that, I am grateful.
Trees truly are sentinels of time.