I An Eye for Trees
Thoreau observed trees daily on his walks and as a surveyor and nat-
uralist. He loved majestic elms and oaks—but also common or
small trees and their smallest parts. He
took in their shapes, colors, and textures—
root, trunk, crown, leaf, blossom and cone.
Thoreau’s disciplined observation of trees, and his desire to see them, deep-ened his creative response to them.
‘The fine tops of the trees are so relieved against the sky that I never cease to admire the minute subdivisions.’
‘A tree seen against other trees is a mere dark mass, but against the sky it has parts, symmetry and expression.’
Thoreau’s sketches
The lecture has three parts. It explores Thoreau’s keen observation of trees, his creative response to them as a writer and trees as his spiritual companions.
The limbs of Minot Pratt’s “stupendous
elm” looked to Thoreau like“vast thunderbolts
stereographed against the sky.’
Henry Thoreau loved trees and saw and wrote about them as few others have. He admired their beauty and found poetic forms and mythic meaning in them. Thoreau studied how trees grew, and he also took them as his spiritual companions. He knew trees so well he could discern their individual character. In short, he spoke their language.
Pairing selections from Thoreau’s writing with photographs of trees, “Thoreau and the Language of Trees” explores the writer’s passion for trees, how he saw them and his imag-inative response to them.
Thoreau and the
Language of Trees
An Illustrated Lecture by Richard Higgins
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II A Poet’s Trees
III The Spirits of Trees
Thoreau called the woods his “holy of
holies,” where he renewed his soul.
Trees taught him spiritual lessons about
patience, perserverance and reaching for
light. The autumn leaves that fall so
gracefully and without worry to the forest
floor, he wrote, “teach us how to die.”
Trees spoke to all that was evergreen in
Thoreau. When he felt despair, the mere
scent of pine could revive his spirits.
ILLUSTRATION: Most of the photographs
are my own. The talk also includes images
by the landscape photographer Herbert
Wendell Gleason, as well as Thoreau’s own
sketches of trees.
AUDIENCE: “Thoreau and the Language
of Trees” is about 45 minutes long. It can
be enjoyed by a general audience as well as
by foresters, conservationists, landscape
designers and anyone who loves trees.
‘Their secret is where you are not and where your feet can never carry you.’
Trees stirred Thor-
eau’s poet’s soul
and his creative
genius as writer. He
called the trees
around Walden the
slender eyelashes
fringing earth’s
liquid eye. With his
pen, he turned
trees into ships,
maples into ministers and pines into
pagodas.
Thoreau saw trees as nature’s poetic
language. As a writer, he drew verbal
images, puns and metaphors from the
forest. The poet, he wrote, loves the
pine tree as his “own shadow in the
air.”
‘The tree is full of poetry.’
RICHARD HIGGINS is a writer and editor
who has explored Thoreau and trees in
depth. He was a writer at The Boston Globe
for 25 years, is the co-author of Portfolio
Life (Wiley) and the editor of four books,
including Taking Faith Seriously (Harvard
University Press). His writing has appeared
in The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly,
Smithsonian, Esquire, The International
Herald Tribune, Yankee and NPR. Higgins
is a graduate of Holy Cross College, Colum-
bia Journalism School and Harvard Divin-
ity School. He lives in Concord, Mass.
To host this talk, contact Richard Higgins
[email protected] 978.369.1895
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