I WAS OUT OF TOWN on a reporting trip a couple months ago, hanging around with a group of people I thought might make a good story. They had gathered near dawn on a bluff by a river. It was a striking site and I wanted to record its details in my notebook, as a way of splashing a little color into my narrative. Far below us, a wooden footbridge arched across the ice-blue water. White caps rose and fell. Poised at the crest of the bluff was some kind of big tree, its mighty limbs overspreading our little group, and when the wind picked up, a gentle spray of its leaves would flutter to the ground, layering a lush carpet of leaves from some other kind of tree nearby. Yet another, different kind of big tree commingled its branches with the first big tree that I just mentioned, and as the light passed through, it fashioned a cathedral effect framing the hillside beyond, where lots and lots of other big trees formed ghostly shapes in the rising mist, the way this kind of tree sometimes does, the kind of tree that has those scraggly, gnarled limbs and the tiny, pointed leaves. Maybe you know the kind of tree I mean.
Or maybe you don’t. My stab at colorful description came to nothing. Wherever I scanned the intricate arrangement of this sun-dappled tableau, trees formed the essential element, and God only knew what kind of trees they were. When I got back home and paged through my skimpy notes, I thought: A writer needs to know his trees. You can’t use phrases like “sun-dappled tableau” unless you’re ready to say what kind of foliage is causing the sun to dapple the tableau. It constitutes a professional transgression of some sort–a cheat. It’s not Jayson Blair, but a whiff of bunco clings to it just the same.
This is how I came to the work of Dr. George A. Petrides. He is the author, now deceased, of “Eastern Trees,” an illustrated field guide I bought soon after my frustration on the bluff. I’ve never met him but feel an intimacy with him, the way a reader does with writers who deliver. Dr. Petrides knows everything about Eastern trees, and as a literary man his chief distinctions are his lack of pretense and his distaste for obfuscation–almost unheard-of in an expert of any kind, but indispensable in anyone trying to get his thoughts down straight and clear. Clarity is a high principle with him. “This book avoids technical botanical terms,” he writes. “There seems to be little point in describing a leaf shape as ‘cordate,’ for instance, when a botanical glossary defines the word as meaning merely ‘heart-shaped.’ One might as well say ‘heart-shaped’ from the beginning.”
And where there is clarity–if the subject is trees–there is beauty. Beauty is another of Dr. Petrides’s chief concerns, as you would expect from a fellow who has given his life to flora. All field guides are built on schemes of classification, and “Eastern Trees,” encompassing 455 species in 210 genera, is no different. Classification is a dull and bloodless art, usually making for dull and bloodless books. Yet within his categories, Dr. Petrides lets his gifts for clarity and for beauty loose, along with the telegraphic brevity required of a guide that can be slipped easily into a pocket for an afternoon ramble. “Crushed leaves are spicy-scented,” he writes of the noble Black Walnut (Juglans nigra). “Twigs hairless, stout; pith light brown and chambered.” Much of the data, such as those on the Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), are more suitably rendered as free verse. “Leaves may be five- or seven-lobed / pleasantly fragrant when crushed / Twigs not ringed / yet branches often corky-winged / Stubby spurs densely covered by scars . . .”
The first edition of “Eastern Trees,” released in 1958, examined shrubs as well as trees, but for subsequent editions Dr. Petrides decided to clear out the underbrush and direct his reader’s attention to trees exclusively. It was a sound decision, in my opinion. Shrubs are a distraction from the more compelling study of trees, which is its own reward. Trees, as I discovered against my will on the bluff, are the essential element. When you’ve learned about a tree–really nailed it–you feel as though you’ve come to know something important. You’ve fed your brain with real news, as opposed to the news that usually consumes us–the kind that passes over the front page for a day or a week and soon enough is gone.
Sometimes I worry about a life misspent. This is why I’m so happy to have come across Dr. Petrides, and why my debt to him, which deepens daily, would be described, by more pretentious arboriculturalists, as cordate. I know more than is good for me about competing schemes for integrating a prescription drug benefit into Medicare (Part B), not enough about the Paper Mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), whose “leaves, fine-toothed, vary from unlobed and heart-shaped to deeply and intricately lobed, sandpapery above and velvety below.”
–Andrew Ferguson
