Have you ever had a favorite tree? I suspect that most people don’t give much thought to this idea. After all, trees just sort of stand there, but most of us do look forward to fall leaf colors. There are those limbs that break off in the wind and clutter our surroundings, and there’s always the fall season leaf drop. That’s when leaves from all over our block seem to be blown onto our lawn--and become our responsibility. Thank you, lawn crews!

We know that tree leaves also do a thing called photosynthesis that is somehow important in the scheme of things. Less well understood is that trees have a circulatory system of sorts that moves around large amounts of water and dissolved chemicals within the tree to where water and chemicals need to be according to the seasonal needs of the tree. These processes need a battery of synchronized internal signals to make them happen! In addition, plants, including trees, have a hormonal system, concerned mostly with stimulating growth and reproduction. 

And, relying on a vast network of soil fungal filaments connected to tree roots, trees communicate with each other, even sharing minerals and sugars with individual trees in need. In short, trees, as well as humans, practice reciprocity. 

If you’ve watched closely, you know that trees have some ability to heal themselves from nicks, cuts, lightning strikes, and limb loss. They stand defiantly with their scars and face the coldest, driest, hottest, and windiest weather Father Sky throws at them. Many of them outlive most humans. And they always offer the benefit of shade.

For some of us, for some reason warmly remembered, a certain tree became a favorite place to spend time either under or within its boughs. I didn’t realize that I had a favorite tree until it was blown down in Onaga, Kan., during a wet and windy night in May of 1975—my 44th year.  I’m grateful that the tree fell cleanly between our house and the home on the other side.   

Years earlier, when it had come time for my parents to own their own home, they chose a house on a lot that also had that giant cottonwood. The house was shaded by that giant, and I spent my teenage years there. My upstairs bedroom window opened out under the north side of that tree, and many nights I lay quietly, window open, listening to the rustle of leaves that only a cottonwood and a gentle breeze can generate. When the wind was up, the huge limbs would creak and moan. I had no need of a sleep app.

As is the case with most trees, the big old cottonwood was home to certain animals. We occasionally heard fox squirrels barking from its far reaches, but they seemed to be swallowed up in the vastness of the limb and branch network. I thrilled each fall to the two to three pendulous sock-like Baltimore oriole nests revealed at the ends of drooping branches now devoid of leaves. They were always on the east side of the tree. Could it be that we share with orioles a thing for sunrises? The warm fuzzies? Escaping the hot afternoon sun?

Soon after moving into our new home, Dad gave my sister, Anna, and me strict instructions about not trying to climb the tree. Not to worry; the lowest limb was twelve feet above the ground! However, the tree was used in various ways. One of Mother’s flower beds was in its shade, Dad and I leaned our fishing poles against it, Anna danced in its shade, I had a basketball goal nailed to its trunk, and my much younger brother, Earl, had Dad build him a pigeon roost on the lowest limb.

After the tree fell, I was fortunate enough to be visiting Mother when sawyers were cutting it up to be hauled away. The trunk was 3 feet and 10 inches across, diameter-breast-high (a forester’s term). That doesn’t sound like much, but few Kansas trees reach that size. I counted 99 annual growth rings, which means that this tree sprouted just a few years after Onaga was founded in 1867.

However, I point you toward a couple of giant trees that grow nearby, in downtown St. George. In the yard of a home there is a bur oak tree. A sign beside it gives the tree’s measurements and also states that the tree is pushing 300-years-old and is the champion bur oak in Kansas. A few hundred feet west of the bur oak is a giant cottonwood that has a trunk diameter equal to or slightly larger than that of my cottonwood. That tree looks to be the result of at least two to three young trees that have fused together. But, it sports a grand symmetry, making it a must-see either in its leafy finery or while standing nude through the wintry months.

Researchers are discovering that there is more to trees than previously thought, e.g., they have surprising sensory abilities, and more capacities for responding to their environments than ever imagined. On the outside chance that trees develop a sense of who shares a space with them, I wonder if our cottonwood missed we three kids when we left home. Did it have a sense of sheltering the aging couple that remained, and, finally, the grieving widow who was the last of us to huddle in the shelter of that giant?  

In one of her hundreds of published poems, my late wife, Imogene, wrote the following line in a poem about that old cottonwood: “Life asks enough, even of trees.”