By Lawrence Winship
Each spring the Connecticut River Valley is flooded with fresh colors and smells as leaves and flowers burst out of dormant buds on trees and shrubs. Green shoots push up through the last snow and over-top last year’s brown leaves, covering the ground with a new cloak of verdant shapes. Each new flower and leaf results from a distinct “choice” by the growing point of a plant to bear flowers, or to bear leaves. One or the other! Because once a growing point starts down the path of becoming a flower and ultimately a fruit, there is no going back for that particular shoot.
By Lawrence J. Winship
For about three quarters of the year, the leaves on our area’s trees and shrubs are at work, absorbing sunlight, opening and closing pores to limit water loss and to take up carbon dioxide. Each species has its distinct leaf shape, size, even color — there really is no one uniquely ideal leaf shape, spatial arrangement or composition. Leaves are diverse in form and function, permitting adaptation to variation in climate, soils and weather. What may be less apparent, though, is the diversity of leaves’ life histories…
By Lawrence J. Winship
In many ways, planting a tree is an act of faith and hope. As we firm the soil around the tree’s roots, we may imagine a future in which generations to come will picnic in its shade. They may gather its fruit or colorful leaves, and think kindly of us. So, of course, we want to choose the right kind of tree.
By Lawrence J. Winship
What is the wisdom shown by “wise trees”? Is it perhaps that they appear to cease striving and simply endure because growth is made impossible by the “sure” arrival of cold, of scarce and pale light, and of water frozen solid? Or might the verse call to mind the “wisdom” of genetic information encoded in the tree’s DNA?
By Lawrence J. Winship For the Gazette December 8, 2019 This past summer, driving back from a family wedding in Montana, I saw thousands of rail cars headed east, fully […]
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