A PROFUSION OF TWIGS
Rex Burress
Along highway 70 south of Oroville, a walnut grove had been bulldozed, leaving heaps of a trillion twigs for thought. “The brush will probably be burned,” I mused. Disposal of agricultural waste and vegetative debris is a problem in this air-quality age with cries to reduce smoke. “Air First” may not have dibs these days in view of the farm-quest for cleared land to raise crops!
“Clearing land for crops,” has been an ongoing activity ever since the Pilgrims landed on American shores, and when you cut a tree you have all that wood and twigs to confront and resolve. The best natural solution is simply to let a pile of twigs and branches melt back into the soil through decay, but a lizard-and-mouse brush pile stands in the way of land tilling and tractor traffic. It takes opened soil for the thousands of acres planted to crops! Twigs are spun asunder in the trade-off.
Oak trees seem to have the greatest profusion of twigs. The abundance is most evident during winter when the deciduous oaks reveal a delightful pattern of twisted twigs and branches in silhouette against the somber sky. The irregular rhythm of oak growth is an artist's delight! I have made more than one painting of oaks featured in the foothills where they cling to steep slopes as if they had clawed their way to higher ground, like a mountaineer scaling Mount Whitney.
I once lived in the Corduroy Hills near Las Trampas Regional Wilderness Park across the valley from Mount Diablo. The local name refers to the rolling rough ridges similar to a corduroy coat. I spent many hours roaming those rills with camera and sometimes lugged my portable easel along to do a “plein aire” oil painting. I gave my artist friend, deceased Dawn Cozine, one of those canvases where I depicted a majestic old oak overlooking flowering hills in springtime. Those twiggy old timers lazily linger longer before leaves come to shade the eager flowers.
It is said that a store of small strengths makes one strong, and thus the deciduous dropouts of Blue Oaks and Valley Oaks plaster the earth with leaves and twigs to help hold the soil together. I am gratified to know that those Las Trampas oaks are protected by the park status, and are again going about their seasonal rhythms. Parks are cherished by tree-lovers, not only for the wooded space they preserve, but also for the comforting mental assurance that the location will be there with its wonders waiting to be shared with those who would hold communion with nature's visible forms.
Near my home in Oroville is an 80-acre blue oak woodland, undeveloped and unoccupied after old caretaker Richard died, except for the occasional hiker, hobo, deer, turkey, and other twig-lovers who love the woods. Lucky for wildlife and a woods-lover like me,a housing tract plan failed...for now.
The star of those woods is a gigantic blue oak, but the 2015 drought decimated it, and now the old giant stands leafless and majestic, dignified in death as 300-years of growth slowly dissipates, gathering in a heap to decay and enrich the soil from whence it came...unless man or fire interferes.
Thus it is for a multitude of twiggy trees that offer a multitude of benefits to the surrounding community as they hover over the earth like a mother hen sheltering her brood, and finally reverting back to the land that sustained their roots.
“The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to
complete the beauty of the living.”
--John Muir
“The one red leaf, the last of its clan,/That dances as often as dance it can,/Hanging so light, and hanging so high,/On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.”
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge