In 1996 I was awarded FrancePress’s Prix d’Excellence for my guide to France published by Fielding Worldwide. I didn’t know about the award until my brother Jon told me. He’d learned from a patient who’d brought to his office a copy of the magazine in which the prize was announced.

Though few others noticed the award, it has nevertheless allowed me ever since to call myself—and better yet to have others call me—an award-winning travel writer.

But 1996 was a long time ago and that Fielding book had a short shelf life, so for a while there being referred to as an award-winning writer felt like I was trying to get mileage from winning honorary mention in a 9th-grade essay contest.

Imagine then my pride and relief when last year I received a second award for travel writing, making me not only a double award-winning writer but a recent award-winning writer.

I am therefore proud, relieved, and honored to show you my new award for travel writing: the New Jersey Native Garden Award.

My first award referred to my work as “informative and entertaining,” which may seem to have more gravity than the “charming and delightful” of this second award. Nevertheless these new adjectives are a welcome addition to my resume.

This latest award refers to the Arbor Day piece that I posted on this page one year ago. You can read it by clicking here.

In reading it you will discover all the hope and pleasure that went into my planting a sprig of silky dogwood last April. The certificate announcing the award was accompanied by a letter from Ginger Young, president of the West Trenton Garden Club, in which she wrote, “I hope the Silky Dogwood is doing well… Mine is about 4’ high now.”

Well, it turns out my sprig was gone before the award arrived.

I’m pretty sure the guy on the lawnmower seen over my shoulder in the photo below was to blame. He claimed he never saw it, which sounds like evidence to me.

That picture was taken yesterday, Arbor Day 2010. Like last year at this time I was in West Trenton, New Jersey visiting family and it was a beautiful spring day. This year I wanted to honor the day while also doing something to halt erosion of the lake on my brother’s property. So, having planted 10 junipers along water’s edge earlier in the week, I planted 10 more yesterday.

While shoveling holes I may or may not have cut the wire to that lamp post beside me in the picture. I can’t tell because no one seems to know where the switch is anymore.

I don’t expect to receive an award for this year’s Arbor Day piece, however I do expect the junipers, at least some of them, to last longer than the silky dogwood. And what does a juniper need with recognition as long as it has a place to grow.

Links:
Arbor Day
West Trenton Garden Club
The Garden Club of New Jersey
The National Garden Clubs, Inc. Nuture the Earth, Plant Natives, Plant Organically Project

The March equinox, aka the vernal or spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, occurred today. That’s the moment when the sun is directly in line with the equator; day and night are of about equal length.

For Earthlings, the March equinox means that spring has begin in the Northern Hemisphere and that autumn has begun in the Southern Hemisphere. For Christians following Western traditions and the Gregorian calendar, the March equinox is also related to Easter since Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon occurring on or after the March equinox.

That’s why some churches, such as Saint Sulpice in Paris, have central, internal sundials of sorts designed to indicate the day of the equinox.

I was touring Saint Sulpice with a group of journalists today when at precisely 1 p.m. (i.e. noon Greenwich Mean Time), we gathered around the altar railing to watch the a spot of sun, coming from a hole in the window of the southern transept (above left in this photo), reach a marker in front of the altar.

(Saint Sulpice, you may recall, is the church that was fictionalized by Dan Brown in the “Da Vinci Code.”)

Saint Sulpice has transparent windows since narrative stained glass was passé when the church was built in the 17th century. The angle of that photo makes it appear that it was a bright out today, but it was in fact mostly cloudy in the early afternoon, though with occasional bursts of sunlight. We could nevertheless make out the oval spot of sun moving across the marker.

The photo below was taken about two minutes after the magic moment. You can make out the spot of sun now just above the marker. The line to either side of the marker is a meridian line.

If our group hadn’t been there (and we didn’t know about the event until we arrived for the tour) I don’t know if anyone would have witnessed the passage of the equinox at this spot this year. An odd thought, but upon leaving the church I could see that there are far more popular things to do in the Saint Sulpice quarter early on a Saturday afternoon. One of them is to queue to go into the Pierre Hermé chocolate and pastry shop across the intersection.

The Weatherman, March 3

I rarely go out for lunch in winter,
but today I joined a television weatherman
at a neighborhood restaurant that prides itself
in serving only the freshest of fresh food,
though it seemed a stretch for the waiter to call the scorpion fish fruity.

He recognized him, and I think the women at the next table did, too.
And afterwards someone stopped to say hello as we crossed the bridge.
What a beautiful day to be walking by the canal, she said.
It’s going to get cold again, he warned, maybe even snow next week.

I don’t have a TV to see him wave his hands before the map of France.
But I saw buds on the bush on my balcony today,
and the cat, too, noticed the morning sun on the kitchen table
finally reaching over the grey mansard across the street,
where the neighbors close their curtains a little later every day.

Just before the party on Saturday evening another guest arrived at the neighbor’s house where Henri and I were staying. He was a young actor from Paris and he, too, knocked at the door empty handed except for his overnight bag. Our host was gracious enough to ignore the absence of preliminaries, as she had with us, but we were surprised to find that within five minutes the two of them were tutoying each other whereas after nearly 24 hours as guests—quite good guests, I might add—Henri and I were still addressing her with a noble vous.

The actor was young, relatively speaking, and also relatively cute, so it was expected that with one look at him she would readily switch to the more playful tu. Still, it made me and Henri feel that we had approached our host wrong from the start. But it was too late to do much about that now. For Henri it was inconceivable to tutoie a host, particularly without bringing a gift. My own hesitation was somewhat different.

There isn’t actually much difference between tu and vous during a weekend at the coast these days unless you live in the world of Proust, or, as in Henri’s case, Madame de Pompadour, but once I’ve been vouvoying for any length of time, say two minutes, I have trouble initiating the switch to the less formal tu.

As an English-speaker I naturally prefer tu because its conjugations are easier to pronounce in the more academic tenses, but I have trouble saying, “On peut se tutoyer, n’est ce pas?”/ “We can tutoyer each other, n’est ce pas?” One hears that all the time at dinner parties, but something about asking someone’s permission to be friendly disturbs me for it makes the contact seem very intimate, as though you’re asking for a kiss, whereas you just want the person to pass the bread. So I either start off with tu at the risk of shocking with my informality the person I’ve just met or, sometime during the conversation, I late slip in a tu as though by a mistake and hope that the person responds in kind. In the end, asking someone’s permission to tutoie them is like asking someone you don’t know to be your friend on Facebook: It’s harmless enough and doesn’t really signify anything, until the person says no.

Anyway, tu or vous, the fact remained that none of us had brought a house gift for our host, so the morning after the party Henri and the actor immediately went out to find one. There are two reasons why I wasn’t asked to go along: First, because Henri was looking for some informality with the actor himself and second because I wasn’t around, having already gone out for a walk.

Early in the morning the path above the coast of Dinard is a great place for a jog, if you don’t mind running on concrete, but by 10:30/11 a.m. when people are out on their morning promenade, the joggers ruin the leisurely atmosphere of the walkway. Sweating profusely and wearing their mean, jiggling jogger’s face, aggravated in its intensity by the fact that they feel the strollers are in their way, it takes some restraint to keep from pushing them onto the rocks below. Dinard has a magnificent seaside walk that it’s impossible to stroll it without feeling that jogging should be outlawed in certain places… and that no more than four people should allowed even to walk together at the same time. In short, it’s the kind of place that makes you feel like a soulful elitist, even when you’re only a weekend guest at the home of someone you vousvoie and didn’t even bring a gift.

Dinard developed across the estuary from Saint Malo as a resort destination for British visitors. The British began arriving in 1836 and by the end of the 19th century had greatly assisted in funding the main resort town of northern Brittany. Ferries to Saint Malo from Portsmouth and Weymouth continue to ensure a heavy English presence along the coast. It is to northern Brittany what Deauville is to Normandy, though Deauville, being easier to reach from Paris or from England, is far more popular for a weekending outside of summer.

The photos in this post are all from the seaside promenade. You see in them the craggy cost, the choppy seascape, the luxury villas on the cliff, the band of the town’s main beach (the casino is nearby), the seawater pool that fills with high tide, and Saint Malo across the estuary. I had a beautiful walk.

I returned to my host’s house just before noon so as to get ready for brunch. There was now a tall bouquet in the living room. Upstairs, Henri told me that I owed him 27 euros.

One day you’re walking down your street on your way home, taking in a view that you’ve seen a thousand, no, ten thousand times, when a disturbing thing happens: there among the ever-so-familiar surroundings of sidewalks and buildings, streetlamps and awnings, shade, trunks, and leaves, something seems off.

It’s just a small detail, say a spiny husk fallen from the tree, but when you bend down for a closer look you realize that you never knew the tree in your street bore such fruit.

You pick it up—or rather I did—and discover that for the past ten years you—or rather I—haven’t been living on a street bordered by linden trees but by something else. Linden trees don’t bear fruit like this, and certainly not in late summer, and certainly not with a spiny husk that contains what turns out to be some kind of nut.

Ten years! How could I not have noticed? I thought something was strange when I stood on my balcony one late afternoon and watched the Asian family who occasionally, at about 5:30, just before the garbage truck arrives, go through the garbage cans along the sidewalk. They weren’t going through the garbage though but rather were gathering something beneath the trees. I had quickly forgotten (I took this photo a few days later), however something must have stuck. Later the same day, returning from the bakery, I noticed husks on the ground. There were lots of them, beneath all the trees.

How could I have missed them? And for ten years!

One moment you’re walking beneath your lindens—yes, your lindens—on your way to buy bread, and five minutes later, demi baguette in hand, you discover that you live on a street not with lindens but with some kind of nut-bearing trees.

Your life then feels like a fraud. Mine did, at least the part that is supposedly aware of its surroundings, the part that feels at home on a street with linden trees. But those aren’t lindens after all. The leaves, I saw upon looking up, though heart-shaped like a linden’s, were serrated, like a scary version of linden leaves. And those spiny husks (photo left) look like something from a horror movie! How could I never have noticed them before?

Earlier in the summer I was doing some research on the internet—that free-floating kind of research that I associated with the World Book encyclopedia when I was a kid, during which you forget what you were looking for but find along the way lots of details wish you could hold onto—and came across a man I have come to know as Monsieur Nature.

Mr. Nature knows all about the birds and the bees and the crops and the trees. I wrote to him and eventually enlisted him to lead me on some naturalist wanderings on the edge of the Paris region, particularly in a zone known as the Vexin Français. The Vexin Français is a regional natural park of villages and farmland north of the Seine on the edge of the Paris region, just before entering Normandy.

I’ll write more about the Vexin Français in a later blog. But I mention Mr. Nature now because in my disturbed state at discovering nuts on my lindens I sent him the following photo and asked him to identify the tree.

“Salut Gary!,” he responded. “You’re to be excused as an urbanite! Other than the flowering of the catkins that comes at a different season from that of lindens (and that should have set you on a different path héhé…)…”

I’ve translated the above line since his message was in French. For catkins he’d written chatons, which I had to look up in my French-English dictionary. After that I had to look up catkins in my Webster’s. It means “a spicate inflorescence,” which was no help at all.

Mr. Nature went on to tell me that my linden was in fact a noisetier de Byzance, corylus colurna, known in English as a Turkish filbert. He tried to reassure me that my ignorance was excusable by telling me that the leaves of the noisetier de Byzance resemble the linden’s and that both trees often have a pyramidal shape. He added that the Turkish filbert tolerates drought and chalky, alkaline soils, as well as pollution and wind, which made them good city plans. And he informed me that the nuts are edible, which explains the family harvesting them the other day. They are, in fact, hazelnuts.

Mr. Nature sent me to the following website: www.lesarbres.fr/fiche-byzance.php
Here’s one in English: plantfacts.osu.edu/descriptions/0246-332.html

Various websites, I’ve since found, note how the Turkish filbert “resembles a linden from a distance.” (Compare the linden to the right with the filbert at the top of this blog.) But I’ve been walking walk by the trees on my street every day, 2, 4, 6 times a day! And for ten years now!

Not knowing doesn’t bother me so much as not noticing. I had never noticed how serrated the leaves are. I had never even registered that spiky husks fall in late August or early September, let alone that there are hazelnuts inside.

From my window I thought for ten years that I’ve been watching linden leaves bud in April, that I’ve been watching linden leaves’ pale green turn a deep green, that I’ve been watching linden leaves blown by the wind, that I’ve been watching linden leaves turn yellow then brown and then fall. But I haven’t been watching that all, I’ve been watching filbert leaves!

Several times now I’ve gone out to the Vexin Français and other greenery with Mr. Nature and have been trying to remember the names of trees, particularly that in French birch is bouleau and beech is hêtre. But it won’t stick. It isn’t a vocabulary problem it’s a natural problem. Botanical names just don’t stay with me.

I’ve repeated those names a dozen times—birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… etc. I’ve stared at a single birch for a full three minutes thinking of nothing but bouleau. But still, show me a birch and I’m likely not even to remember that it is a birch, let alone un bouleau.

I know where the ambulatory/déambulatoire is in Notre-Dame, I remember that Henri IV was assassinated in 1610, and I’m pretty good at distinguishing a Pissarro from a Sisley, things that interest me only when I’m in a particularly cultured mood but that truly don’t matter to me.

But I am very attached to trees. In an uninformed way I’m drawn to them. I’m fascinated by the ways in which they, too, live and change and suffer and survive and adapt and blossom and stay serene. That must be why trees frequently appear on this blog. And I recognize that one of the wonderful things about Paris compared with, say, New York or Rome, is that wherever you go you’ll see a variety of trees: plane trees and horse chestnuts and lindens and, I now know, Turkish filberts—hazelnuts, if you like.

But I’m unlikely to remember their names. They just won’t stick in my non-botanical brain. Still, some kind of awareness remains, some kind of discovery, for having digested the disturbing fact that I no longer live on a street with lindens, I feel, as summer ends, a sense of renewal, as though I’ve moved to a new neighborhood, a new street, where hazelnuts grow, and where filbert leaves will soon be falling.

Flowing south from the edge of Paris to the town of Massy, a distance of 7.4 miles (12 km), there’s a bike and foot path called La Coulée Verte du Sud Parisien. You can pick it up in Paris just behind the Montparnasse Train Station. Enter through an archway leading off Place de Catalogne in the 14th arrondissement and enter the peaceable world of Paris’s southern suburbs.

The first mile or so of the path progresses with fits and starts as you wind your way outside of the city and into the immediate suburbs of Malakoff then Châtillon. Little by little the path then settles into an easy-going, occasionally rolling, unhurried green (verte) flow (coulée) passing through the relatively tranquil towns of Bagneux, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Sceaux, Châtenay-Malabry, Antony, Verrières-le-Buisson, and into Massy.

Two-thirds along the way is the most well-known greenery to the immediately south of Paris, Parc des Sceaux, a delicious spot for an afternoon loll-about after a genteel ride out and before a satisfied ride home.

I pedaled in the company of Va-nu-pieds. Va-nu-pieds is the pseudonym—the lens name, if you will—of a French photographer whose unique work will soon be appearing on France Revisited. A va-nu-pieds, literally “goes barefoot,” is a vagabond, a tramp, a ragamuffin. Further explanations will come when Va-nu-pieds exclusive images begin appearing in this site.

Va-nu-pieds took his first series of photos for France Revisited yesterday afternoon while we wandered through the park. I took a few Skytree shots while there, some of which will also eventually appear on this site. We spoke of ways in which image describes place, but I’ll save that discussion for another time. (Actually, you can catch a glimpse of that by reading my preceding blog post.)

For now, though, allow me to take the tour-guide approach to tell you why, in the right weather—and yesterday certainly was—Parc de Sceaux is such a worthy destination for a traveler looking to enjoy some green time just outside of the city.

There’s also a chateau here, which one sees from the Coulée Verte.

Chateau de Sceaux, view from the Coulée Verte. Photo GLK.

 

One glimpse of it and you’re sure to want to approach for a closer view.

Chateaux de Sceaux, a closer view. Photo GLK

Entrance is free. You can walk your bikes through the park, but Va-nu-pieds would have none of that, so we attached them outside and spend a few hours wandering around.

The chateau was mostly constructed under the ownership of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance. It’s a photogenic place in a post-card kind of way, but the main attraction of Sceaux is the park, created by the grandfather of French landscape gardeners André Le Nôtre (1613-1700). Le Nôtre’s work at Versailles was already well underway by the time Colbert purchased Sceaux.  Hired by Colbert then by Colbert’s son the Marquis de Seignelay, Le Nôtre designed what remains one of the pleasing and accessible noble parks of the Paris region.

As with other noble parks in the region it had its 19th-century era of ruin but has since been lovingly restored

Its trademark features are its cascade,

Cascade, Parc de Sceaux. Photo GLK.

which includes these spouts,

The cascade, three of five mouths. Photo GLK.

its Grand Canal,

Grand Canal, Parc de Sceaux. Photo GLK.

and its perfectly aligned rows of populars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, lindens, and other trees whose names I never remember.

Picnickers between closing walls of shade. Dappled sculpture. Photos GLK.

The sculptures are less noteworthy, but I like the image above right.

It’s simply a delightful place for a stroll, a picnic, a lounge on the grass (actually allowed here!), photographic explorations, a jog, prolonged conversations, a nap, romance, and, as far as I’m concerned, a illicit pee in the woods. There are snack stands and cafés in the park.

Other than biking along the Coulée Verte, Parc de Sceaux is easily reachable from the center of Paris by suburban train. Take RER line B, direction Massy-Palaiseau, directly to the Parc de Sceaux stop, a 21-minute ride from Chatelet-Les Halles. The park is then a 3-minute walk from the station.

Click here to learn more about Parc de Sceaux in French.

Here’s a Google map indicating the path of the Coulée Verte. Zoom in to see Sceaux.

A skytree is an image looking up from the base of a tree. Revealing both the tree and the sky it give a sense of place with a more or less vertical view that is naturally quite different from that of the horizontal view that typically defines place.

Here are several examples from a recent trip to Provence using the vantage point of olive trees.

The first one is from Avignon.

The second is also from Avignon. The stone tower seen in the lower portion of the image is the upper portion of one of the towers that punctuate the walls surrounding the old town.

This third is from Nimes. My shirt was getting caught in the branches as I bent down to take the shot, which caused the leaves to blur and allowed me to capture something of the mood of the park toward sunset that evening. The stones glimpsed here are those of a Roman tower.

Click here for examples of 3 skytrees from Paris in March.

Click here for 2 more from Paris, late March.

To get a sense of tourist hell in France in summer, go inside the Palace of Versailles sometime between 11am and 4pm. While your guidebook uses words like splendor, luxury, opulence, etiquette, and your guide invites you to imagine nobles playing billiards, the queen playing cards, and the arrival of the Turkish ambassador before King Louis XIV in the Hall of Mirrors, your mind shouts “AIR, I NEED AIR!”

Palace of Versailles: Angled view from the (new) royal gate. Photo GLK.

First, arrive in the town of Versailles in the middle of the afternoon to visit the heart of the town for a couple of hours. Versailles was designed as a royal town with a trio of wide avenues leading to the palace and well ordered streets in between. It has remained a pleasant, upscale town with a 1650-1750 heart.

Even with lots of shops are closed in August, the two central quarters of the town—the Saint-Louis Quarter and the Notre-Dame Quarter—make for an enjoyable walk-about, with the requisite café and pastry stops, window shopping, and food market gawking, visits to the churches that gave the name to the respective quarters, and eyes open for architectural details. Take note of the numerous restaurants and outdoor seating in case you decide to stay in town for dinner. You might begin your explorations of the town by picking up a map at the tourist office at 2 bis avenue de Paris, easily found between the RER (suburban train) station and the palace.

Sometime after 5:45pm, when tickets for the gardens are no longer sold and the ticket-takers have shuttered their windows, freely enter the gardens from any entrance and enjoy a stroll through Louis XIV’s backyard. The gates of some of the fountain areas will be closed, but the main vistas and the side paths are increasingly left to you in the early evening. You’ll be entering as those who earlier suffered through palace hell are heading out. And you’ll quickly discover that the grand view of the palace of Versailles isn’t from the front but from the back.

Palace of Versailles: View from the gardens toward central portion and the Hall of Mirrors. Photo GLK

The gardens then stay open until 8:30pm from April 1 to October 31. (This alternate approach to Versailles isn’t valid Nov. 1-March 31, when the gardens close at 6pm.)

If in no rush to return to Paris after leaving the gardens, you can stay in that alternate Versailles frame of mind by having an easy-going dinner in town.

Note: If, as a part of this alternate Versailles approach, you nevertheless wish to visit the central rooms of the interior of the palace with minimal crowds, arrive in the town of Versailles in the early afternoon, have lunch, then arrive at the palace between 4 and 5pm, when the ticket line is relatively short to non-existent. You’ll then have an hour’s visit inside before going out to the gardens.

The palace is open until 6:30pm April 1-Oct. 31 and until 5:30pm Nov.1-March 31 and is closed Monday year-round. For further details on opening times and tickets click here.

For France Revisited articles about Versailles see:
Versailles, Versigh, Versails, Versighs, Versize, Versace: How I Learned to Forget the Crowds and Appreciate Versailles
Part I: Marie-Antoinette’s Versailles Featuring Lolly Winston
Part II: Louis XIV’s Versailles. Purgatory and Heaven, War and Peace, Mirrors and Fountains
Part III: The American Versailles. Not Impressed Yet? Try This!

Sometimes, when the weather’s nice and I feel nature calling, I’ll take the RER out of the city, not too far, a half-hour ride from the center of Paris. Actually, it isn’t nature calling but a friend of mine who lives out there. He’ll pick me up at the station and drive us back to his house, about 15 minutes away.

He has a beautiful backyard, full of all kinds of trees and plants and a vegetable garden and a chicken-n-pigeon coop where he raises birds such as chickens, pheasants, and Texan and Hubbell pigeons.

I like visiting his backyard because I don’t have one of my own.

I see lindens from my window but no ginkgoes or beeches or pines, as he does.  

I see pigeons, but none like this, none I would want to touch.

Then we’ll have lunch, if possible containing something from the garden, like the zucchini that’s plentiful right now. Oh and those cherries earlier in the month!

And pigeon.

No, just kidding, we didn’t eat one of those beautiful pigeons on Sunday. We had rabbit.

I don’t get much of a chance to dig into the soil in Paris. In fact, there are few places in the City of Light where one can even walk on the grass. Not that I was much of a gardener before moving to Paris, but I do recognize the pleasure, at least in theory, of crouching in the soil, digging, weeding, and watching things flower, grow, take form. My planting thumb, though rarely exercised, turns out to be inadvertently green to judge from the plants on the small balcony of my apartment in Paris; they survive no matter how long I’ve been gone, even though the balcony above mine prevents them from receiving much rainfall.

I’ve been in the U.S. for three weeks now taking an East-Coast road-trip, doing some consulting, having meetings, and seeing friends and family. When I get back to Paris next week I’m sure to find my plants looking dry and forlorn but alive and willing to be nursed back to health through the spring. The secret to raising plants, I’ve found, is to not get too attached to them.

So I’m trying not to get too emotionally involved with the silky dogwood that I planted in my brother’s yard in New Jersey on Arbor Day, April 24, but I confess that I’ve been checking on it several times a day and will probably inquire about it often when I return to Paris. I hope that one day it will take its place among the other hearty blooming trees in the yard such as the pear tree below.

That’s my mother in the photo above. Proud as she was to pose with it on Arbor Day, she’s actually quite the fatalist when it comes to new plantings. No sooner had she taken the picture of me (below) with the newly planted dogwood then she told me that between the deer and the lawnmower I shouldn’t get too attached.

What I especially like about this sprig of a dogwood (it’s the foot-high twig the shovel in case you don’t see it) is that I planted it on Arbor Day. You see, one of the great pleasures of travel is to hit upon a local holiday, even—or perhaps especially—when you’ve simply traveled back to your old backyard. And so it was with me and Arbor Day in West Trenton, New Jersey.

Truth be told, I wasn’t aware that it was Arbor Day until I went to the Ewing Public Library and was happy-arbor-dayed at the entrance by two kindly women from the West Trenton Garden Club who were handing out the sprigs of silky dogwood (cornus amomum). They seemed to be the only people in the area who knew it was Arbor Day. For the rest of the day I went around trying to spread the word, but few people believed me. Most assumed that I meant Earth Day, which was two days before, while one person suggested that I was confusing Earth Day with some French holiday. Another insisted that Earth Day had actually replaced Arbor Day since he couldn’t recall anyone mentioning Arbor Day after he left elementary school.

Arbor Day is actually a great unsung and original American holiday. It is a rarity in that it promotes neither politics, nor religion, nor nationalism, nor veterans, nor an ethnic group, nor much in the way of commerce, the combination of which explains why it passes so unnoticed. No one outside of garden clubs makes an effort to claim it—or recuperate it, as the French would say—as their own because there would be little immediate advantage in doing so.

Arbor Day is also a rarity on the American calendar in that it originated on neither the East Coast nor the West Coast but smack in the middle, in Nebraska, where civic-minded tree-lover J. Sterling Morton organized the first Arbor Day in April 1872. Within a decade it had spread to other states, with school districts often being the local purveyors of the greening of America. National Arbor Day is now celebrated the last Friday in April, though some states prefer the last Monday, others, particularly in the southeast, celebrate it earlier in the year in keeping with the arrival of prime tree-planting season to the region, and a few northern border states opt for May.

Arbor Day is indeed now overwhelmed by Earth Day. Despite the latter’s laudable goal of placing concern and care for the environment on our national agenda, there was something suspicious about Earth Day from the start since it was intended to teach and demonstrate rather than truly celebrate and honor.

I was in 6th grade when the first Earth Day was declared in 1970. As the school bus was approaching the school that April 22 morning there was a tremendous traffic jam since some progressive-minded older students had apparently decided that we should all get out of the bus and walk the remaining half-mile to school. What I remember of the first Earth Day is therefore cars and buses idling for an hour or two and a long walk past a hundred exhaust pipes. What I remember of last week’s Earth Day is radio and television commercials appealing for Earth-loving consumers to drive out to the mall to buy stuff that will biodegrade sometime before North Korean uranium rods.

Earth Day is a fine idea both nationally and internationally, and some day a traveler from Mars will get the kind of thrill of traveling to our planet for Earth Day that travelers now get by going to Holland for the Queen’s Birthday (April 30). For the time being, though, Earth Day isn’t pagan enough to have much cultural interest and it’s too vague to offer anything but an occasion for national and international corporations trying to outgreen each other. Arbor Day, on the other hand, means the planting of and caring for trees, and so has little place in the economy but lots of place in the backyard or the local park.

Faithful readers may want to check back in 5 or 10 years to see how my silky dogwood is doing, that is if it manages to escape the dual threat of the deer and the lawnmower.

In the meantime, put Arbor Day 2010 on your calendar and don’t believe the Earth Day commercials.

For more about Arbor Day and state by state dates see www.arborday.org.