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Pointe du Layet is right next to Cap Nègre, famous as Carla Bruni’s family residence and hence that of her husband the president. Carla and Nicolas prefer Cap Nègre to Fort de Brégançon, an official presidential vacation residence that’s only a few kilometers away.

Shot from below, this is a eucalyptus, which gives off subtle fragrances in the heat of the sunny in the south.

Dans le cadre des études France Revisited sur le rapport entre les arbres et les lieux, voici trois images prises par Stanislas Illya Yankovich sur la côte méditerranéenne entre Toulon et St Tropez à la Pointe du Layet. Mais attention aux visiteurs pudiques: l’endroit est déclaré naturiste

La Pointe du Layet se trouve juste à côté du Cap Nègre, célèbre par la résidence familiale de Carla qui y accueille son président de mari, qu’ensemble ils préfèrent à l’officiel Fort de Brégançon qui n’est distant que de quelques kilomètres.

Pris par en dessous, c’est un eucalyptus (à gauche) qui, dans la chaleur du soleil du Midi, dégage de subtiles effluves.

And these two are “tortured” pines by the sea.
Et les deux autres sont des pins “torturés” par la mer.

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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 crow about 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. In it I express the hope and pleasure of 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.

(c) 2010, Gary Lee Kraut

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Schoolyards throughout France are often planted with a checkerboard of lindens. Village squares frequently have well-trimmed lindens. So do palaces parks as part of their French formality. Lindens of various species grow in the wild, with major forests of them in Provence and Roussillon.

In Paris, the Garden of the Palais Royal and Place des Vosges are two prime examples of parks with orderly rows of linden trees. The photo below is from an alley of lindens at the Palais Royal. These are silver lindens.

When visiting the Landing Zone in Normandy, you can see some tremendous old lindens in the town of Bayeux in the square called Place Charles de Gaulle. The square took on the name of the general because it was there that, eight days after D-Day 1944, he made his first speech on French soil since fleeing to England in 1940, but the one hundred lindens bordering the square are much older, dating from 1840.

The branches of the linden of the linden are sharply pruned in February, and they begin to bud in March, but it’s as their leaves unfold with the arrival of spring that the romance begins. April is typically a rainy month. You might walk around for two or three days with your collar up and your head down, but then the rain will stop and you’ll look up and find the linden’s young, pale green, heart-shape leaves decorating the branches. Like love, one half may be longer or wider than the other, and the edges are more or less serrated.

By May lindens cast full shadow, then in June yellow-white flowers blossom, releasing a sweet fragrance, from mild sweet to sickly sweet. That’s the smell of linden tea, one of most familiar herbal teas in France. Linden-mint is another. There is also linden flower honey.

The shade of summer gives way, in September or early October, to the brief yellow-brown flush of coloring of autumn in northern France before the leaves fall.

– Text and images: GLK

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It’s just a small detail, a spiny husk fallen from the tree, for example, but when you bend down for a closer look you realize that you never knew the tree in your street bore 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 this 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 today 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 this afternoon, returning home from buying bread at 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. Lindens are frequent in Paris, including most famously in Place des Vosges and the garden of Palais Royal.

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 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, a regional natural park of villages and farmland north of the Seine on the edge of the Paris region, just before entering Normandy.

In my disturbed state at discovering nuts falling from what I had previously thought to be lindens, I took a close-up photo of a prickly husks, a nut and a leaf and an image of a full tree and sent them to Mr. Nature asking him to help me identify it.

“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 plants. 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!

Linden flowers put off a more or less powerful scent when in tiny bloom in early summer and the fact that I had always reasoned that I didn’t smell the scent on my street because mine were of the lesser scented citified kind. It would have been much simpler to reason that they didn’t smell like lindens in early summer because they weren’t lindens at all, but that had never crossed my mind.

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. 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.

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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 Turkish filberts 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 hold.

Then we’ll have lunch, if possible with something from the garden, like the zucchini that’s plentiful right now or those cherries earlier in the month. And perhaps pigeon.

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

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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 just planted in my brother’s yard in New Jersey, 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, shown above, near which I’ve planted it.

Living in Paris, I rarely celebrate truly American holiday in the homeland, so I was especially proud to plant the silky dogwood on American soil because today is Arbor Day.

That’s my mother in the photo with the pear tree. I asked her to pose with it in honor of Arbor Day, which she planted many years ago. But as proud as she was to pose for me, she’s quite the fatalist when it comes to my new planting. No sooner had she returned the favor by taking 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 it. (The sprig of a dogwood is the foot-high twig by the shovel .)

One of the great pleasures of travel is hitting upon a local holiday, even—or especially—when where you’ve traveled is back to your old backyard, in my case to Ewing (aka 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 had just passed. 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.

Nevertheless, Arbor Day does still exist. It is 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. In fact, that’s why it passes so unnoticed. No one outside of garden clubs makes an effort to claim or co-opt it 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 has indeed been overtaken by Earth Day on the tree-hugging calendar. 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 enjoy the thrill of visiting our planet to celebrate it. But Earth Day is too abstract. That abstractness allows it to be used by large corporations trying to out-green each other and by politicians promising cooperation and big ideas, yet it’s difficult for us to have a personal relationship with such a celebration.

Arbor Day, on the other hand, can be easily expressed and understood and celebrated as a day of planting and caring for trees. Other than for your local tree nursery, it has little place in the economy but lots of place in the backyard or in the local park or in the woods. It requires neither faith nor sacrifice; it demands no presents or ritual meal; it can be celebrated alone, with family, with friends or with complete strangers. It is at once a hopeful and nostalgic celebration of life, growth and terroir, a combination that makes it personal for those who take part. In celebrating Arbor Day we (re)affirm our attachment to a given place in the hope that we will one day return to see what we have planted grown. No traveler could ask for more.

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

© 2009, Gary Lee Kraut

See the follow-up to this article, Arbor Day and the Award-Winning Travel Writer.

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