An ode to bare branches

Jill Severn

Photo by Anna Schlecht

Darlin Creek Preserve
8998-8840 Lake Lucinda Dr SW
Olympia, WA 98512
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As March comes into view, I often start to crave leaves – leaves on now-bare trees, leaves on skeletal shrubs, and leaves rising from the ground as the soil warms and perennials awaken.

I suffer from my own greed for full-on spring. Crocuses, snowdrops, camelias and even the gladness of daffodils don’t satisfy my lust for the unfurling of a world’s worth of glorious green leaves.

Sometimes I’d like to skip March altogether and wake up in April. Yet skipping a month of life is a terrible thing to wish for.

So for the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to overcome my impatience by focusing on the sky I see behind and through bare tree branches, the patterns of branching and bark, and the bright green moss that is, as a friend says, “What the well-dressed forest is wearing this season.”

One bonus of this focus is seeing the birds’ nests that survived the winter, tucked into a thicket of still-naked salmonberry bushes, or high in a street tree downtown.

The downside of this focus is seeing how often trees are misshapen by pruning, and how hard they work to heal the cuts, rebalance and regrow. The upside of this downside is that so many trees succeed – often regrowing even when cut down to a stump.

On a recent walk on the Darlin Creek Preserve, another friend and I noticed scores of maples that had regrown mightily from stumps, now with multiple trunks. They had been cut to make way for a development, but were saved from the bulldozer by the Capitol Land Trust. Those trees are now part of hundreds of acres of recovering forest, 70 acres of wetland habitat near Lake Lucinda, and over two miles of fish-bearing streams that are tributaries of the Black River.

It was a nice outing aside from freezing feet, but I want to see it again someday with leaves on all those mossy maples.

I try my best to appreciate the view of open sky above a trail where maples will eventually create a shady summer arbor. Further up the trail, I admire a long view through a patch of bare alders where a blanketed horse grazes in a pasture.

March will be the last full month to see these sights, and to enjoy the moonrise through the lace of bare branches.

The leaves will come soon enough, I tell myself. And for a while at least, my impatience is allayed.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com