Mnemonic Read online

  Also by THERESA KISHKAN

  ESSAYS

  Phantom Limb (Thistledown Press, 2007)

  Red Laredo Boots (New Star Books, Transmontanus series, 1996)

  FICTION

  The Age of Water Lilies (Brindle & Glass, 2009)

  A Man in a Distant Field (The Dundurn Group, 2004)

  Inishbream (Goose Lane, trade edition, 2001)

  Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane Editions, 2000)

  Inishbream: a novella (Barbarian Press, 1999)

  POETRY

  Black Cup (Beach Holme/Press Porcepic, 1993)

  Morning Glory (Reference West, 1991)

  I Thought I Could See Africa (High Ground Press, 1991)

  MNEMONIC a book of trees

  Theresa Kishkan

  Copyright © 2011 by Theresa Kishkan.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Cover illustration: www.istockphoto.com/ekspansio.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Printed in Canada.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kishkan, Theresa, 1955-

  Mnemonic [electronic resource]: a book of trees / Theresa Kishkan.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Type of computer file: Electronic monograph in HTML format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-706-4

  1. Kishkan, Theresa, 1955-. 2. Novelists, Canadian (English) — 20th century — Biography. 3. Authors, Canadian (English) — 20th century — Biography. 4. Trees — Social aspects. 5. Natural history. I. Title.

  PS8571.I75Z467 2011a C813’.54 C2011-902890-5

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the government of New Brunswick through the Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport.

  Goose Lane Editions

  Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For my brothers Dan, Steve, and Gordon Kishkan

  “. . . impossible to imagine a world without them.”

  Contents

  Prelude

  Quercus garryana

  Fire

  Quercus virginiana

  Degrees of Separation

  Olea europaea

  Young Woman with Eros on her Shoulder

  Thuja plicata

  Nest Boxes

  Platanus orientalis

  Raven Libretto

  Pinus ponderosa

  A Serious Waltz

  Fagus sylvatica

  Traces

  Arbutus menziesii

  Makeup Secrets of the Byzantine Madonnas

  Populus tremuloides

  Cariboo Wedding

  Arboretum

  A Coda

  Acknowledgements

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  This is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.

  — Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life

  Prelude

  Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself

  in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell

  about those woods is hard — so tangled and rough . . .

  — The Inferno of Dante, Canto 1, lines 1-3

  On a forested acreage on the north end of the Sechelt Peninsula, my husband John and I built a house, raised our children, and sent them off into the world. Most mornings of my adult life, I’ve awoken to these woods. They are never the same though you’d have to live here to know that. For instance, in wind, the trees bend and arc wildly, some of them falling to earth but usually deep within the woods, not near the house, so visitors wouldn’t know of their demise. At those times, I find myself wondering about their secret lives for it seems that they thrash and sway in joy, like Bacchantes. And stories abound of trees that live as people live, with the same sorrows and pleasures.

  In winter, in snow, the evergreens are most perfectly themselves, heavily burdened. In late winter, the alder stems and buds are russet, giving way to green in spring; in fall, the alder leaves don’t turn orange or yellow but dull brown, or they fall still green to the ground. Sometimes I glimpse an unexpected flutter of white down the bank below the house and eventually realize that the dogwoods are out, the bracts as large as Kleenex surrounding the small greenish-purple flowers. In fall, the leaves of the dogwoods are gorgeous, deep pink and scarlet. In high summer, no one would know that each spring the arbutus tree looks as though it’s dying; this is because there are plants around it that I water over the summer and the arbutus receives too much irrigation for its liking. It does survive, though.

  There are many maples in our woods, some of them mossy with age. Ten years ago, in autumn, I called a painter friend to ask, “If you were painting the bigleaf maples right now, would you use Naples yellow?” He mused for a bit, answered, “No, they’re too orange,” then called me back to say, “Yes.” A neighbour’s daughter once raced down a forest trail with a huge fallen maple leaf on her face, keeping it in place by holding her face up, laughing as she ran. A perfect disguise, I thought, so close to Halloween.

  In a treatise on oratory, On the Ideal Orator (De Oratore), the Roman statesman Cicero advises the training of one’s memory, specific to oration and rhetoric, in a systematic and logical manner called a method of loci. By memorizing the architectural space of a particular building and by attaching elements of a speech to particular features of the building and forming an image of the two, a structural mnemonic is created. Variations of this discipline existed and persisted well beyond antiquity and traces remain in our contemporary figures of speech: “in the first place, in the second place,” we say to keep our place in an argument or discourse.i

  I had this in mind — those palaces of memory. Every time I found myself remembering, I tried to walk myself through a gracious building with nooks and window seats. Instead, I had such a clear and visceral sensation — more than a picture, more than an image — of a tree. The smell of dry grass carried memories of fire and the trees that presided over those memories were the Garry oaks of Vancouver Island where I lived as a child. Recalling a brief romance on a Greek island — I was surrounded by olive trees, their grey-green leaves shimmering in the heat of that lost time.

  I also had in mind John Evelyn’s Sylva: A Discourse of Forest Trees & the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions. Ostensibly, the book is an inventory of Britain’s arboreal holdings undertaken to address the shortage of timber available for shipbuilding (and thus exploration), transportation of every sort, fuel for the manufacturing of glass, smelting tin and iron, brewing, cloth dyeing, and for domestic use; in short, the necessities of Empire. Evelyn achieves this, but the book is also a love song to trees in all their nuanced beauty. He wrote, “Here I am again to give a general notice of the peculiar excellency of the roots of most trees, for fair, beautiful, chamleted and lasting timber, applicable to many purposes; such as formerly made hafts for daggers, hangers, knives, handles for staves, tabacco-boxes, and elegant joyners-work, and even for some mathematical instruments of the larger size, to be had either in, or near the roots of many trees . . .”ii

  In the first place . . . What do I know about the habits of trees? I’m not a botanist and barely passed high-school biology. I can name them, count them,
keep lists of their occurrence in landscapes familiar and far-flung. How we once saw a Douglas fir on a ledge of rock at Island in the Sky, within Canyonlands National Park in Utah, far from its usual range. How I went to the western red cedars at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, when I lived for a time in London and touched their bark for the remnant perfume on my hands. What do I know about them? I intend to find out. I intend to revisit, in memory, significant trees of my past, assisted by field guides and assorted historical texts which have informed my process of learning and seeing.

  In the second place . . . Could I write my life by remembering the groves, imaginary or real, of my childhood, my girlhood, the painful years of young adulthood, of motherhood? Separated by time, by geography, by mythology — for who among us doesn’t embroider in order to find the pattern of beauty and meaning in the plain clothing of experience? — the trees in the grove would congregate with botanical unease perhaps at first, those accustomed to the Libyan Sea touching boughs with those growing along the edges of the Salish Sea. But I think of the teaching gardens, the “physick” gardens, the utilitarian gardens of subsistence, and I hope that my memory plantation might have something to say about relationships between species without any apparent connection. Companion plantings, if you like.

  My children have left home, the house echoing with their absence; yet like young trees their shadows leave us with a story told by the fire, season after season. In the shadows I see myself, dreaming my way back to the beginning. I found myself in dark woods . . . But not completely dark. Sunlight filtered through the wide boughs of maples. To tell about those woods is hard . . . I will tell of the trees, their bark and their shady leaves, each of them in its place. I have a few good guides to help me with my tale.

  Quercus garryana

  Fire

  In early May of 2007, my husband John and I walked through the woodland below Government House in Victoria, under mature Garry oaks. Blue camas bloomed in great drifts like a dream of heaven, punctuated by wild roses and snowberry, fawn lilies, and grasses. It was sunny and warm, and the heat released a smell that transported me back decades, to my childhood.

  It was 1965. My family was staying in a motel out towards Colwood. I was ten years old. My parents were searching for a rental house for us, now that we were back in Victoria after two years on the East Coast where my father’s naval career had taken us. Some days they left my younger brother and me in the care of our two older brothers, who were twelve and fourteen. They hung out with some older kids — the offspring of the motel owners — and my younger brother and I found ways to amuse ourselves.

  I took books into the area behind the motel, dry grassy bluffs with groves of oaks. The smell was intense — the grass, the leaves, sticky pitch from a few pines, the unexpected twist of onion as I grazed the stems of nodding onion. I’d recline in the grass, ants tickling my bare legs, and read Nancy Drew adventures. I longed for a life so exciting — where treasure might turn up in a hollow tree or under a bridge; where villains might be thwarted by polite requests; where a girl would rise from a shaking up by an escaped convict, straighten her stocking seams, and drive away in her roadster for the next case. I was absorbing the dry heat, pollens, and odours as I read, my body resting on golden grass that flattened beneath my weight, satin to the touch. My younger brother stalked imaginary villains among the bluffs, talking to himself.

  Later in the day, my parents returned to report on possible houses, urging us to gather up our swimming gear for a picnic to Beaver Lake. I was pulled reluctantly back into my family’s orbit. The green camping stove was stowed in the back of the station wagon with Star, our Labrador. We ate wieners in buns spread with green relish and bright yellow mustard, and drank fruit punch from a Coleman thermos jug. Swimming in the weedy lake, swans on the opposite shore guarding their young, I marvelled at how I could remove myself so completely from my family and then return to them as though nothing significant had happened. And to anyone else, nothing had.

  That summer there was a fire warning; the stretch of rainless days was making the oak groves volatile as tinder. Lightning was feared, or the careless flick of a cigarette butt. I’d lie in my bed in the motel at night under a single thin sheet, worrying that sparks would lick the dry grass into flames and rush down the bluffs to the unit where my family slept, oblivious. Sirens from the Colwood Fire Hall punctuated the quiet. I could smell the night outside, heavy with heat. The idea of fire seemed somehow inevitable as our lives changed — suspended between a house we’d left near Halifax, and the house on Harriet Road, which my parents had yet to find. I was afraid, but also thrilled with the possibility of such latent power. I knew, though I wouldn’t have had words to say how, that we lived in an intensely mysterious and potent world, and the possibility — even prospect — of fire was part of that. I imagined fierce heat and crackle as flames consumed grass and brittle moss.

  There is a long history of fire shaping this landscape of oak and dry grass. Northwest Coast peoples used fire to create ideal growing conditions for camas, the roots of which were a staple in their diet. The oak trees withstood the heat; undesirable species didn’t. The burned areas produced healthy harvests of the beautiful blue camas flowers and their succulent bulbs, as well as acorns, for meal. (I suspect that vulnerable young oak seedlings would not have withstood the fires, however, so I have to wonder about subsequent generations of Garry oaks in these landscapes, though recent research by range ecologist Jon Keeley and chemist Gavin Flematti, among others, does indicate that compounds in smoke trigger germination in buried seeds.1) The Northwest Coast peoples burned after harvest, before rains, and developed techniques that used weather and terrain to their advantage.

  “A perfect Eden,” James Douglas wrote of the park-like nature of southern Vancouver Island,2 a quality that Captain George Vancouver had thought natural and artful, never understanding how the effect had been achieved.3 Before these controlled burns, lightning fires would have produced some similar results and might have inspired those early people to use fire as a way to increase camas growth. They would have observed how animals fled from fire and how this made hunting more successful. People living deeply in a place are the best observers of cause and effect, weather, fire, and harvest.

  Anecdotal reports from the journals of early explorers and settlers attest to the improved berry crops — wild strawberries, currants, gooseberries, black and red caps — as well as nodding onions and the important camas bulbs. The fires also improved pasture and forage for deer.4 We have been taught to think of the Northwest Coast peoples as hunter-gatherers, yet there is evidence of a kind of agriculture, practised with care and skill — orchards of oak yielding acorns, rich fields of root crops, and berries.

  Garry oaks, or more properly Quercus garryana, were named by David Douglas for Hudson’s Bay Company official, Nicholas Garry. There are two distinct kinds of oak woodland on Vancouver Island. One of them, the Garry oak parkland ecosystem, is deep-soiled, producing big oaks such as those of the Broadmead meadows in Saanich, where I spent my teen years. In other areas, with shallow soils and more rock, we find the scrub oak ecosystem, a landscape closer to California’s than our western temperate rainforest. The understory differs too, with snowberry, camas, fawn lilies, graminoids, and brackens populating the former and spring flowering forbs, grasses, and mosses in the latter. Fires were mostly used by the First Nations peoples to control growth in the deep-soiled areas, which is where the most potential existed for good root crops.

  Sitting at a desk in the Annex of Sir James Douglas Elementary School as a child, I looked out at the familiar trees — Garry oaks on rocky bluffs below Government House — puzzling through a sentence in my reader, wondering yet again why words that looked the same sounded entirely different. I was kept in at noon one day because I argued that “food” and “good” should be pronounced to rhyme. It was not explained to my satisfaction.

  When I was a child in that motel, fearful that those beautiful meadow
s would ignite, my reading retreat disappearing in an instant, I wonder now if somehow I was caught in a wrinkle of time when children would have lain awake in their cedar lodges, the same fear and anticipation quickening their pulses and hearts. “The fire runs along at a great pace,” a newspaper article from 1849 reads, “and it is the custom here if you are caught to gallop right through it, the grass being short, the flame is so very little, and you are through in a second . . .”5 Was I running with those children, our feet swift on the dry grass, flames racing ahead, and behind? Was the acorn I pocketed a descendant of one a child in 1849 might have gathered with his mother, anticipating the taste of them steamed or roasted, before the excitement of the coming fires? Or one that lingered underground, longing to be awakened by smoke?

  So often a myth contains within itself a kernel of absolute truth — a codex, an epistemology: the stories of harps singing on their own, the music contained in the wood of their making; gods and druids who took their wisdom from trees; acolytes seated at the foot of a banyan, or perhaps an oak, hoping for enlightenment.

  The etymology of oak is curious and revelatory. Ancient Indo-European roots for “tree” begin as oaks — der-, dru-, doreu-, derwo- — before evolving through the Gothic tru and Old Norse tré to the Anglo-Saxon treo. Underlying this was a belief that oaks were the most important of all trees, where sacred names had their origins. Can you hear “druid” in these roots? And the Attic Greek word for tree: δρûς drys, echoes “oak.” It’s only a short linguistic distance from drys to “dryads,” the feminine personification of the oak tree spirits.6 Dryads possessed some divine gifts — specifically prophecy.

  Researchers now believe that trees can hear, that receptors for sound are located in the leaves above ground. When plants synthesize the hormone gibberellic acid, it accelerates growth but also has been found to promote a listening response, the range of which is slightly louder than the human voice.7 All those science fair experiments investigating the effect of music on pea plants had merit after all!