Toad in the Hole

This juniper is a favorite of mine. In fact, I think of it as an old friend I get to visit once a year.

Click on it, then click on “All Sizes” above the Flickr rendition and go to Large or Original. The details are important. There are more views in the set, and one shot of the road and the juniper’s neighborhood.

It was probably on my first trip along Del Puerto Canyon Road that I met this tree. That would have been maybe 25 years ago, maybe more. It knocked my socks off, and I wasn’t yet as much an appreciator of trees as I am now. Over the years I’ve learned more about how to read what a tree writes in its own living flesh: its autobiography. I’ve learned that from studying bonsai, working on garden trees, watching wild trees, reading Shigo.

Check this out; go enlarge it same as the last one:

Yes that’s daylight you can see through the trunk. “Like basketwork,” is how Joe described it last Tuesday when I took these photos.

Junipers grow in spiral fashion (so do some other species) and, like all trees (except things like palms that are trees mostly by courtesy) the living part, the cambium, is outside the heartwood, the structural support that the old cambium has hardened into. Bonsai artists like to exaggerate what’s going on here by smoothing and lightening the heartwood of a juniper and showing the “lifeline,” the strip of bark-covered live cambium that supports the green and growing parts of the tree, ideally from the point where it enters the ground to the point where it reached the foliage. Sometimes it winds around the tree entirely, as the lifelines of this tree must, and the bonsai artist shows just the beginning and end of the line. This, this defiant flourishing on the most scant allowance or resources, is what they’re abstracting. Trees like this are where they learn the art, and they practice it in awe of the life stories of such trees.

Look at all the foliage on this juniper! All healthy, even in a dry year like the one we’re having. There are springs in the area, so there must be an aquifer in reach of its roots, but that scree it’s on goes too deep for me to reach through. The odd camera angle in the second shot happened because I had to go down on my knees to stay in that spot; the scree’s too deep and the angle’s too steep to allow a foothold. Perfect drainage but damned little nutrition. I know the rock moves, too, as all the steep hillsides and roadcuts in that area do every year. That road and Mines Road, which it meets just over the Santa Clara County line, have new slides and patches and one-lane segments on them every spring.

There are older and bushier and bigger junipers along that road, but I’ve seen none more beautiful.