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That trees strike us as human-like is an essential element of their fascination but is also part of the fear they can inspire. Their proportions resemble ours; their crowns are like heads, their branches arms—no wonder so many of the myths Ovid records in the Metamorphoses have people turned into them. They are the visually dominant figures of the plant kingdom, as we fancy ourselves the monarchs of the animal realm. Like us, they can in their solitude seem welcoming and friendly, though sometimes imposing; also like us, in mass they can terrify. Who has understood better than Tolkien the terrors and the companionable appeal of trees, and the way those traits are mixed imperceptibly together? In Fangorn Forest we see the first tempered by the second; in Treebeard and the other Ents the second tempered by the first. Yet in depicting these creatures of the woods Tolkien seems to many of us to have created nothing, but rather to have read our minds, and sometimes our nightmares.
On the east side of the house I now live in we have a little sunporch or Florida room where I camp out whenever the weather allows it. From my usual seat I look out across our back yard, which is open and flat but bordered by trees. An enormous twin-trunked honey locust dominates the far side of the lawn; in the back is a tall Norway spruce and a small redbud which seems to be thriving since the recent death of a crabapple that had partially blocked its sunshine. Nearest to me, and most often in my sight and mind, is a maple—but what kind of maple? The shape of the leaves is unmistakable, so that determines the species; and everything about the tree, from the texture of the bark, to its delightful helicopterish "keys" with their cargo of seed, to its droopy smaller branches and its tendency to drop lots of twigs, fairly shouts that it's a silver maple. Except for one thing: the undersides of the leaves, the very feature that gives the silver maple its name, aren't silver at all. I sometimes tell myself that they're grayish-green, but really they aren't: they're just a pale green with a matte surface. There are other silver maples in my neighborhood that anyone could recognize immediately by those highly distinctive leaves.
Individual trees within a species, and even within a distinct variety, can vary tremendously (just think about the many sizes, shapes, and colors of people), so it's perfectly possible that this lack of silveriness is well within the bounds of ordinary variation; but nevertheless it remains a source of annoyance to me that I can't confidently name this most familiar tree. It is very familiar to me, and beautiful. I have simply stared at it for many hours when I was supposed to be grading papers or writing essays for Books & Culture, and even when I have set myself the task of figuring out what kind of maple it is. Its architecture endlessly delights my eye. About twelve feet off the ground its trunk divides into three distinct sub-trunks, and from them stem, at pleasing intervals that are only slightly irregular, thick branches that extend horizontally for unusually long distances. The effect is one of elegant complexity, and different aspects of this architecture attract my attention at different seasons, in the dead of winter almost as much as in the season of full leaf or in the time when the keys spin comically through the air and crash-land on my lawn and driveway.
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