PHILLY FIRST BLOSSOM FRONT

Citybillies, it’s confession time.

The rumors are true.  I’ve sold out.

Jon Spruce has officially signed on the dotted line.

For two years now, I have meticulously and courageously hunted down and archived the kingdom of Philly trees but, behind the scenes, hidden from view, I’ve been bombarded and assaulted with endless requests for sponsorship.

Landscape crews and tree services, nurseries and greenhouses, fertilizer companies and seed catalogs, you name it.  Non-profits and charities, all good causes.  Philadelphia institutions like Aramark and Tastykake, Sunoco, Comcast, Action News and Lew Blum Towing, all knocking down my door.

All asking for a piece of the pie.

For the last two years, I’ve always had the same response.

Hold the gravy.

Until now.

I’ve finally found something that I can hang my hat on.

Citybillies, it’s hanami time and there’s no better way to spend it than participating in the Subaru™ Cherry Blossom Festival of Greater Philadelphia.

What is hanami?  It means flower viewing in Japanese and it refers to the annual blossoming of the cherry blossoms, the sakura.

This event is so anticipated that even the Japanese Meteorological Agency tracks and charts the sakura blooms throughout the whole island.

They call it the sakura zazen, loosely translated as the cherry blossom front.

According to the map, the sakura are currently flowering in the southern part of the island, blazing their way from Kagoshima through the old capital of Kyoto and, by the end of April, they will have reached the northern tip of the Aomori Prefecture, land of apples and wild horses.

Some people call it the pink tide.

I long to see it in person.

Hanami has been on the calendar for centuries now, observed and celebrated by emperors and farmers, royalty and peasants, city rats and country mice alike…

…immortalized throughout the ages by songsters, dancers, poets and painters, including the great 18th-century printmaker Katsushika Hokusai…

…who famously depicted the brief sakura in the foreground of Japan’s most exalted marvel…

…the ephemeral floating world of early spring balanced against the immovable permanence of Mount Fuji itself.

Now that’s my kind of yin-yang.

Here in Philadelphia, we’re less than one week away from our own hanami.

Hold on to your hats, citybillies, and get on up!  The sakura are marching, cherry blossoms about to set the city on fire. 

In anticipation of the event, I floated over to the Shofuso Japanese House…

…and then to the nearby cherry tree avenue that connects the House to the Mann Music Center.

I’m getting nervous.

Less than a week away from the big bash and the guest of honor is hardly making a peep.

Just my luck.

PHILLY FALL & THE FERNHILL FRUIT

Now, where was I?

That’s right, it’s autumn here in Philadelphia.

Now, how does that quote go again, the one about autumn?  Think, Jon Spruce.  Who was it again?

That’s right, it was Albert Camus, the French philosopher.  Now, he was an absurdist but don’t worry, Donny, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Every now and then, even an absurdist is worth listening to.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf’s a flower.

Zut alors!  He was right.

Season of the tawny dawn, season of the rustic twilight, the brisk walk…

…the green world’s final curtain call.

Now, Jon Spruce, pay attention.

This is how it turns.  This is how it falls.

THE TANNENBAUM

Every working day, on my commute to and from the time-punching machine, I pass the following sign perched atop a warehouse that towers over the sound barrier of Highway 76.

Kindy’s Christmas Factory Outlet.

I’ve been looking for a place like this.

Every tree-blogger worth their salt has to tackle the Christmas tree…but how?  Where to go?

I needed an angle.

Maybe it’s this Kindy’s.  Maybe this sign really is a sign.

I checked the Kindy’s website and it looked encouraging…fine photos of bright homes decked out in colorful patterns of blinking lights…a boy perched on his father’s shoulders planting the ornamental star on the top branch…a handsome, slim family nestled around the illuminated conifer…plus promises of real live trees, photographed in a snowy lot, each tree shining green under a light dusting of downy frost.

Kindy’s has been around since 1980…the retail outlet for the Brite Star Manufacturing Company located in South Philly…and, according to its website, it is the premier stop for all things Christmas…the Kindy’s shopping experience [is] a fun-filled family holiday tradition.

This could be the place.

Look, I’m one hardened, sarcastic scalawag of a citybilly.  I’m a rogue and I’m a rounder and, yet, around this time every year, I just say hark that. 

I yearn to be swept away by the holidays.

T’is the season and I want to feel it…the spirit, the glee, the mirth.  I want to wash away my cynicism with good, old-fashioned holiday cheer.  I know my weather and I know my Wheel so I know not to expect a white Christmas, though that would be lovely…but I want all the rest.

I want to feel part of something...to feel connected...hard to do while living in this urban grid...hard to do, at this time of year, while fighting traffic, fighting crowds, fighting lines to the registers.  

I want that warm glow in the bottom of my belly…I want to turn into a happy stooge…heedless of the wind and weather…I want peace and joy on Turtle Island…I want to deck the halls…I want to sing along. 

I want to be jolly.

And so…with a seasonal sense of optimism, under a typical sky of the Long Snow Moon…scudding trails of storm-clouds twisting inside-out, revealing their dark and rainy hearts…I traveled through the mean streets to the Kindy’s Christmas Factory Outlet.

Ho, ho, ho.

PIONEER TREES

The other night, I went for a walk to enjoy the last moon of spring, the last moon of Wabun, the Golden Eagle.  This be the Corn Planting Moon.

According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the days right now are long, fourteen hours and thirty-seven minutes long, to be exact.  By the end of this moon, on June 20th, the day will be ten minutes longer, the longest days of the year, clocking in at fourteen hours and forty-seven minutes, the summer solstice.

According to the Wheel, people born under these spring moons are full of wonder and curiosity.  They are awake.  They are spontaneous and creative and, like Wabun himself, they are able to soar high, see clear and see far.  Wabun’s children are, by nature, explorers, hunters, scouts, trailblazers, navigators, pilots and cosmonauts. 

 

THE THIRD AND FINAL MOON OF SPRING

The Wheel always moves forward…but to what?  Usually, it’s about food.  The trees and plants have mostly flowered and budded and leafed and they are now beginning to fruit.  This is food, whether it comes in the form of flowers, stems, buds, roots, bark, leaves, fruit or pollen.   

The wild dinner bell is ringing. 

The new growth of spring rings that bell.  On the farm, this is the time when new lambs and piglets wean off the milk and taste, for the first time, green food.  In the forests, wild berries are just about to burst, the perfect food for bears.  In the woods, the beaver family swims out of the lodge and chomps down the weak new trees to repair the winter damage to their dams.  On the plains, the grass is growing high and that provides a cover for the rabbits and mice as they dart across the fields and lawns, looking for food, hiding from hawks and owls.  Bats are born in May and June, just in time to catch the bees and insects hunting for pollen in the roses and peonies and sunflowers.  Down by the sea, the blue crab molts under the first full moon of May and becomes soft-shelled.  The seagulls and pelicans have been waiting.

And for us?  This third moon of spring is salad: lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, baby turnips, baby beets, spring onions, green garlic, the radish, the rainbow chard and the spinach.  

Eat up…but don’t forget to plant the corn.

This is the Corn Planting Moon.

This moon actually has many different names.  It’s sometimes called the Strawberry Moon.  If you take a visit to any local farmers’ market, it’s easy to see why.

It’s also called the Rose Moon.  I like to do my rose-hunting by night.

But I prefer to call it the Corn Planting Moon.  Here on Turtle Island, it’s hard to think of a plant more important than corn, our native grass, the maize, the food of the ancient Wheelmakers themselves. 

I’ll wait for summer to talk about the corn.  It’s the moon that fascinates me now.  This one is for Wabun’s children: the pioneers.  These curious pilots?  Sometimes, they bring back trees.

PATTERNS: A KEY TO NAMING THE TREES

People are always asking me: Jon Spruce, how would you define ‘nature’ using only one word?

One word?  That’s easy.  Patterns.  The one word is patterns.

If you said cycles, I wouldn’t kick you out of the cabin.  That’s an excellent word to describe nature but I can’t see nature's cycles in my lifetime and I certainly can’t see them tree-hunting on these city streets. 

When I stare into the shaman’s fire and think in terms of nature’s endless cycles, I see images of Pangaea dispersing into continents, India crashing into China, dinosaurs surviving as birds, ice ages melting into rainforests, magma rocks building sedimentary shelves, underwater volcanoes sprouting sandy islands, drought and rain burying fossils, a 2.5-inch cone that I can squeeze between my fingers growing into the California Bigtree we call Sequoia and, above it all, the milky cloud-cover spinning forever around our blue planet.  And moss.  Lots of moss.

I’ll stick with patterns.  When I’m out tree-hunting, I’m looking for patterns.  The patterns help me identify the tree.   

Maybe it’s the way the branches are growing – opposite or alternate?  Maybe it’s the pattern of leaf shapes and sizes.  It could be the bark or the fruit.  If I can recognize the pattern that the tree is growing into, then I got a good shot at putting that tree into a family or a group, one step closer to knowing its name.     

Patterns in trees.

I’ll show you what I mean.