Dormant buds are beginning to break all across the northeast forests. Winter is stubborn somedays, but temperatures are consistently rising, days are getting longer and with the bud break of our deciduous hardwoods comes reassurance of the biological process seemingly to us internalized during the cold months of winter. To see the swelling and the unfurling of a tree’s photosynthetic organs really is a wonder, a resurrection of hope, a reminder that nature constantly recreates itself-that a distant star’s energy can drive the chemistry of beings millions of miles away.

In David George Haskell’s book The Forest Unseen, he writes, “When wonder matures, it peels back experience to seek deeper layers of marvel below. This is science’s highest purpose,” (Haskell, 139)

Peel only a few layers deep and observe the tree’s intimate integration to world around them. On all levels, trees play a role in affecting their entire ecosystem, for better or worse. I am reminded by the breaking buds of how important tree biology is, the process of growth and repair and engineering. After all, as arborists, it is these tree systems that we marvel in. Nutrient uptake, pest and disease susceptibility, bio-mechanical architecture and abiotic factors acting on the system are only a few biological processes that challenge the arborist to excavate deeper, to search out the players on a sub-surface level, on the macro, micro and atomic level.

Consider things as Haskell does (as he describes in his preface for The Forest Unseen) in the common metaphor of the mandala-the search for the universal in the infinitesimally small, or as he quotes Blake in writing, “To see a world in a grain of sand” can be a wonderful way to look at both trees and tree work.

Can I see the world in a root hair? Or maybe a tattered strand of polyester amongst a thousand. As I draw my handsaw, I can see the flecks and streaks of dried sap, some rust, then beyond that, my own blurred reflection. It’s not easy to find enlightenment in a fleck of saw dust, but I know that it’s size and shape tells the story of the chain, and maybe there is a longer narrative there if we are privy to listen. It is true, the world does hang on a stub of deadwood, a thin strip of hingewood, we can see it in a severed fiber of polyester or ripped kevlar, or in the tiny, d-shaped exit hole of a beetle.

I wonder if trees wonder. Or do they just move rhythmically to some other beat of life-a song we know but a dance we do not-harmoniously governed by a steady stream of processes and actions funded by all the atoms and all the galaxies. If ever there was a mandala, it is a tree. A breathtaking composition that comes from the memory of time, an intricate picture made from a million tiny, carefully placed pieces; ultimately swept up and washed away in the waters of the earth, for some other flower, for some other bird, for some other song of life.

I can feel my own leaves unfurling at the moment, which I owe to the tree and maybe some distant star.