The Trees, the Constellations

I’ve spent a lot of time walking through Amiralitetsparken, ‘the Admiralty Park’. It takes about ten minutes for Dog and I to walk around it, and we’ve walked around it at least twenty-three hundred times over the past twenty-seven months, making for an approximate total park-time in excess of sixteen days. Some of the park’s trees are already beginning to shed their leaves, which have been eased from their branches by a prematurely cold-edged breeze.

The helpful park-keepers have set up some signs which provide a key to the various species of tree that I see there every day. I have yet to make use of these, however, and, until I do, I must continue to classify them more naïvely: as big/not so big/little; spiky/non-spiky; rough/smooth-trunked; or the like. I should like to know my trees better, and be able, confronted with a tree in a new locale to say with confidence, ahh, a larch, for example. Little name tags have even been pinned to a few of the trees (perhaps at one time all of them were identified thus). One says silverlönn, (silver maple) another parklinden...

I sometimes have cause to regret my lack of botanical knowledge, such as when I read a descriptive passage in a novel mentioning an elm, let’s say, or a beech, which, in either case will evoke in me the same generic mental image: tree: large, non-spiky…

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On a couple of recent clear nights, some of the lights which line the paths through the park have been dead, permitting a better than usual view of the stars, from whose spatter-pattern I could only discern the ‘W’ shape of Cassiopeia…

…and the familiar outline of Ursa Major, which I always think of, in any case, as ‘the saucepan’. Besides those two, I can readily recognise Orion, when he comes out for the hunt. It occurs to me though, that constellations really ought to be personal matters, each to his or her own, like some celestial ink-blot test: when I look up it never occurs to me to see a lion’s shape, or a scorpion’s, or an eagle’s. Indeed, looking at a list of non-standard names for star-patterns yields surprises such as ‘the Cat’, ‘the Lily’, ‘the Electric Machine’, ‘the Northern Fly’, ‘the Printing Office’ and ‘the Solitary Thrush’…

Posted by misteraitch at September 3, 2003 09:22 AM | TrackBack