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HOW TO DRAW A TREE
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By Charles Hood
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Most people like trees, since they give us so much-shade, curb appeal, food, timber. And trees make good art subjects since they never charge a modeling fee, nor do they fidget, bored, as you're trying to work. Except for the Pebble Beach lone cypress, trees are not copyrighted, and, broadly speaking, trees are everywhere, even Death Valley and the Atacama Desert. Trees connect us to history: the oldest tree that is a tree (and is not a creosote ring or clonal aspen grove) is a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains on the Nevada/California border. This tenacious elder is called the Methuselah Tree and according to core samples, it is 4,857 years old. It is probably not the truly oldest living tree-it is just the oldest one that we know about.
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All bristlecones represent two ages at once. On one hand, some bristlecones are older than the pyramids, that is true. On the other hand, all bristlecones are barely seventy years old, since their physical age was only figured out recently. The March, 1958, issue of National Geographic magazine marks their dendrochronological arrival into modern consciousness, their cultural "coming out" so to speak. That particular issue had an article by Jacques Cousteau ("Calypso Explores an Undersea Canyon") and also an article on birds by Roger Tory Peterson. As important as those works were, it was the botanical news that shocked the public, delivered via Edmund Schulman's landmark article, "Bristlecone Pine, Oldest Known Living Thing."
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| Professor Schulman was a pioneering dendrochronologist-a tree ring expert-though he had already passed from a heart attack by the time the issue was delivered to subscribers. (He died at the age of forty-nine; there is a grove of trees named in his memory.) Working with core samples, Schulman had figured out that the Great Basin's bristlecones were much older than sequoias. By the time of the article's publication, he had already located twenty bristlecones that were past the 4,000-year mark. One secret he had was to start looking in the stoniest, harshest, least favorable locations. That is because of the truism that if bristlecones grow slowly, they die even more slowly, and even a bare snag may still include ribbons of intact (and still growing) tissue. As Schulman says in the article, "Some of the old [bristlecone pines] have been adding only an inch or less of rings per century throughout their long lives. There is something a little fantastic in the persistent ability of a 4,000-year-old tree to shut up shop almost everywhere throughout its stem in a very dry year, and faithfully to reawaken to add many new cells in a favorable year." His shorthand phrase for this connection is that "adversity breeds longevity." Why draw bristlecones? In addition to the obvious answer, "why not," Scott Hudson has an additional perspective. He explained to me that the more he studies trees, the more he is "amazed at how each tree expresses such a distinct personality." His drawings of the bristlecones present them not as mere sticks and leaves but as a dynamic part of the ecological landscape. The word that comes to mind is duende-a term popularized by Federico García Lorca that means passion, spirit, authenticity, an inherent artistic lifeforce or creative energy. |
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| Good on him for trying. To state the obvious, it is hard work drawing bristlecones. First there is the effort needed to make initial contact. The Schulman Grove starts at 10,000 feet, and the Patriarch Grove (to name two places Scott has worked) is above 11,000 feet. These are high altitudes and your body knows it, even if you've camped overnight, helping your heart and lungs get a jump on acclimating. |
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| And then there are the trails themselves. The very oldest tree's location is a secret (to protect it from vandals), but the internet is quite a blabbermouth, so nothing is really secret, not anymore. If you want to see Methuselah badly enough, you can. You don't need to seek out that specific individual though, since neighboring trees (including the ones shown here) are just as interesting, just as historic, just as deserving of respect and attention as oldest-of-all-beings. Each one stands alone, a sentimental and witness. Yet collectively they make up a forest, not a museum, and there are many hundreds of trees in any given cross-section of habitat. Alike yet different: as Scott says, "When you are in the White Mountains, you stare at a mountainside of individual trees. You see the trees as distinct units, like statues or icons. They are not just a continuous mass, like in a classic coniferous forest; they have identity and personality." |
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| After working on solo drawings of individual trees, Scott assembled a grid of finished pieces in order to build a final mosaic, The Mountainside. He has other bristlecone responses besides this sequence, but the grid here is particularly striking. At first it may seem dense or visually demanding, but as he says, "I trust the viewer to be able to handle some complexity if it has substance and a story. And the White Mountains in a solstice moon are both complex and sublime." |
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| This is boots-on-the-ground art making. Scott's tree work starts with him hiking through nature looking, and after a middle period when it spends some time on the pages of his field notebooks, it ends with what we see in this new work-trees that have transformed into vivid blazes of connected energy. This transfer makes sense since one thing that trees can do for us is serve as metaphors, and the relationship between tree and symbol seems especially strong with bristlecones. These trees (like art and like artists) grow where they shouldn't-in sun-irradiated, alkaline soil that is so windswept and water-deprived it defeats almost all other plants. And these trees (like artists as well) turn and twist and spiral and survive, turning sun and time into beauty and testimony. |
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| The bristlecone pine is a plant we are still trying to figure out. Individual needles can live for fifty years; the outer limit for the tree's potential lifespan is not yet known. Mark it as somewhere between 5,000 years and infinity. Even more startling is when you realize that with such extended lifespans, we could be looking at trees that are only second- or third-generation colonists. During the Pleistocene, when glaciers filled Yosemite and mammoths browsed the La Brea Tar Pits, bristlecones occurred at lower elevations than where they are found today. As the ice melted and the temperature warmed, bristlecones moved upslope to the high country. Seed-caching Clark's nutcrackers would have helped with this. That means if a 4,000-year-old tree is the offspring of a 4,000-year-old parent, then the bristlecones in the White Mountains are just getting started. |
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| Of course most bristlecones do finally come to an end. However, in a climate of such sere austerity, dead chunks of wood do not decay-they erode slowly, like stones, becoming bleached ventifacts sculpted by the sandblasting wind. That means there are sections of little-visited slopes that must have pieces of 5,000- and 6,000-year-old wood still extant. Walk carefully: there is deep history present under your boots. |
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| Starting with that first article in National Geographic, this tree has endured in our imagination. Most people find the fact of bristlecones very inspiring, even when they cannot hike among them in person. This is so true that even the National Park Service becomes altered and uplifted when its anonymous ranger-authors contemplate the longevity of trees such as these. According to an unsigned entry on the website for Great Basin National Park, "the bristlecone pine . . . exists on its own, rooted in stone, twisting its way through thousands of years, thriving in the impossible." |
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| How to draw a tree: go outside and find a tree. Once there, touch and smell, draw and sing, dance and pray, walk and think. The tree itself will guide you, and if your first try is a bit awkward or incomplete, that's all right. The trees don't mind waiting and tonight is the summer solstice. The full moon's rising and one thing's for sure-the night is still young and we have all the time in the world. |
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| Charles Hood, Professor Emeritus, author of Mouth, Acorn, Wild LA, and A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature
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