By Marybeth Holleman, on the wisdom of the trees.

“When we bought our home fifteen years ago, we hired an arborist to walk our mostly wooded acre and advise us about the health of our trees. He stopped at a willow in our back yard. “Nice burl,” he said, pointing to the gnarled base. “If you cut this down, I’d love to have it. I could carve a pretty nice bowl from it.” But we weren’t planning on cutting down any trees if we could help it; to the contrary, we were interested in keeping them living, and standing, our own garden of trees.”