[This piece first appeared at Jonathan-Rogers.com.]
Until recently, my in-laws had a farm in South Georgia. When they bought the place, its charms weren’t altogether obvious to the casual observer. It was scrubby where it wasn’t planted in pines and swampy where it wasn’t scrubby. But my father-in-law made it the work of twenty years to beautify the place.
When he planted pines, he planted longleaf, the tree that once shaded all of South Georgia–indeed, the tree that towered over nearly every mile of Hernando Desoto’s path from Florida through the Deep South to the Mississippi River.
By the time my father-in-law was born, the longleaf had been logged to near-extinction; when the trees were replaced at all, they were replaced by faster-growing slash and loblolly pines, which produce income twice as fast as longleaf, but always fall well short of the longleaf’s native majesty. Much of South Georgia’s wealth and beauty had once been attached to the longleaf pines, before they were felled and floated down the Ocmulgee and Altamaha to the ocean, then shipped away to be the ribs of great buildings far away from Georgia. My father-in-law loves his native country; no wonder he planted longleaf. If they take forty years to grow to maturity—well, then, they take forty years. He is a man of imagination and hope.
A bare, sandy road ran between two fields on my in-laws’ property. My father-in-law always envisioned it as a grand avenue lined by spreading live oaks festooned with Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. So he went to the tree nursery to buy a few dozen baby live oaks. The nursery man squinted at my father-in-law, who was well into his sixties at the time. “You realize,” he said, “that it takes a live oak a hundred years to grow up?”
“A hundred years?!” my father-in-law answered. “Then we don’t have a day to waste!”
That’s vision.
Those longleaf pines on my in-laws’ farm will one day tower straight and high like the pillars of God’s own house. But the man who planted them will never see it. That avenue of oaks will be a sprawling marvel one day—but not during my father-in-law’s life or his children’s lives, and maybe not in his grandchildren’s lives.
Still and all, it is a good work to plant a tree. We don’t have a day to waste.
“Planting Trees”
by Andrew Peterson
from Counting Stars
Jonathan Rogers is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, one of the finest biographies of Flannery O’Connor we've ever read. His other books include the Wilderking Trilogy–The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking–as well as The World According to Narnia and a biography of Saint Patrick. He has spent most of his adult life in Nashville, Tennessee, where he and his wife Lou Alice are raising a houseful of robustious children.
3 Comments
Jen Rose Yokel
This is so, so beautiful. I felt homesick the first time I read it. Live oaks and Spanish moss!
Peter B
Here is a man who walks his own talk. Writing close to the earth, indeed.
Riveting.
Liz
Wow, wow, wow. This is just the reminder that I needed.
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