Jeffrey Greene

In a book about wild edibles, I wrote the following passage about my inner correspondences with nature:

I grew up in the woods, and though I have spent most of my adult life living in cities and now work in Paris, the country remains a fundamental part of my psyche. My mother, a runaway, took up modeling in New York City before she was sixteen. Strong-willed, she made up her mind to marry an artist, start a family, and use the land productively. Deer may have decimated everything my parents planted, our goats may have poisoned themselves, and marauding foxes may have dashed off with our ducks, but our small and solitary forest world was powered by the rhythms of nature.

Behind our house, the East Branch Silvermine River rushed over rocks, pooled, and snaked half a mile through woods before passing the empty foundations of a mill and feeding into Browns Reservoir. It could have been a scene rendered by Cousins or Constable. Even at the earliest age, I knew that mine was a blessed childhood, one that my impetuous teenage mother created for us, one with no discernible gods--just trees and animals, stars and storms.

The material in this passage is recurrent in my work, either submerged or explicit.  Through the nights and changing seasons, I’d listen to the trees and understory that pressed close to our house.  Whether trees have souls or not, I couldn’t say, but I did know that they affected moods when creaking with the wind, cracking during ice storms, or falling silent in the snow.  Trees can be noisy beings.  Then on listening to my wife’s cello for years, I wondered, like Thoreau, if tree fibers rejoice in transmitting music.  So I journeyed to discover the rare mountain forests that provide resonant wood for the world’s finest stringed instruments.