Alison Townsend

My relationship with trees began at Wild Run Farm, my childhood home in rural Eastern Pennsylvania. There, I played beneath a giant sugar maple, an arboreal mother who greeted me each day as I built miniature villages between her roots or climbed into her branches to survey my small world. In college, I met my science requirement by taking classes about trees, expanding my knowledge when I moved to the West Coast. But it wasn’t until my husband and I moved to an acreage of oak savanna in southern Wisconsin that I became intimate in a deeper way, learning from the grove we steward. “Northern Red Oak: The Language of Trees” is part of a series of poems about my efforts to live in conscious interrelationship with these profoundly wise beings. 

“Star Jasmine” was inspired by my unsuccessful attempt to find and send a plant (in mid-winter) to my dying mother-in-law, as a comfort and reminder of our connection and all the times we had walked among those flowers in Southern California (where it thrives). Shortly after her death, my own raggedy jasmine, wintering over in my study, began sending out leaves early, reminding me to be alert to the mysteries of resurrection always present in the green world.