The Trees Please project, profiled in the fall edition of the Upper Delaware Magazine of the River Reporter, has quietly begun growing.

Members of the initiating group met to identify the next steps toward fostering engagement and envision the evolution of this exciting initiative.

Trees give.

And we receive.

Shade from a blistering sun. Fruits and nuts. Maple syrup. Fiber for paper. Building materials for our homes. Wild textures. Raging colors. Sculpted forms. A place to rest. A chance to climb. Fuel for warmth. And astonishing beauty.

Trees bring forth leaves in wildly varying forms. Toothy or needled, rounded or elongated, some fall with the year’s decline, some linger year-round, some cling past their prime and rattle like tiny bones clicking in wind.

We rake their leaves and exercise our bodies. We take their leaves and turn them into compost to enrich our soils. Trees cleanse the very air we breathe, thriving on our exhalations and purifying our pollutions.

While some trees weep (willow), others help us to find water (witch hazel). The hawthorn sports formidable thorns. So many trees shower us with blossoms galore. There are champion trees and old-growth trees and even trees (cypress) that grow “knees.”

Here in our neck of the woods, oaks relinquish acorns; the serviceberry lines its limbs with sustenance. Bird and bear and deer and squirrel and countless unseen others living amidst the forest survive on what can be gleaned from trees.

Trees are beings. Green Gummy (a white pine) guards a path that winds past the Towering Twins, two pitch pines that stand sentinel over a glassy lake. Through characteristics like shape and texture, location and form, trees reveal personalities.

And who could calculate the value of a deciduous tree’s delightful passage through the seasons—flushed with a luminous glow in spring, fleshed with summer’s fullness, riotous with flaming fall color and stripped to skeletal essence when ice and snow coat limb and landscape?

For information or updates about Trees Please, contact publisher@riverreporter.com.