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what it might tell me about the vegetation history of the area where I grew up and learned to love the oaks.
    A fascinating essay, “An Ecological History of Old Prairie Areas in Southwest Washington” by Estella B. Leopold and Robert Boyd, from Indians, Fire and the Land , offers a deep portrait of post-glacial vegetation in a particular landscape, taking into account historical and anecdotal material regarding land use. Camas and various umbelliferae pollens peak in association with local fires. Douglas fir pollens drop to reflect logging and deforestation due to European settlement. Narratives of shifting relationships can be read by reconstructing plant communities, estimating climatic and environmental conditions. Charcoal shows up to tell of fires. People shape their landscapes to accommodate what they require — and not just the First Nations people who tended their camas crops and their nodding onions, and who knew that ash improved the growth of wild tobacco.
    People arriving later from elsewhere often brought mementoes or improvements, uncertain that the place itself would be adequate. Think of the English sparrow, the European starling, Himalayan blackberry, gorse and Scotch broom (all the widespread and invasive offspring of three seeds that germinated in Sooke in 1850), 15 the beautiful, soft-eyed fallow deer seen on the Gulf Islands and the Saanich Peninsula, to which they swam from James Island at low tide. I saw fallow deer on Island View Beach, making their delicate way through the flotsam and jetsam at the tide line.
    The world contains such archives — plants, birds, foreign and native, their bones and stems and pollens anchored in the sedimentary layer. The one I read in memory is almost lost; houses crouched over the vanished grasses where the oaks once listened for fire, the promise of renewal in its dense heat.
    Those grey trees on the long walk home from school, down Haliburton Road and along Elk Lake Drive to Royal Oak. How they mirrored the angst of a girl at odds with the social world — those radiant groups so tightly guarded that no one new stood a chance of belonging; the other group that would have me and took me on Friday night hunts for beer and hash, followed by pizzas in the small hours, and then headaches the next morning as I cleaned my horse’s stall and wondered about dying.
    The trees, presenting gnarled fists to the sky! The darkness of their bark, their sombre postures! I wanted too badly to know the world beyond the present, and I don’t think I meant heaven. I wanted to know the great lively spirit that caused the tides to turn in their season, the passing of geese in the high flyways, muttering amongst themselves as they flew to warmer sloughs and lakes, the brief luminescence of fawn lilies by the trail down to Quicks Bottom, their petals turning up like Turks caps after pollination. It made me cry, this beauty, and I had no way yet to express what I felt in the face of it. I’d go out at night to visit my horse in his wide field, his black body mysterious in the dark and his white stockings glowing if there was moonlight, and I’d cry against his warm flank.
    The young never know that vast and splendid lifetimes await them. Travel, lovers, children, sorrow, loss, the beauty of mornings seen from hotel windows while a cup is cradled, the scent of jasmine filling the room from an open window. Or a young woman walking the dark streets, having met a poet with whom she was almost certain she’d spend the rest of her life, trying to see stars through the tangled branches of the great oaks, their roots deep in sediments of pollen and ash. A new moon waited.

Quercus virginiana
    Degrees of Separation

    To sum up the outward madness of nations, this is the land to which we drive out our neighbours and dig up and steal their turf to add to our own, so that he who has marked his acres most widely and driven off his neighbours may rejoice in possessing