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Today, April 22, 2020 is Earth Day. Is it coincidence that with no advance planning, today’s  tree is a bittersweet bit of our own personal history that begins with herbicides and ends with joy in the renewal of our chemically depleted land?

Back in Indiana, when my husband farmed conventionally, he soaked in herbicides. Then he got sick; it turned out to be a non-Hodgkin’s leukemia. A few years later we learned that the herbicides he used caused non-Hodgkin’s diseases. He quit chemical farming and turned from conventionally grown corn and soybeans to grass farming. That first spring without crops or chemicals the land was barren; very little grew. Year by year our joy increased as long dormant seeds of grasses and wildflowers sprouted, spread roots and and cast new seed to reproduce. My husband loved to ride his tractor through the pastures or walk the fields holding a little book about varieties of grass in his hand. He wanted to name and count u[ all the grasses he found. With no intervention on our part, our chemically deadened soil was reviving and returning to productive life.

His body did not revive. When he became too weak to climb up on the tractor or fuel it, it was time to stop farming. We left the Indiana farm and traded our healthy cows and thriving pastures for lawn. The owners of our new home had worked hard to cultivate short clipped weed-free golf-course quality grass. Our choice to avoid chemicals and nurture natural growth undid their efforts. Guided by a naturalist, we stopped mowing about a third of our lawn. The very next year, tall native grasses and wildflowers began to grow. Nowadays, come spring, mowed portions of our lawn are almost solid yellow with dandelions. Their deep tap roots are breaking up the dense clay soil and will eventually add humus.

To our delight, after a year or two, trees and wild berry bushes began to pop up wherever we stopped mowing. Several self-sown pines trees are an unexpected pleasure in our messy let-nature-take-its-course landscape. The way the winds and birds have scattered the seeds for these small but growing pines looks a bit like the scattering of pines in this watercolor. Is their gift of untended survival and growth the parent tree’s thank you to God?

Watching chemically depleted land restore itself brings joy. When unplanted seeds sprout, survive and surprise us with grasses, flowers and especially trees, nature points us toward the realities behind all environmental concerns and Earth Days— it points to the Lord and His to desire and ability to heal and restore. It calls us to join nature and take joy in Him—

. . .  all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
.they will make a name for the LORD, . . 
 .  . . everlasting sign, never to be destroyed.”  Isaiah 55:12-13 BSB

Let the fields exult, and all that is in them. Then all the trees of the forest 
will sing for joy before the LORD,  for He is coming—Psalm 96:12-13

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
Rabindranath Tagore

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• Trees