Two
Today’s great find is a website dedicated to tree tours in Toronto. As a city dweller from a former city built of cement, steel and glass she finds herself so often ignorant of trees and flowers, giving enough reasons for her to borrow from one of the nearby libraries two volumes of encyclopedia of trees and flowering shrubs, which in turn lead her to nowhere but botanical labyrinths of species and seas of scientific names that she couldn’t read lest to remember; and she would be greatly discouraged by her own stupidity and get so annoyed to walk out in the real world finding herself still unable to distinguish the leaf of a Maple from a Sweetgum tree. Speculating the map on her hand she can find fifty four numbers spreading across three regions: south, middle and north end; each number denoting one specific kind of tree in its, thank God, common name. Then came the warning from her daughter reminding her Winter is already here, and most of the leaves’d have fallen from the trees, making it harder to identify, and since the Pandemic began last March the number of tents set up by homeless people have increased, it would be inconvenient and imprudent to get closer to a tree without disturbing its surrounding tenants. She is still debating and wanting to go over to the park she has visited hundreds of times, with probably blind eyes then, she reflected. Now, with this park map printed right out from the tree tours website, she is very much motivated to walk over there, and take a good look at the supposedly oldest tree in Trinity-Bellwoods Park. Well, this Butternut Hickory, which is said to be well over 100 years old, is marked standing on the south-west fence line of the tennis courts.