Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Trees

I've been taking the time to read the classics. Currently, I'm reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I know most people read them when they were children, but better late than never. I read other books when I was a kid (The Baby-Sitters Club series comes to mind) and they just never topped my reading list.
Honestly, I'm enjoying them very much. I think the creators of Stargate enjoyed the first book, "The Magician's Nephew". The Wood between the Worlds makes me think very much of stargates, and it's just a good story overall. Recently I finished "A Horse and His Boy", which is the third in the series. It's a sweet story and strongly emphasizes importance of humility to me.
So there's this chapter in "A Horse and His Boy" called "The Hermit", and one part of a paragraph struck me:
"...It was all open park-like country with no roads or houses in sight. Scattered trees, never thick enough to be a forest, were everywhere. Shasta, who had lived all his life in an almost tree-less grassland, had never seen so many or so many kinds. If you had been there you probably would have known (he didn't) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans, and sweet chestnuts..."
I suppose C.S. Lewis wrote this with British children in mind. Preferably British children who had been in the country and were part of nature groups that went to forests and parks and taught the children to point at trees and correctly say "That is a silver birch," or "That is a sweet chestnut". Or perhaps he was kindly encouraging children who didn't know their birches from their beeches to go out and research them.
I suppose it's too bad that I didn't read these books as a child. Growing up in a tree-less sand hole myself, it occured to me after first reading that paragraph that my classification of trees is essentialy pine/not a pine. I thought about it later and consoled myself that I can tell a palm and a joshua also. But for the rest it's pretty much pine/not a pine.