Facebook is so often a waste of time, but sometimes it comes through with a gem. I found this share at Big Trees Michigan page.

The Strangest Trees Grow in East Hampton: At the Folly Tree Arboretum, a natural museum curated by an artist with a historian’s eye, every oak, magnolia and sycamore has its own peculiar tale.

By Penelope Green
Photographs by Balarama Heller
The New York Times, July 14, 2023

Excerpt:

The clone of the tree that grew from a seed that went to the moon doesn’t look like much. It’s still a callow sapling, a flurry of bright green leaves on a spindly six-foot trunk. But in 20 years or so, this American sycamore will be a formidable presence at the Folly Tree Arboretum, an unusual collection of some 250 trees planted by Tucker Marder, a 33-year-old artist, on five acres of his family’s land in East Hampton, N.Y.

Arboretums, loosely defined, are public parks dedicated to a wide range of trees and shrubs. The word roughly translates from the Latin as “a place to grow trees,” and some arboretums are devoted to a single type, like conifers or fruit trees. This arboretum is devoted to stories — Mr. Marder describes it as a cultural archive of environmental storytelling and it’s as much an art project as a horticultural adventure — which means that each tree here has a narrative, a good yarn behind it.

Read the rest of the story and see magnificent photos at The New York Times here.   (UPDATE:  was accessible at fb for some reason but now I cannot get into it, even with a free account.  It says my maximum # of articles (1!?!?) has been reached.)  FUNK DAT.  NYT, you are not making any friends with your bs!

Building narratives
with trees cultivates bonds
that may save us all.

Remember the stories of trees and tell them whenever you can.