In elementary school and in ninth grade general science and tenth grade biology classes in the St. Paul public schools where I attended, students were ‘forced’ to develop tree leaf collections.
There was no political pressure then to worship native plants as superior to those ‘imported’ since the times of early English settlement. Ignorance of vegetation, woody or herbaceous is so vast among the general American population these days of nearly everyone under age 60, it competes with America’s vacuousness of anything historic, except the accepted political correct myths and memorizations.
I admit I was a whiz in any and all such classes at all levels of study including graduate school. I loved trees, their mystique, size, shape, smell and noise…..so I excelled in all leaf collections.
Even at age four or five I knew trees had names. As I recall the first tree I knew by name, was the Lombardy Poplar. I was around age five.
My Mother was into punishing me to get me our of her way during her hour by hour routines of being Super Woman on all fronts…..cooking, baking, sewing including making of my and my sister’s clothing, canning, cleaning, knitting, gardening, jigsaw and crossword puzzle fixing, learning first aid nursing during the WAR, besides working downtown St. Paul managing the women’s accessories department at a major department store…..long since voided from the public mind.
The mode of imprisonment was being sent to stand at the wall at the entryway to our small Highland Park home my dad bought new on installments for $6,200 in 1936.
Each punishment was of the same duration…..one hour, unless I made unusual sounds or suggestions of complaint regarding my innocence which truly was nearly always. She would add a bonus hour if I balked. I believed her, so I learned to become rather private and quiet at home. Yet, I was curious and constantly asked questions….She’d answer one or two, but more would cause punishment time again…..or I might be playing with my blocks, or later during the early years of the WAR I might be making too much noise bombing Nazi installations I had constructed for targeting, made with blocks and tinker toys with my favorite playtime dive bombers with appropriate sound effects I had learned from the movies and radio dramas to imitate.
The sound effects eventually would tend to become too loud, or Mother preferred to listen to Strauss Waltzes and Scandinavian Melodies on radio while on duty with her tasks so I went to wall detention for the inevitable hour. Mother was a Danner, German descent….with whom an hour always meant 60 minutes.
I learned early on to favor classical music. I had no choice. I discovered no one should ever go from birth to death without knowing Beethoven.
High above me on the wall where I would stand, was positioned a picture illustrating a beautiful landscape garden rather flashilly painted with a grouping of tall pyramidal leafy, not needled, trees giving background to large swaths of colorful flowers, which by age six I knew as peonies and hollyhocks, which both my Mother, her German speaking grandmother, and my Dad’s mother, grew in their city gardens. Early on, I recognized that the tall, skinny but stately trees of picture beauty looked like our next door neighbor, Mrs. Rowell’s tree framing the front of her house. I remember to this moment thinking, “I’ll have to ask Mrs. Rowell the name of her tree”….It sure looked like the trees in the painting.
That very afternoon, when freed to be outside, I went over to her house, knocked on her door, and asked her what the name of her front yard tree was…….”Lombardy Poplar”, she answered. She seemed stunned at the topic of the question and did ask the reason for my interest…..I was savvy to keep still about family matters from an early age.
I well remembered the name and thereafter called the trees of my punishment wall picture my Lombardy Poplars. A couple years later I discovered the real name of the photolike painted trees…..Lombardy Poplar.
As I grew I discovered how to read the name of the cause of this painting……R. Atkinson Fox, which was never forgotten. I often played spelling games with the name….How many words I could spell using its letters.
I learned to spell well early in life and quickly moved into crossword puzzles …..Like my Mother, I have always been busy……and have never remembered being bored.
We never hear of Lombardy….or Bolleana Poplars any more. Bolleanas were planted around Lake Calhoun during the WAR. Mother knew the names of most deciduous trees. Before the WAR we often took Sunday drives through the beautiful landscapes of the wealthy living at Lake Minnetonka…..the large estates of dozens of acres each and appropriate English style countryside landscape beauty….weeping willows, white pine, sugar maples, Norway spruce with great oceans of beautifully mowed lawn and R. Atkinson Fox painting garden plants.
I was allowed to ask five questions of “What tree is that, Mother?” during each tour.
I was lucky to have been forced to spend over a hundred of my young hours stuck standing below that R. Atkinson Fox. It now hangs admired in my bedroom as it constantly reminds me of much of my physically inactive past.
Many years later after I had just married I asked Mother where she got the picture…..which was still hanging then at their new home in Roseville and at her apartment where she lived till 84.
“I was sixteen and working as cashier at Friedman Brothers Super Market downtown St. Paul,” she answered. Mother left school at age 13 when she graduated from eighth grade and had worked at Friedman Brothers thereafter for years becoming head cashier when 17. She had lived with her parents across the Mississippi River and walked to and from downtown every work day.
“It was winter, and on the way home I saw it displayed in an art shop window, and I knew I had to own it I thought it was so beautiful.”