Page arno· ~a 2 The Charter Oak Gayle Barndow Samuels Volume 59 Number 4 1999-2000 10 Agmg and Rejuvenation in Trees Peter Del Tredici Arnoldia (ISSN 004-2633; USPS 866-100) is published quarterly by the Arnold Arboretum of 177 Harvard University. Second-class postage paid at Fruiting Espaliers: . Boston, Massachusetts A Fusion of Art and Science Lee Reich Subscriptions are $20.00 per calendar year domestic, $25.00 foreign, payable m advance. Smgle copies of 25 Rose Standish Nichols, A Proper most issues are $5.00; the exceptions are 58/4-59/1 Bostonian (Metasequoia After Fifty Years) and 54/4 (A Source- Judith B. Tankard book of Cultmar Names), which are $10.00 Remit- tances may be made m U.S. dollars, by check drawn 33 Arnold Arboretum Weather Station on a U.S. bank; by international money order; or Data-1999 by Visa or Mastercard. Send orders, remittances, change-of-address notices, and all other subscription- 34 Index to Arnoldia, Volumes 58 & 59 related communications to: Circulation Manager, Arnoldia, The Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Jamaica Plam, Massachusetts 02130-3500. Front & back covers: Dawn redwoods (Metasequoia Telephone 617/524-1718; facsimile 617/524-1418; glyptostroboides) photographed through an early e-mail arnoldiaCa?arnarb harvard edu. morning mist by Phylhs Lerman, February 2000. The trees grow on a dike that crosses Donghu (East Lake) Postmaster: Send address changes to m Wuhan, Hubei Province, Chma. Arnoldia Circulation Manager The Arnold Arboretum Inside front cover: A ponderosa pme (Pinus ponderosa) m National Park m Utah. The 125 Arborway growmg Bryce Canyon stunted form and twisted stem indicate a Jamaica Plam, MA 02130-3500 clearly highly stressful existence. Photograph by Peter Del Tredici. Karen Editor Madsen, Inside back cover: This espalier of yew (Taxus Andy Wmther, Designer cuspidata) has adorned the Dana Greenhouse complex smce 1962. Photograph by Peter Del Tredici. Editonal Committee Phylhs Andersen Ellen S. Bennett Robert E. Cook Peter Del Tredici Gary Koller Stephen A. Spongberg Kim E Tnpp Copyright © 2000. The President and Fellows of Harvard College The Charter Oak Gayle Barndow Samuels artford is the home of the Connecticut Society. Sitting there in a quietHistorical room at a library table, I am read- ing about a funeral for a tree. Centered between two items urging support for the newly formed Republican Party’s antislavery candidate, the soldier-explorer John C. Fremont, a black- banded front-page obituary in the August 21, 1856, Hartford Courant proclaims a tree’s death. "The Charter Oak is Prostrate! Our whole community, old and young, rich and poor, were grieved to learn that the famous old CHARTER OAK, in which Wadsworth hid Kmg Charles’ Charter of the old colony of Con- necticut, in 1687, at the time when James 2nd demanded its return, had been prostrated by the wind." The article goes on to say that "no tree in the country has such legendary associations,"" and to tell of a dirge being played at noon by Colt’s Armory Band and of the bells all over the city tolling at sundown "as a token of universal feeling, that one of the most sacred links that bmds these modern days to the irrevocable past, had been suddenly parted."" At the time of its death the Charter Oak had been a Hartford institution for almost two centuries. The tree was fully mature when colo- nial Hartford was founded. It was then, accord- ing to the enduring tale alluded to in the obituary, that the colonists, finding their free- dom threatened by their monarch’s decision to revoke their liberal charter, had turned to the tree and hidden the cherished document in a cavity within its trunk. Newspapers across the country and as far away as England sympathetically reported the tree’s death-from the New York Times to the Louisville journal, Springfield Daily Republi- can, Washington Daily Union, and London Times. Grief, followed closely by a feeding frenzy among those eager to secure a fragment 3 Fredemc Edwm Church, The Charter Oak, lookmg southwest Oil on canvas, 1846 4 Fredenc Edwm Church, The Charter Oak, looking east. Inscrzbed with notes made by Church, zncludzng the word "character" zn the upper left Ink and graphite drawmg, August-September 1846. of the sacred relic, reached into Texas, Alabama, City."3 Based on the estimate of one newspaper Georgia, the newly admitted state of California, editor that in 1856 ten thousand pieces of and the Minnesota Territory. The president of the tree made their way across the country, Jefferson College in Mississippi requested a Twain might have exaggerated only a wee bit. piece as did Hartford residents who "bowed Although it amuses us to learn that some Char- with age, and whose eyes were bleared with ter Oak relics were actually made from elm, time begged a sprig in commemoration."’1 there was nothing counterfeit in the fervor that Hartford and Connecticut chairs of state were swept America in the wake of the tree’s demise. fashioned from its wood, as were earrings, brace- Flag-draped, it had been given a hero’s funeral, lets, goblets, beads, Bibles, a lamp and screen and the nation had responded with that mixture depicting heroes of the Revolution, and three of respect and memento-gathering that it would pianos, which, by using the new technique of dust off agam less than nine years later as sol- veneering, combined a celebration of nine- emn onlookers placed pennies on the tracks teenth-century technology with commemora- when the train carrying Abraham Lincoln’s tion of the ancient oak.2 coffin passed by. Hartford resident Mark Twain quipped that he had seen enough pieces of the Charter Oak Lincoln’s presidency and the Civil War were made into "a walking stick, a dog collar, needle still several years away when the Charter Oak case, three-legged stool ... toothpick ... to fell, but the tree’s death was clearly a unifying build a plank road from Hartford to Salt Lake symbol for the nation during a time of increas- 5 ing dissension. Portents of the coming conflict everyone. Others saw in the continuing trans- had been spewing forth like volcanic ash: the Atlantic trade in new and exotic American plant Missouri Compromise excluding slavery from a species an affirmation of the more-than-raw- portion of the Louisiana Purchase; the publica- material value of the American landscape.s tion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the battle over And by the 1850s, the entire nation was awed Kansas, which had required federal troops to and energized by a specific piece of the Ameri- maintain order between pro- and antislavery can landscape-trees. Reports of Yosemite and factions; and the continued drumroll of states the Big Trees (Sequoia gigantea) rippled from declaring their slavery sentiments as they west to east. The realization that America had entered the union. Political issues hung heavy living monuments of its own-older by far than in the air, but economic and cultural matters Europe’s constructed landscape, reaching back also claimed national attention. beyond the beginnings of the Christian era- It was a time when the advance of American was a matter of national pride. industrialism, especially the extractive indus- American scenery was also attracting the tries that depend on natural resources such as attention of serious artists. Influenced by Euro- trees, was leaving an ever-greater mark on the pean Romanticism, a school of American artists common landscape and the collective con- called the Hudson River School was celebrating sciousness. Industrialization created wealth the scope and scale of America’s natural riches much more rapidly than agriculture ever had, and, in the process, founding our first truly enriched a newly enlarged mercantile class, and national school of art. Called "priests of the populated factories and mills with immigrants, natural church" by the art historian Barbara many of whose ethnic roots differed from those Novak, such men as Thomas Cole, Frederic of the early colonists. Home-based production Edwin Church, Asher Brown Durand, Jasper F. was bemg replaced by newer industrial modes. Cropsey, and Albert Bierstadt, they converted There was a growing awareness that idealized "the [American] landscape mto art" and, in the past-and glorified its symbols, such as the the process, created an "iconography of nation- ancient trees. alism. "6 They produced a body of work reveal- The Charter Oak fell during a time when ing the sweeping grandeur of the American Americans were trying to establish a national continent in such monumental canvasses as culture. Europeans had been busily mining their Bierstadt’s Mount Whitney-Grandeur of the pasts searching out their "primitive, tribal, bar- Rockies, as well as its more intimate treasures, baric origin[s]." "Americans," the historian such as Cole’s and Church’s depictions of the Perry Miller explains, "tried to answer by Charter Oak. bragging about the future, but that would not Cole, who also wrote poetry condemning serve ... [so] many of our best minds went hard the widespread destruction of America’s forests to work to prove that we too were a nation in ("The Complaint of the Forest" and "The some deeper sense than mere wilfulness." What Lament of the Forest" for example), produced a emerged was an American culture that was sketch of the oak, and Church did several "rooted in the soil."’ sketches and two paintings. As Gerald Carr, Our forebears, then, sought their "identity in who has written the catalogue raisonne of their relationship to the land they had settled" Church’s work, explains, "because it was situ- and looked to the wonders of the landscape to ated only a few blocks from the family residence provide "points of mythic and national unity" on Trumbull Street, Church must have passed not confined to any religion or sect.