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| Cyparissus (1670s) by Jacopo Vignali: Wikipedia Commons |
Cool morning air drifting in from the windows; a light blue sky beyond the hedge. For the moment, untroubled and at peace.
It's an arborvitae hedge. Martha pronounces it, charmingly, as "arborviety," rhyming with "variety." Tree of life, that is, which seems a little highfalutin for a hedge shrub. But apparently it got the name because tea made from it cured scurvy.
It's a kind of cypress. A thuja. The which name is another anomalous perplexity, at first sight, but it turns out to just be an odd spelling of the Greek name for a particular sort of cypress. Thuia, would be the normal English spelling. What possessed some botanist to spell it with a 'j'? 'i' and 'j' are originally just variant forms of the same Roman letter, but to anyone with linguistic sensitivities the 'th', which fairly screams its Greekness, sits very uncomfortably in the same short word with a Latin 'j'.
I do not know why cypress trees are associated with sadness, though I suppose the internets would tell me. They don't strike me as particularly sad trees. A little dusky, but not strikingly dark like a yew.
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
... I'm back! The internets say that of course cypress trees are sad because once upon a classical time Cyparissus accidentally shot and killed his pet stag, and he made such a nuisance of his grief that the gods turned him into a tree: an immortal cypress so that he could grieve forever. But then other of the internets say that Cypress trees are not only immortal but protective (here the arborvitae theme is foreshadowed, no?), so they're planted in cemeteries to guard the dead from demons. That seems more likely than the stag story, but of course you never know. So I will put Mr Vignali's picture up top. One does hope he gave the model a comfortable pillow to embrace, but artists are notoriously ruthless.
3 comments:
Another beautiful piece.
Your love of language is an inspiration-- a divine breath-- to me, my friend.
I can understand Thuja seeming sad, though not cypresses in general. They are dense, letting no light through they're branches. They're very dark green. Thuja plicata, our western redcedar, has slightly downswept branches and foliage, as though laboring under their weight, even when they're not bearing snow. In the summer they are welcome promises of deep shade, but in winter they add only modest cheer to a wet and foggy scene compared to bare deciduous trees. I find pines, doug-fir, and true firs more inspiring on those days.
Emily Carr's famous paintings of British Columbia forests sometimes render Thuja plicata foliage as dense heavy curtains, which seems apt in winter.
:-) Western Reds do look, at least, dejected.
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