Note: This piece was originally written in February 2025
When I first arrived at Swarthmore, I couldn’t stop taking pictures. It was August, and the whole campus was bursting with late summer bloom – bright blue cushions of hydrangea just at eye level, curling stalks of fern below, and overhead, branches almost sagging under the weight of midnight green leaves. I wanted it all on my phone.
It was strange – in high school, I’d snapped a shot of the occasional meal or sunset like anyone else, but I had no particular interest in photography, even at the most amateur level. Now, though, my camera roll was filling up at unprecedented speeds, one leafy photo after another. The pictures themselves weren’t very good, and I didn’t even know the names of most of the plants that I was adding to my two-dimensional botanic garden, but these facts did little to give me pause.
I grew up in New York City. My apartment wasn’t in the middle of Times Square, but it certainly felt a long way away from “Nature.” When we were looking at colleges, I opted away from the urban universities because I wanted to get a taste of the unadulterated outdoors, to live in a place with lots of thick grass and a placid silence in place of the din of sirens and car horns. The life I imagined for myself at Swarthmore was shamelessly plagiarized from the pages of Emerson and Thoreau.
When I finally moved in, my fantasies of the Great American Outdoors were hardly contradicted. For the most part, they were confirmed. Here was Nature: rough, tangled roots and cascades of teeming foliage, mornings full of birdsong and chipmunks darting underfoot. All just as advertised. My compulsive photography was a celebration of this new reality, each picture a portable reminder of the beauty that now enveloped me. New York City had been beautiful too, but that had been a beauty of an entirely different kind – intentional, artificial, constructed. The trees didn’t mean to be beautiful. Their aesthetic perfection, wild and unordered, felt like a sort of proof – not that God existed, but that the world could survive His absence.
This last thought was going to be the conclusion of the essay that I first set out to write. I would describe my picture-taking habit, then turn to a detailed portrait of my favorite photographic subject – a low tree spouting tendrils of gnarled gray bark and clouds of thin red leaves – before settling into my quasi-spiritual closer. I’d only made it through the first paragraph, sitting at the round folding table in my dorm’s empty common room, when it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know what the gray tree was called.
I closed my computer and headed outside. By this time, campus had sunken into a frigid northeastern winter, but I didn’t put on a coat – my tree waited only a few short yards from the entrance to the dorm. I jogged across the frozen ground, then stooped to read the Latin name inscribed on its Scott Arboretum identification tag. The card read Acer Palmatum CV Dissectum,” which I later learned is the technical term for a tree more commonly called the Japanese Laceleaf Maple. I barely noticed the label, though. My eyes caught on the thick metal screw that jagged from the bark, joining the tag to the tree. It was as though it were only another branch, the identification card a strange winter flower. My teeth had begun to chatter, so I headed back inside.
I knew that I couldn’t write my piece. I couldn’t call the vivid perfection of the campus trees and flowers natural, because it wasn’t. In fact, it was even less natural than the city: at least skyscrapers don’t disguise themselves as chance creations. Every last sapling in an arboretum is intentionally placed; the arboretum presents natural beauty, which inherently makes said beauty unnatural.
I didn’t know how to proceed. I found myself disdaining the cultivators of the Arboretum. Why did they feel the need, or the permission, to construct this strange collage of pieces torn from the natural world?
According to RidgeviewGardenCenter.com, the Japanese Laceleaf Maple is native to the forests of Korea, Japan, China, and parts of Eastern Mongolia. In a world completely unspoiled by human intervention, I never would have seen one. Right now, I’m looking at it through the common room window. It’s still freezing outside, but the heaters are on. I can hear them buzzing faintly.
